umuko

Thirty years ago, Dorothée Munyaneza left the red ochre soil of her native land and anchored her life elsewhere: in London, Paris, and now Marseille. But she never forgot umuko, the tree that has illuminated her since childhood, constantly returning to her thoughts – so much so that she decided to celebrate it. With five young artists from Rwanda, "a source of inspiration, beauty and delight," she created this performance as a way of returning to her memories. She approaches the source and draws from its communal trunk – umuko, the sacred tree with vermilion flowers –, commemorating it and imagining what it might be like in the future. A symbolic tree for the Rwandan people, an ancestral tree, a healing tree, it is also called umurinzi, “guardian of memory”, and often planted in front of the royal palace. Dancers Yvette Fasha and Abdoul Mujyambere, and performers and musicians Jean Patient Nkubana, Impakanizi, and Michael Makembe, accompany her with their presence, their voices, their songs; they invent new sounds and gestures using ancient instruments such as the inanga. "I lead them towards other temporalities, other tempos. We dig, we root ourselves in the most authentic form of Rwandan culture while displacing it through different music and words."