Dorcy Rugamba

Dorcy Rugamba is a Rwandan director, actor and playwright. He is also the artistic director of the African Capitals of Culture.

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  • Son of Cyprien Rugamba, a Rwandan choreographer, poet and composer, he was raised in his father’s dance company, which maintained the Rwandan tradition.

    As an actor, he has worked with different directors and choreographers from different worlds and also collaborates with artists from different cultures and practices. In 2005, he directed L’Instruction, a play by Peter Weiss about the trial of those responsible for Auschwitz. Rugamba is also the author of the play Bloody Niggers, a fresco on mass violence with Caesarean accents, which toured Europe and Africa from 2007. His many projects amongst others include founding the Rwanda Arts Initiative (2012), staging Afrofuturist choreographic show: Planet Kigali in 2018, writing and staging the official ceremony of the 25th commemorations of the Tutsi genocide an opera titled Umurinzi In 2019, and that same year set up a publishing house, Moyo, which publishes authors in African languages.

Felwine Sarr

Felwine Sarr is a Senegalese academic, writer, and musician. Since 2020, he has taught contemporary African and diasporic philosophy at Duke University in North Carolina.

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  • His academic work focuses on the ecology of knowledge, contemporary African philosophy, economic policy, epistemology, economic anthropology, and the history of religious ideas. With Senegalese writers Boubacar Boris Diop and Nafissatou Dia, he is the co-founder of the Jimsaan publishing house. Felwine Sarr makes literature a vital necessity, a work of light and freedom. After a remarkable essay, Afrotopia, he created in Dakar alongside Achille M’Bembé the Workshops of Thought, whose proceedings Writing Africa-World were published in 2018. He also participated in the collection Osons la Fraternité, coordinated by Michel Le Bris and Patrick Chamoiseau. He published in 2022 Les lieux qu’habitent mes rêves, a meditative and initiatory novel.

Marie-Laure Crochant

Marie-Laure Crochant is an actress and director. She has worked in various hybrid projects, at the border of dance and theater, notably with Régine Chopinot and Roland Fichet.

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  • In 2019-2020, she performed in Vents Contraires by Jean-René Lemoine. In 2020-2021, she was in the company Plateau K, and the show Le Réflexe de Moro. In 2011, Crochant directed her first production, Dans La Solitude des Champs de Coton, variation(s) by Bernard Marie Koltès. Following this creation, she co-founded the company La Réciproque with the musician Stéphane Fromentin. She closed 2021 with the show Cactus freely adapted from the novel 180 days by Isabelle Sorente and the testimony A l’Abattoir by Stéphane Geffroy. Since 2019 she has been engaged in a new research and creation work around women’s writings, the first of which, Capsules Féministes, saw the light of day at the Grand T in Nantes, and the central piece of which, Cielles qui Manquent, is coming in 2023.

Majnun

Majnun is a Senegalese artist whose work combines a multitude of music genres and artfully blends languages like Serer, English, Portuguese, and Wolof.

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  • Lulled by traditional West African music, he took his first steps in hip hop and then in reggae, before striving over the years to mature a resolutely eclectic art. Afro-beat, jazz, funk, trance and Latin music are the different colors that make up his musical fresco. His voice perfectly combines a multiplicity of languages (Serer, Wolof, English, Portuguese, Lingala) as if to reveal the uniqueness of the human race. With a rich stage experience, he produced and directed his first album in 2015. In 2019, Majnun and his band The Black-Magic Sofas Sofas organized a tour of West African giving them the opportunity to record the new album entitled, “Mandigo’s Fight.”

T.I.E.

T.I.E is a polymorphic artist whose leitmotivs are experimentation and hybridization of different forms of expression.

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  • From painting, she has moved on to music and is passionate about autofiction through video. In 2009, after creating her first live band T.I.E and The Love Process, she created an immersive creation “Lâcher L’homme!” which mixes music, literature and video around Frantz Fanon’s essay “Peau Noire Masques Blancs” and in 2019 founded the electro hip-hop trio Exillians. Polyglot, T.I.E sings, raps, in Wolof, Serer, French and English about the challenges of post-modernity, with a statement rooted in the Serer cosmogony and its femininity. Alongside music production, T.I.E has created an immersive and intuitive installation: the girls of Mawu. This project invokes Mawu the Dahomean goddess in a digital world, and marks her entry into the contemporary art scene with a first exhibition and performance in March 2021 in Dakar.