Mailles

The stage as the intersection of the stories and fates of six women. Stories that tell of how we are formed by our past. About our ancestors and their experiences, both good and bad. Suggestive narration through word, wonderful song, breath-taking music and impeccable movement about identity and the places we come from. What and why do we carry within, in our genetic code? Dancer and director Dorothée Munyaneza arrives for her second round at ITF Divadelná Nitra – following up on her 2015 production Samedi Détente that wowed our audience with a testimony about the Rwandan civil war. In Mailles (‘mesh’), she appears with five fascinating female artists of African descent – a Haitan storyteller, British dancer, Danish poet, Dutch philosopher and French choreographer… We have programmed this production in a unique festival format combining a theatrical and filmic experience – as a screening of an exquisite video recording on the big screen of the Andrej Bagar Theatre’s Great Hall.

In her piece Mailles (‘mesh’), Rwandan-British singer Dorothée Munyaneza meets five women. Each lives in a different corner of a globalized world and comes from a mixed cultural background. Each is a member of the African diaspora: a Haitian, a Rwandan, a Somali from Denmark, an Ethiopian living in the Netherlands, and naturalized British. Each creates art and reflects in it the specifics of their cultural identity. Besides Dorothée Munyaneza, the project was co-authored and features story collector and teller Ife Day from Haiti, British-African flamenco dancer Yinka Esi Graves, Danish-Somali poet and multidisciplinary artist Asmaa Jama, Dutch-Ethiopian choreographer and philosopher Elsa Mulder, and Rwandan dancer-choreographer based in France Nido Uwera.

Dorothée Munyaneza binds the women together. While touring her previous projects (e.g., Samedi Détente, programmed during ITF Divadelná Nitra 2015), she met a rich variety of artists; after years of solo performance, she now felt the need to surround herself on stage with women that have, in one way or another, inspired her. She felt compelled to create an artwork transcending her own ideas and possibilities. Once again, her starting point was autobiographical, and creative work fed from collective improvisations. Each artist responded with her own words, voice, body or song, joining hands to seek the final form of the individual scenes and artwork as a whole. The latter is best described as a performance relying on the techniques of diverse artforms and genres. Spoken word alternates with dance, music or sound complements scenic action, physical solos seamlessly flow into choral declamations or singing. The effect of total theatre is to transgress personal experience into celebratory and liberative collective ritual. The performers are mutual mirrors, completing each other and forming a plural female body of sorts. They are powerfully present on stage as individuals but equally part of a collective anatomy, composed of multiple bodies, merging with each other and assuming diverse shapes, skin colour and movement.

The women on stage share an African origin and simultaneously exile from the cities where they or their ancestors were raised. Thematically key here is the search for a common identity. As first- or second-generation immigrants, they are well aware of deriving their roots from representations of non-existent places. In fact, they make up their own imaginary locations, because neither they nor their parents have a chance to return to where they grew up. Their countries have been ravaged by war, the lives of their ancestors by colonialism, marked by slavery, sex trafficking or other forms of violence. The women do not seek to return to these places or dream of them but strive to formulate the common experience of such people living in Europe, to give it voice, word and body. What would it really be like physically to return to a country you carry within? Nostalgia, that is to say suffering caused by an unquenchable desire to return (nostos: return, algos: suffering), always has been and remains a dominant theme in the history of European art. Mailles portrays it on stage very originally on the based on the experience of individuals with mixed identities living in the early 21st century who carry their ancestors’ plight.

The personal and collective histories which the women retrieve on stage through voice and body are scarred by suffering and abundant trauma. They express the anger and pain relayed from one generation to the next. They respond to the Black Lives Matter movement, the political-philosophical concept of social justice and much else besides. But Dorothée Munyaneza and her ensemble can forge these into a cathartic experience. Traumatic rage dissolves in the women’s ritual performance, as they have learned to overcome it. The rage is not just their – they represent thousands of invisible souls with a similar fate.

Ján Šimko