Toi moi, Tituba…

“As always, everything starts from encounters, encounter with Elsa Dorlin, the philosopher, encounter with her text Me, you, us: I, Tituba and the Ontology of the Trace that  I enjoyed setting to movement in 2021 as part of L’ADN Dance Living Lab  at the National Theatre of Chaillot, and then the reunion with Tituba  and Maryse Condé’s line of thought.

A story-genealogy, published in 1986, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem  gave life, from a few lines discovered in the minutes of a trial for  witchcraft, to Tituba, woman, black and witch, at a time when it was not  right to be either of them. A work-resistance, that of Maryse Condé,  who has never ceased to give back a voice, a flesh, a story to what has  been erased, silenced and bruised.

Everything is there. How to resonate the breaths,  lives and dreams of those men and those women whose identities and very  existences were denied and crushed by the slave trade and the colonial  system? Through words? Through the body, perhaps, since I am a dancer?  Through the voice that inhabits space, songs that speak to those who are  there and those who are far away? How to move my body and my story so  as to make audible, visible and palpable the traces of those  extinguished, gone unnoticed, ignored or forgotten, how to relate to my  own history which no written trace testifies, except perhaps for a few  “historical erasures” to use Elsa Dorlin’s words in the colonial  administrative archives? Is it possible to make lineage, to relate for  the time a dance lasts, those that history has forgotten with so much  application, with our lives, but also with those who are yet to be  born?”

Dorothée Munyaneza