Following Samedi Détente, in which she revisited her own memories of the Rwandan genocide, and Unwanted, a work confronting the use of rape as a weapon of war, Dorothée Munyaneza created Mailles, a performance in which African and Afro-descendant women artists share their personal journeys and lived experiences.

Rwandan-born singer, writer, and choreographer Dorothée Munyaneza continues in Mailles the artistic approach that has shaped her previous works: beginning with lived reality to engage with the memories and bodies of those whose voices have too often been silenced. Bringing together a constellation of singular stories, the piece weaves “the threads of a shared fabric.” It explores the transmission of memory across generations, linking ancestral legacies with contemporary lived experience.

« L’idée de faire corps à plusieurs, c’est un geste artistique (…), d’être visibles en étant nombreuses sur un plateau, mais le fait d’être nombreuses devenait quelque chose en soi. »

Rwandan-born singer, writer, and choreographer Dorothée Munyaneza continues in Mailles the artistic approach that has shaped her previous works: beginning with lived reality to engage with the memories and bodies of those whose voices have too often been silenced. Bringing together a constellation of singular stories, the piece weaves “the threads of a shared fabric.” It explores the transmission of memory across generations, linking ancestral legacies with contemporary lived experience.

In Mailles, the violence of the “systems that annihilate” is confronted head-on through a physical language of cries and movement. Yet the work is equally a celebration of the women whose “joy, vital force, poetry, and beauty” it brings into the light a resilience rooted in a form of shared trance. For Dorothée Munyaneza, joy is “our greatest weapon against violence, dehumanisation, and invisibilisation”; it is “a way of resisting.”