Reviews NYCOff-Broadway Published 15 January 2016

Samedi Détente

Public Theatre ⋄ 14th - 17th January 2016

Speechless.

Molly Grogan

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There’s no good way for art to tell the story of the genocide of 800,000 Rwandans in  1994. The ethical and moral dilemma of that task was the subject of debates and conferences among African writers and artists in the years following the massacre. Yet because it took place under the noses of an indifferent international community, with few outside observers, its story begged to be told, and artists from across the continent have wrestled with the question ever since.

Dorothée Munyaneza begins her story with the murder of her Tutsi aunt in the courtyard of her home, while she sheltered her young cousin from watching his mother’s gruesome death. She was 11 years old at the time. That was the beginning of months of flight, hiding, starvation and the murders of many more family members, yet as a Hutu, she survived. Now a dancer and choreographer living in France, Munyaneza tells the story of how she did, in Samedi Détente. and the language she has chosen could hardly be more simple and direct; the events are burned into her memory, she says, and she relates them with the same vividness and immediacy. Her opening dance, on a heavily miked tabletop, while the show’s composer Alain Mahé, sharpens knives noisely against each other, is filled with fear, suspense and menace. Hers is a straightforward survivors’ tale of the events of April 1994.

However, there is another story that has definitively marked the African continent. It’s characters are not Hutus and Tutsi’s but rather France and its former colonies, and it figures as prominently as Munyaneza’s own family in Samedi Détente.  She remembers how, when she and her sister and father would hide outdoors at night, she would marvel at the stars, until her father told her that what she was seeing were satellites, looking down at her blood-soaked country from far away. Samedi Détente (Saturday Relax, the name of a popular music show on Kigali radio) is an ironic name for her version of the genocide, though it sums up the world’s insouciance while Rwandans killed each other by the thousands.

But it is not irony that is Munyaneza’s concern, rather rage, and appointing responsibility. Where were the French, the Swiss, the British, the Belgians, the Germans and all the foreigners who had lived in Rwanda, once President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down and the killing began, she asks point-blank? Where was the UN, the French military, American opinion? Where in fact, she’d really like to know, were we, all of us, sitting comfortably in the audience today?

I was a student in France in 1994 and I remember watching reports of the genocide begin to arrive on the nightly news. I remember debate in the French government and media about whether France ought to intervene in the “private affairs” of their economic partner in East Africa, whose paramilitary groups they had trained (and who would be responsible for starting the genocide). I also remember when the French military’s Force Turquoise finally arrived in the closing days of the massacre, too late to be of any help. France ought to have been the first in the international community to intervene, it didn’t and it will never make amends for its inaction, a fact that Samedi Détente wants us never to forget (though the show receives the support of the Cultural Services of the French embassy).

Munyaneza is seconded on stage by the dancer, Nadia Beugré, from Côte d’Ivoire, and this is an important fact. Munyaneza plays herself in schoolgirl clothes, and her dancing, though powerful, would best be described as mournful. Beugré, on the other hand, is in sweats and shades and drips attitude. She dances zouglou, the zouk/ragga-inflected dance of Ivoirian university students dissatisfied with years of toxic economic and political fallout from France’s clientelism in their own country (summed up by a clever term, la Françafrique). Beugré’s dialogue with the audience in French references immediately President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who helped transition the country into independence beginning in 1958 and ruled it, with great personal profit, until his death in 1994. This segue is no way out of place in Munyaneza’s personal story.  She now understands things – notably France’s direct responsibility for many of Africa’s ills – that her younger self did not and her rage gives the show its moral weight.

With that backstory only alluded to here, Samedi Détente is neither easy nor simple to grasp. At times it teeters on didacticism, at others on tragedy. The alternating choreography and narration can feel rote, particularly in a long scene relating Munyaneza’s final flight during the genocide, told while she scales up and down a scaffold. Yet she can bowl us over immediately after with an elegiac remembrance of her young cousin. Mahé’s sound effects are chilling, but some of the texts he reads are simplistic (such as a quote taken from France’s President Mittérand while on holiday in 1994). Beugré is a muscular performer yet her physicality sometimes threatens to steer the show’s emotional core into just anger, rather than anger and longing both (without which this would be mere diatribe).

How does anyone tell the story of so much pain, so much hate, so much evil, so many lives lost? Samédi détente delivers a moving, personal version of a moment no one ever should have to live. And if we are brave enough to answer Munyaneza’s question, perhaps it never will again.

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Molly Grogan

Molly is a New York Co-Editor for Exeunt.

Samedi Détente Show Info


Written by Dorothée Munyaneza

Cast includes Nadia Beugré, Alain Mahé, Dorothée Munyaneza

Link Under the Radar

Running Time 75 minutes

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