Kiswinsida Oliver Gansaore

REMEMBER ACTE 02

A solo performance – and a manifesto

A solo performance

Creation 2025

Duration : approx. 45 minutes

Suitable to all audiences up from 6 years. Contains text in French, can be performed in English.

REMEMBER ACTE 02 is a solo as much as a manifesto — a danced tribute to Thomas Sankara, a visionary figure who dared to reimagine the role of art and culture in Burkina Faso before his assassination.

Drawing on the funeral codes of the Moaga tradition, the piece weaves dance, theatre, voice and humour into a performative act of mourning.

Rooted in research — interviews, testimonies, archives — it questions what it means to pay homage, what remains of Sankara’s legacy, and what the fate of art might have been had he survived.

An intimate and political act: the body as a space of resistance, grief, emancipation and memory.

This performance acts both as an act of memory and an act of faith in art — a manifesto affirming its political and poetic power.

It pays tribute to Thomas Sankara, who, on 4 August 1987, rose to lead Upper Volta and proudly renamed it Burkina Faso, “the Land of Upright Men.” Kiswinsida Olivier Gansaore translates the void left by his assassination — a figure both present and absent, who “rocked his early childhood, accompanied his adolescence, and nourished his youth.”

This danced narrative stems from an inquiry conducted with Sankara’s family and friends. The threads of memory are held together by a scenography made of Faso Dan Fani fabric cords. Gansaore seeks to make Sankara’s words, ideals, and legacy resonate, while questioning what his story awakens in me, in us.

“One can kill a man, but not his ideas.”

Dossier (FR)