Mailles

Here you find a short description of the performance and the credits.

Intention Statement

text by Dorothée Munyaneza, 7/02/2029

Some of us are young, some of us are old.
Our stories differ.
Here, there and elsewhere.
We have lived through earthquakes, blood, crises, joy, darkness, laughter and tears. We sail in the midst of multiple languages and daily dances.

Between anger and gentleness.

We live scattered across lands and continents.
I want to sit at the heart of this feminine nucleus, intertwining horizons.

These past years, I have met artists who are free, powerful, engaged, bold, hybrid, who share the stories of long-oppressed peoples, scorned peoples, beaten peoples, segregated peoples, long-considered insignificant. Rich encounters with people who have so much to tell, to share.

Their stories, songs, dance, tears and laughter are like roots where memories irrigate our stories.

Dancers, actresses, performers, authors, composers, cooks. We are interwoven stories.We are melodies.
We are humanity.
We are crossings.

Beyond identity, we are geographical, generational and professional mesh.

I have shared my story for some time now. The story of my people.
And the more I met artists from elsewhere, the more curious I became of their own stories which were, in one way or another, linked to my story as a human being.
I can no longer speak of me without them.

They come from Belo Horizonte, Port-au-Prince, Johannesburg, Chicago, England, Seville and Berlin.
I am them.
I follow them.

I come from different places.
I am multiple voyages.
Crossroads of stories.
I am encounters, torrents, suns, torments, silence and light.

Their stories grab a hold of me through a melody, a berry, a song, a jewel, a meal, a photo, a petal, a colour, a sentence, laughter, a scream.
To be imbued by their words, gestures, poetry, languages, food.

I dream of this intimate gathering where our stories meet.
I dream of this intimate gathering to summon history.
I dream of a stage gathering.
Our daily long-distance exchanges have filled the vastness between us and pulverized the time difference therein.

We share stories.
Intimate.
Daily.
The roar, collapse, present, love, music, politics, chaos, cacophony, filth, fruits, possibilities,
holes.
No need to know everything. We know each other.
From the infrastructures of the intimate. Then comes what binds us and links us to others.
Here is my ambition.

Story tellers.
I now want to gather and share intimate and collective memories.
Those memories we bear as indelible and fertile marks. Those we shape every day. Ancestral and contemporary story-filled memories.
We are celebrations.
Celebrations in our multiple languages, English, French, German, Spanish, Isizulu, Kinyarwanda, Kreyòl.

Our lives are closely related to the policies of our respective national politics.
I want to share the earthquakes, emotions, journeys, encounters that carve the furrows of our beings and reveal who we are, different faces of one shared humanity.
Contexts ground us but intimacy lifts us.
I want to address humanity through intimacy.

Resilience, our weapon of resistance, accompanies us and is our strength, our beauty. I want to celebrate this strength, to share it.

More kinds of beauty.

Curves, arches, grey hair, tight curls, dark skin, taut skin, moving bodies. Deployment.

These women are brave.
They speak words that are seldom told or heard in daily cacophony. They live in bodies we see everyday but rarely onstage.
I want to create a space where they are seen.

“Não apenas um momento, mas um movimento”.
Thank you Zora Santos for your wisdom and these words.

Young hands in Zora’s grey hair. Full of blue
It’s alive
Seeking

The freedom inside Living is a right
Packing everything out Post-power fairer world Crossover

Resurgence Ancient shapes. New every morning.

“Do we come from where we are born. From where we die. Interstices?”, wrote Felwine Sarr in his Méditations africaines.

We are ongoing.