Dorcy Rugamba, Rwandan actor and director, brings Hewa Rwanda – Letter to the Absent to Biennale Teatro: a performance that transforms the ancestral ritual of guterekera into a shared ceremony, thirty years after the genocide that wiped out his family.
On April 7, 1994, the first day of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, Dorcy Rugamba’s family was killed in their home in Kigali. He survived only because a phone call kept him away long enough to escape the massacre, a tiny deviation that split his life in two. Since then, his work has moved within that original fracture, seeking not only testimony but a renewed relationship with what was lost. Actor, writer, and director, Rugamba is the founder of Rwanda Arts Initiative and the Kigali Triennial. For thirty years he has explored mass violence, genocide, and the identity of a people, always searching for forms that restore dignity to lives reduced to numbers. Hewa Rwanda – Letter to the Absent marks the moment when this history becomes personal: memory is not treated as closure, but as something still alive. The work is rooted in guterekera, an ancestral Rwandan practice of speaking to the dead and about the living, maintaining a dialogue across generations. Onstage, the ritual becomes the structure of the performance itself: theatre as a ceremonial space where the audience is drawn into a form of listening that goes beyond observation. Thirty years after the genocide, in a world marked by new wars and persistent collective violence, Rugamba’s work raises a question that concerns us all: how can memory remain alive without becoming mere commemoration, continue to shape how a community chooses to remember, and to recognize itself in its past?
On April 7, 1994, your family was killed in their home in Kigali. In many of your works, individual memory meets the collective history of Rwanda. What place does the experience of that day occupy in your work today?
For a long time, I was unable to speak about that day, devoting myself instead to the broader historical narrative while waiting until I was ready to approach the intimate story – my family’s story and that fateful day, the first day of the genocide, when I learned in the morning that my family had fallen victim to a crime that, at the time, I struggled to comprehend. I believe that all the work I later did related to mass violence stems from that initial shock, even though it took me nearly 30 years to confront it directly.
Such crimes can be prevented beforehand, and there is no fatality that makes them inevitable if society remains vigilant
Guterekera is a private, familial rite: the living speaks about their ancestors, and to the ancestors of those who are still alive. What changes when you bring it to the theatre, before strangers who never knew your father or your mother?
I believe that the theatre stage is a privileged place for such a ritual in that it is itself a form of ceremony. We are on stage, but within a circle where the audience and we – Majnun and I – participate in the same gesture. The difference is that the stage expands this ritual beyond the family circle and, in doing so, universalizes the narrative. The evocation of my father, my mother, my brothers and sisters become a metaphor for all the fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters of those present. In many countries and among different audiences, people rediscover a ritual for their own loved ones through this shared ceremony.
You said that in Rwanda 94 it was still necessary to name the genocide as such – to identify it and have it recognized. In Hewa Rwanda, the work seems different, turning toward memory as a form of healing. When did you realize it was time to move to this second stage?
These are two different periods. Rwanda 94 was created at a time when it was necessary to reveal the nature of the crime committed in Rwanda; the issue was still being debated. The term “genocide” had not yet been recognized, even at the UN. Thirty years later, this is no longer debated. No one contests the nature of the crime except denialists, who will not change. This makes it possible to focus on the victims as individuals and to allow them to reclaim their history and their existence.
Art is above all an act of sharing, and each of us must do our part for the next generation
Your work is also inspired by Machete Season by Jean Hatzfeld. You have said that perpetrators are not monsters, but men – fathers and sons. Bringing this humanity onto the stage, in a work dedicated to victims: is that an act of courage, or a necessity?
In Hewa Rwanda, I do not really speak about the perpetrators; I felt they did not need to occupy the center of the narrative. However, in other works – such as my staging of The Investigation by Peter Weiss – I considered that the words of the perpetrators help us understand the mechanisms through which political violence takes hold in a society. Hannah Arendt speaks of the “banality of evil”: understanding that perpetrators can be ordinary people frees us from a sense of inevitability, especially in the case of ideological crimes. It shows that such crimes can be prevented beforehand, and that there is no fatality that makes them inevitable if society remains vigilant.
Your father, Cyprien Rugamba, was a poet, choreographer, and historian; he founded an open-air theatre for the community in Kigali. You founded Rwanda Arts Initiative and created the Kigali Triennial. What part of him lives on in what you do?
He was the one who trained me in the performing arts, who gave me a love of art. He is the greatest teacher I have ever had. I owe him a great deal, and through my work I try to give back a little of what I received – though I can never fully succeed, because what we receive always surpasses us. But I learned from him that art is above all an act of sharing, and that each of us must do our part for the next generation.
