A native of Burkina Faso, Étienne Minoungou is an actor, director and artistic director all rolled into one. It is to him that we owe the foundation, in 2002, of the Récréâtrales, a fertile space for creation, training, research and scenic dissemination of French-speaking Africa, which also includes an important theater festival in a residential area. from Ouagadougou.
The theatrical art enjoys an exceptional situation in his country, he says. “There is a kind of theater spring in Burkina Faso, through the multiplication of work and research spaces and through the entire seasons presented by theaters. Thanks also to the emergence of new directors, authors, actors and professions such as scenography, the creation of lights, videos, costumes, etc., which are becoming more and more professional. On the other hand, in the rest of West Africa, the situation is much more contrasted. Of course, there are important events, such as the Univers des mots festival in Guinea, Emergences in Niger or the International Theater Festival in Benin. But the arrival of television packages and social networks has disrupted this environment. We lost people everywhere. And what events like Les Récréâtrales do is make people want to come back to the theaters, because they tell something else. »
Subjects in tune much more directly with their lives than what foreign TV series offer “which now flood families”.
For this discussion to take place, the stage and the room must be recomposed as a space of circulation, rather than as a space of verticality where there is a word that starts from [la première] to go down [dans la seconde]. We need to create circulation that allows people to talk to each other at eye level.
Accompanied by a kora player (Simon Winsé), Étienne Minoungou will present the monologue here Tracks. Speech to African Nations. “It is first of all the initiatory story of the one who leaves his home and who, after crossing the desert, the Mediterranean, arrives at the closed borders of Europe, where he will experience all the difficulties. A bit like Ulysses, he will learn a lot during this trip. Back home, he decides to educate his community, to tell them about the world as he has experienced it, with its [misères]. At the same time, it restores hope by the fact that, sometimes, at home, when one is organized, one can make one’s environment more habitable and that it is perhaps better. If Africans have confidence in themselves, that they work on themselves, they will have much more to share with the rest of the world, rather than continuing to look at this one as being the solution. While the repair of the world can also come from Africa. »
Invitation to emancipation, the text of the Senegalese writer and economist Felwine Sarr also launches a call to build another, more human world. “While working on the wounded memories and on the tensions that have undoubtedly punctuated the various encounters between the North and the South, the ultimate call he makes is to leave a luminous trace […], despite the past. ” Because tracks also includes a spiritual dimension: “A desire for elevation, not only from our identities that root us, but also from a quest for a more universal, more humanistic identity that brings us together. »
The character’s journey is similar to that which Étienne Minoungou himself made, from Africa to Europe. Today he divides his life between Ouagadougou, where “I have my workshops, my theatrical practice”, and Brussels, from where he offers us this telephone interview. “It puts me in a position of observation on what makes the strength here, the weakness here, as on what forms the resources of the African continent. Resources that we can still hope will nourish the world spiritually. And we definitely need it. »
Ali lookalike
Created in 2018, tracks is already the actor’s fourth solo. This speech, this “appearance of a single person in the middle of the others, was obvious from his first monologue, My name is Muhammad Ali, in 2014, he explains. “I was waiting for this moment. I believe that it takes a certain density of life to pretend to stand up in front of others. Afterwards there was Notebook of a return to the native country, founding text of the Negro-African literature of Aimé Césaire. It was a logical sequence. I started to dig from there a form that I call the theater of conversation, and it seemed to me that I had to continue on this momentum. It is a journey of research. I had the feeling that the theater left much more room for performance, for the spectacular and for a very abundant dramaturgy, than for this idea that I have always had of the theatre: that it is a place where one speaks with the people, to people. For me, the theater of conversation is that: placing the breath of human speech at the heart of an assembly. »
According to Étienne Minoungou, theatrical art should be a “social discussion”. “For this discussion to take place, the stage and the room must be recomposed as a space of circulation, rather than as a space of verticality where there is a word that starts from [la première] to go down [dans la dernière]. We need to create circulation that allows people to talk to each other at eye level. »
Coincidently, My name is Muhammad Ali will be presented at the FTA by a Quebec company, the Théâtre de La Sentinelle, which transformed the solo into a nine-voice score. This text, which Étienne Minoungou has performed in some twenty African countries, some 300 times, was written for him by the Congolese Dieudonné Niangouna. The actor inspired him this piece where an African actor is about to play Ali, first because he physically resembles the legendary American boxer. “So they say,” he admits, laughing. We wanted to exploit this resemblance to also put our fights side by side. He has made boxing a space for political speaking out and we, on the African continent, have made theater our boxing space for much more freedom, much more [respect]. So it’s a mix of those two commitments. »
As tracks, this text summons memory. “There is a connection between these authors. They work on our memory liabilities, sometimes unsettled, and how they need to be reactivated. Not to indulge, but to shed more light on the convulsions of the present and open the doors of the future to dialogue. If we recall the commitment of Mohamed Ali [contre] the Vietnam War, his desire for freedom, the way in which he upset the American order in relation to the struggle of black people for civil rights, it is that this fight is not over — we see the phenomenon Black Lives Matter. We must not forget that these struggles have been carried out for a long time, and that they are references to be able to re-enchant those of today. It’s the same fights, always. »