How does your piece echo the work of the philosopher Elsa Dorlin and the renowned novel by Maryse Condé about the story of Tituba, a slave accused in the Salem witch trials in 1692?

The piece is a journey which began at the ADN Dance Living Lab through a discussion with Elsa about her text Me, You, Us… : Tituba or the Ontology of the Trace. Elsa delved into archives on slavery and the slave trade to connect with her family’s past. The archives she looked through are the very place where these men and women were rendered invisible and marginalized, since they became merely numbers or names that are barely mentioned. In this place of absence, she found her ancestor Isabelle. Elsa addresses her and pays tribute to her by celebrating the figure of Tituba, whom the author Maryse Condé brought to life by giving her a body, a heart, a voice, and a community in the novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. I perform some episodes from her life, I take up her song, which was passed down from generation to generation in Barbados, and I invoke her in the piece, along with Isabelle, Elsa, my grandmothers, and myself, all of whom I summon on stage. Isabelle symbolizes resisting oblivion and annihilation; she appeared because Elsa kept searching for her, even though it was difficult. As Elsa so eloquently puts it, “Becoming Tituba means reaching out and caring for those lives that languish in the depths of the archives. It means communicating with those who are invisible.” Through the action of art, we resist the reduction of people to nothing. We reconstruct, reconnect, and repair...

How are these intentions expressed on stage?

At the very start, I pass through a forest of neon lights and pay tribute to the unknown people who have disappeared, but who are still among us. I play a lot with what is lit up and overexposed and what is obscured in shadow, or even total darkness. At one point, I enter into something living but not human, making a connection with other worlds, just like Maryse Condé’s heroine. That’s when the voice of my grandmother is heard and we shift into another form of language. I lead us into a space-time where there are only sounds and transformations. Sound and light are deployed to surround, disturb, transport, and guide the audience.

Khyam Allami composed the music by developing a highly complex system that transforms words into sounds and rhythms. The text is therefore always with us. Everything is always there, and everything is so completely transformed that people often don’t know what it is that has affected them. They’re frequencies and vibrations that we’re not used to feeling. It ends with a dazzling light that suggests the blank page of history, the archives from which people are missing. This way of being, of rising up in this light, is a means of introducing beauty into a journey through a very dark period of human history. Beauty can be a powerful weapon against annihilation and oblivion. I would like to think that it’s an act of restitution and uplift.

Kinyarwanda is one of the elements that creates the sense of a hidden meaning. What role does your native language occupy in your work?

Whether spoken or sung, Kinyarwanda features in all my shows. It’s a language which is highly metaphorical, poetic, beautiful, and subtle. It’s always with me. I speak it with my children and practice it to maintain a connection to my native culture. It’s through Kinyarwanda that I understand the world, absorb it, and articulate it in the depths of my being. It’s such an integral part of who I am that I cannot disassociate myself from it, and I hope that audience members who don’t understand it will still take something from it.

Being multilingual gives me extraordinary power, and I establish a hierarchy among the languages that I speak as a response to colonialism, which tried to wipe out dialects and languages, as was the case with the First Nations. What I seek and desire is to share this language, to bring it to life—which includes using movement, because it’s very rhythmic. Sometimes I translate it, as in Unwanted, which told the stories of women victims of the genocide against the Tutsi. In Tituba, it’s part of a complex world that I am inviting the audience to enter. It’s also a way of speaking to the missing. Words and language are very important to me. There’s tremendous value for me in an approach that makes it possible to use multiple languages to speak about our world and orient certain stories.

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