How and where do the imagination and poetry of writers in English-speaking East Africa and French-speaking West Africa meet? What realities do they address and what roles do the questions of translation and even more so that of the circulation of their creations play in these countries and internationally?
As part of the Africa 2020 event, the Maison Antoine Vitez, the Odéon Théâtre de l'Europe and the Cité Internationale des Arts present a reading of works by contemporary African writers. On the program:
-
Assane Timbo will be reading extracts from:
-
La Chambre des Noms Perdu by Sitawa Namwalie (Kenya), translated from English by Isabelle Famchon.
-
J'ai rendez-vous avec diEU by Asiimwe Deborah Kawe (Uganda), translated from English by Gisèle Joly.
-
Et cætera by Kouam Tawa (Cameroon), who is currently in residency at the Cité internationale des arts.
-
Chasser les fantômes, by Hakim Bah (Guinea), who is currently in residency at the Cité internationale des arts.
-
The readings will be followed by a discussion with Kouam Tawa, Hakim Bah and translators Isabelle Famchon and Gisèle Joly, which will be moderated by Sylvie Chalaye, who works in the anthropology of representations specialising in contemporary African dramaturgy.
Hakim Bah was born in Mamou (Guinea). He graduated from Paris-Ouest Nanterre university with a master’s degree in directing and dramaturgy. His texts are read, produced and performed across Africa and Europe and his work has received numerous awards (Prix RFI Théâtre, Prix des Journées Lyon des Auteurs de Théâtre, Prix d’écriture Théâtrale de la ville de Guerande, Prix des Inédits d'Afrique et d'Outremer, audience award at Text'Avril, Prix Lucernaire) and grants (Institut Français, Beaumarchais, CNL, ARTCENA, région IDF, DGCA, Occitanie Livre et Lecture). His plays have been produced by Frédéric Fisbach, Jacques Allaire, Cédric Brossard, Pierre Vincent, Guy Theunissen, Souleymane Bah, Aristide Tarnagda, Imad Assaf, Rouguiatou Camara and the ildi Eldi collective. His texts are published by Lansman Éditeur, Théâtre Ouvert, Quartett and Passages. He is the co-director of the Compagnie Paupières Mobiles in Paris and artistic director of the Univers des Mots festival in Guinea.
Asiimwe Deborah Kawe was born in south-west Uganda. She is a playwright, director and performer and the co-artistic director of the Kampala International Theatre Festival. She co-led the Sundance Institute's East African theatre programme for six years covering Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda and continues to be associated with the Sundance Institute as part of a new initiative in North Africa and the Middle East. She has written around a dozen plays, was awarded a writing fellowship by the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and is a guest lecturer / artist at Pomona College in California.
Playwright, poet and director Kouam Tawa was born on May 31, 1974 in western Cameroon. He lives in his hometown devoting his time to literature, theatre and running writing workshops. He won the first ACCT prize for African youth literature, the Lire et Faire Lire readers poetry prize, as well as receiving writing scholarships from the Association Beaumarchais and the Centre National du Livre, the AFAA-Beaumarchais "En quête d'auteurs" programme, DMDTS, the CulturesFrance "Visa pour la Création" programmme, ARTCENA, and the French Institute's "Des mots à la scène" programme. He has published some twenty books, including fifteen for young people.
Assane Timbo is an actor, director and teacher. He directs La surface de réparation, a company with which he has produced plays by a wide variety of authors including Gustave Akakpo, Stig Dagerman, Adeline Picault, Harold Pinter and Rémi de Vos. As an actor, he has worked with directors such as Stéphane Braunschweig in Molière's L'École des femmes (2018) and will be seen next season at the Odéon in a production of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra directed by Célie Pauthe.
Isabelle Famchon, a long-time member of the Maison Antoine Vitez, has been researching Irish and African-American theatre for years. She is a translator for the theatre, a playwright and the author of several adaptations and articles on the history of theatre and theatrical translation. She has also worked as a director. She is especially interested in discovering, translating and promoting contemporary English-language theatre in its most diverse forms, such as that of Athol Fugard, Marcus Gardley and José Riveira.
Gisèle Joly is an actress and English translator. She has been a member of the English committee of the Maison Antoine Vitez since 2007, with whose help she has translated, alone or with others, plays by Peter Barnes, Alan Bennett, Richard Bean, Debbie Tuckker Green, Douglas Maxwell, Lachlan Philpott, Nicola Wilson and Simon Longman. Together with Isabelle Famchon, she coordinates the MAV's African languages committee.
Sylvie Chalaye teaches African and diaspora theatre at Sorbonne Nouvelle university, where she co-directs the Institut de Recherche en Études Théâtrales and has created the "Scènes Francophones et Ecritures de l'Altérité" (SeFeA) research centre.