ICIRORI

On the 21st of October 1993, in the middle of the Civil War in Burundi, four-year-old Consolate and her sister are hiding in the Kwitaba Wood following the murder of their parents. They are found and then brought to Belgium to be adopted. There she grows up with a white family in a small middle-class town. Almost 30 years later, Consolate, now an actor and director, travels back to Burundi, where she meets members of her family who she could have stayed with back then. She has now accumulated several years of intensive research, in which she has explored issues such as human trafficking and illegal adoption, and has examined her own experiences of racism and the destruction of identity. The play »ICIRORI« is the result of this painful but liberating examination. Drawing on a wide range of resources, Consolate attempts to reconstruct her fragmented identity and biography, in order to reappropriate them for herself on her own terms: body, videos, smells, images, stage design, letters, audio tracks are equal elements of this production.
In Kirundi, one of the official languages of Burundi, »ICIRORI« means something like »looking into your own internal mirror, looking into the face of your history, in order to move forward«. Consolate takes this word literally and has developed a play that reflects her journey from Burundi to Belgium and back – and in so doing tells her story, which is as collective as it is intimate.