umuko

“It's been 28 years since I moved away from my native land. 28 years that I live in new lands.

28 years that I root myself elsewhere. First, London, then Paris and today Marseille. 28 years that I haven't forgotten umuko, that tree that illuminates my childhood. That tree that resonates only in the native language. That bright red tree, earth red, which links me to what begins, to what is lost and found again, when I return, to what continues...”

Dorothée Munyaneza

Dorothée Munyaneza left but always returned, tirelessly, to her motherland. She returned to listens to those who make the Rwanda of tomorrow, but who nevertheless do not forget, these "brand new ancients" to borrow the words of Kae Tempest: Yvette Fasha who raises her child alone and wants to dance, against all odds, Akayezu Jean Patient who, from the height of his twenties, plays the Inanga marvelously, the traditional stringed instrument celebrating the epics of the past, Impakanizi, an "Intore", a chosen one, who carries traditional dances and songs with the lightness and detachment of a young man of this millennium and the seriousness of an old master, listen to Abdoul Mujyambere and Michael Makembe.

She brings them together under the umuko where ejo, yesterday and tomorrow in Kinyarwanda, meet and speak through the body, poetry, music, inanga and song. umuko, the ancestral tree, guardian of stories, heals to weave links between what is preserved, what resists oblivion and what is to come. It is the tree of memories, the tree of vermilion flowers that illuminates this creation-celebration based on love, solidarity and joy.