Children of Amazi: the rising star for art magic echoing from the Great Lakes Region

From the 26^th to the 30^th  of November 2019 was a highly hectic and fruitful period for Umunyinya Theatre Company honored to represent “The Small Citizens” Project in Kampala International Theatre Festival 6^th Edition. The project gave birth to a beautiful performance entitled " Children of Amazi". Fruit of hard work, a real success for the project.









Umunyinya was humbled to be part of The Small Citizens project led by Ishyo Arts Centre and Le Theatre du Papyrus. This project started in November 2017 in KINA Festival in Kigali. Karole Karemera brought together different actors from Burundi, Rwanda, DRC and Kenya to start devising out of a prologue from which Le Theatre du Papyrus created the play “Le petit peuple de la brume”. 
 

Those artists passed many weeks devising, switching from one group to another, trying crazy stuffs, dropping things and thinking about new options that can fit the idea of understanding anger. The directors, mainly Bernard Chemin, Carole Karemera, Denis Mpunga and Didier de Neck asked the actors to bring different objects that are meaningful to them culturally, economically and socially and those ones became very important sources of inspiration to create “The children of Amazi”, a play for young audience whose premiere was in Kigali in May 2019.

This play was invited in the 6^th edition of Kampala International Theatre Festival held in Ndere Centre and Kampala National Museum. The play was performed twice and the audience was crazy about it, the audience, which was more than 99% adult became very humble and innocent kids who accepted to follow the actors unconditionally and experienced the beauty and mystery of that lovely story around the power and place of water in the Great Lakes Region in particular and in the world in general. They discovered how man’s activities may harm and chase water and endanger themselves. They explored together how far could go the suffering of mankind if nature could no longer offer its generosity in feeding and shielding them. 

The same play is touring in Belgium with another team of actors between November 20 - December 30, 2019. Due to unknown reasons, actors from Burundi have no feedback about their visas for Belgium whereas in fact they were supposed to be performing in there now. 

Actors from Rwanda, DRC and Kenya only made it with their visas. An almost similar scenario happened to Rwandan actors who were to perform in Kampala could not make it because of political issues between the two countries. Only actors from Burundi, mainly in Umunyinya Theatre Company represented the production in Kampala. Our next rendez-vous is Carthage in Tunisia between December 11-16, 2019.