Umuko

“Umuko” is a tree with vermilion flowers, a guardian of stories and a healer. With five young Rwandan artists – dancers, poets, and musicians – Munyaneza celebrates the creativity, courage and freedom of this new generation that both carries memory and dreams of the future. 

She invites to the stage five young Rwandan artists, the “Brand New Ancients,” in the words of Kae Tempest, who fantasize about the Rwanda of tomorrow but do not forget. Alongside them, she invokes Umuko, a tree presenting flowers ranging in hue from bright red to earthy clay, the colors that illuminated her childhood. Around Umuko, a healing, ancestral tree, a keeper of tales, we weave links between what is preserved, what resists destruction and what is to come.