As Prospero, in Peter Brook’s staging of The Tempest.
Antigone, staged by Sotigui Kouyaté with Malian actors from the Mandeka Theatre.
Master of ceremonies: a griot performs in Guinea
“a man with
an extraordinary presence and quality”
When
casting The Mahabharata, Peter Brook’s assistant scoured through film
studios in search of an actor to take on one of the lead roles, Bhisma the sage.
“I saw one shot of a tree and a man as tall and slender as this tree, with an extraordinary
presence and quality. It was Sotigui,” recalls Brook in a recent documentary about
the actor. Born in 1936 in Bamako (Mali), Kouyaté belongs to an illustrious
family of griots–masters of words who are at once genealogists, historians, masters
of ceremonies, advisers, mediators, singers and musicians. He has handed down all
these talents, as a composer, dancer, actor and father, to his own children and a
multitude of “spiritual children” dispersed across the world, for whom he is a precious
guide. Filling each of his roles with profound dignity, he has appeared in some 60
films, most recently in Little Senegal, directed by Rachid Bouchareb. As one of Peter
Brook’s longtime actors, he will tour in several shows over the next year, including
The Man Who, based on Oliver Sacks’ The man who mistook his wife for a hat, and The
Suit, adapted from a story by the late South African writer Can Themba. |
“The
best way to kill a tree is to cut it from its roots”
“Is there any sin so serious that it can never be forgiven?” |
Despite
years away from home and a career spanning many cultures, Malian actor
and griot Sotigui Kouyaté has not strayed from his foremost mission: to break
ignorance of Africa’s living traditions and spark encounters across continents
You
often say you’re first and foremost a storyteller, a “griot.” How does this deep-rooted
identity affect your approach to theatre?
I draw my inspiration, my energy, from meeting people. In my corner of Africa–my
parents were from Guinea, I was born in Mali and I’m Burkinabé by adoption–such
encounters are important, since outsiders are the ones who bring us what we don’t
know.
I didn’t go to any drama school, unless you count the great school of the street–the
school of life. When I was young, a theatre producer friend, Boubacar Dicko, asked
me several times to play parts for him. But it was the last thing I dreamed of: at
the time, I was playing for Burkina Faso’s national football team!
Did you have a bad impression of theatre?
When I was a kid, I enjoyed koteba performances, an old African tradition. The
word means “big snail.” They took place in our neighbourhood and there would be three
circles–one of children, another made up of women and a third one of men. But in
those colonial days, the koteba was dying out and being replaced by Western-style
theatre. The French started drama contests between all their West African colonies,
which later became eight countries. Consciously or not, the idea was to instil us
with Western culture. We weren’t allowed to speak our own language at school. If
we did, the teacher would make us wear a piece of wood or metal around the neck with
a mule’s head on it and deprive us of lunch. The best way to kill a tree is to cut
it from its roots. This Western-style theatre also helped steer African intellectuals
away from the campaign for independence.
What made you change heart?
I love dance and in 1966, I finally agreed to be in a historical play produced
by my friend Boubacar Dicko which featured a war dance. He also asked me to play
a part as adviser to the king. The play won a prize and went on tour in the region.
I became attached to the show, and then to another, based on a play written by my
uncle.
Gradually, acting grew on me. But I wasn’t enamoured by everything–not the courses
run by French instructors, for example. They told us, without explaining why, how
we should walk on stage, which seemed far too affected to me. They would ask us to
imagine a ship, to picture it on the wall, but I couldn’t see anything. I left, though
by then, I’d really become taken with the profession.
I set up my own theatre company in 1966 with a group of 25 people. Burkinabé
radio gave us a place to work and we mainly did improvisations. I’d go to work at
the ministry for labour and public administration in the morning, play football in
the afternoon, and then go off to theatre rehearsals. At the same time, I was also
writing my first play, The Crocodile’s Lament. It was about being sensitive, a gift
with which you can even manage to caress a crocodile, as it actually happens in several
regions of Burkina Faso, where crocodiles are viewed as sacred.
Sensitivity– is that what actors need most?
When I give courses, I do a lot of work on being open, sensitive and learning
to communicate. Politicians always make speeches about communication and dialogue.
But it all has to do with economic interests, never human ones. You can’t communicate
if you don’t listen, and people don’t listen to each other, even if they live in
the same country. Everyone’s absorbed in themselves, so exclusion grows. People risk
their lives to leave their country, and the authorities close their eyes on all that.
Finding another way of communicating, through the efforts of actors from different
cultures working together, is key to the approach of Peter Brook, who you met in
1983 for the great Indian epic The Mahabharata.
When I joined the Bouffes du Nord Theatre in Paris, I had no intention of staying
in France. I’d taken a year’s sabbatical from my job at the ministry. The problem–or
if you prefer, the luck in my case–was that The Mahabharata was a hit. I asked the
ministry to extend my leave, and they gave me another year unpaid. But when that
was up, the play’s run still hadn’t ended. I didn’t have an understudy, and the play
lasted nine hours. I was brought up not to abandon something halfway through, I couldn’t
leave the company. But I’d been with the civil service for 29 years and was just
a year away from being able to draw my pension. I lost that, and four months later,
The Mahabharata closed and I was left without a job back home. I didn’t want to return
to my family empty-handed because as the oldest son, I was their pillar. It was very
hard. Here in France, I could struggle, work and continue to explore my culture and
being. Art has never fed anyone in Africa.
You are said to have slipped into the part of the wise man Bhisma.
When I joined Peter Brook, I didn’t feel out of place. I could see everything
was happening inside a circle, just like in Africa, and on the third day, he took
my hand, looked me in the eye and said: “Sotigui, from today, you’re part of the
family.” That was a magical moment for me. He didn’t say: “You’re part of our group,
of our company.” He’d understood the soul of an African, he’d embraced my culture.
Brook is a universal man. For him, there are no barriers between people, which is
rare in today’s world. Some people don’t understand my loyalty to Brook. But how
can I not be loyal to someone who defends such values in today’s world, where separation
and individualism hold sway?
At his International Centre for Theatre Research were 22 actors from 18 different
countries. In The Mahabharata, the five Pandava brothers were played by a German,
a Frenchman, an Iranian, an Italian and a Senegalese. This bothered no one, and the
play travelled the world for four years. Only Brook could have pulled off such a
feat. There aren’t any races or skin colours in his mind. I’ve also played Prospero
in The Tempest under him. It was the first time a European director, a British Shakespearean
to boot, had staged this play with a black Prospero.
Brook has said your imagination was nourished by a culture where the visible and
invisible worlds are not separate. In the parts you play, it often seems as if you’re
on an initiation voyage.
I come from a culture where nature is very important in a person’s life. Your soul
is first incarnated in a tree, then in an animal and then in a living human being.
Some people are even named after trees. All this means everything in the world is
alive. Unfortunately, humans increasingly think they’re the only living beings on
earth.
In French, you can point to someone and say “there’s a person.” In several African
languages, when you say “person,” the word is followed by something that means roughly
“the person of the person.” That is, each human being comprises many identities,
which are in fact other people. Daily life is about discovering all these beings
within. This can only happen through meeting other people.
“When you meet another, instead of losing yourself in his eyes, recognize yourself–and
perhaps you’ll see yourself,” the saying goes. Our wise men tell us that ignorance
is the worst thing that can happen to anyone, worse than illness or death. And the
most ignorant person of all, they say, is someone who has never stepped outside his
or her house.
Your own work as a stage director is enriched by such contacts and encounters.
You once produced Antigone with Malian actors.
It’s through differences that you find ways to work together. At the request
of the Jean Moulin Museum in Paris, I produced a show in 1999 to mark the centenary
of the French wartime resistance leader’s birth. I adapted his diary, Le Premier
Combat, and merged it into a novel by the Cameroonian writer Ferdinand Oyono, Le
Vieux Nègre et la Médaille. This shocked some of Moulin’s old comrades,
but the director of the museum, a historian, firmly defended the project.
In recent months, I’ve been working on Oedipus, which follows naturally from Antigone.
I’ve based myself on several versions of the story, from Sophocles to Jean Anouilh,
and even a thriller on the theme. I’ve read the analyses of psychoanalysts from Freud
to Tobie Nathan. All focus on incest. For me, however, Oedipus is about the problem
of facing up to oneself. I’m not trying to provide an answer, I’m just raising the
issue to foster awareness of the battle that’s inherent in every destiny, namely
not to let ourselves be overcome by fatalism. Is Oedipus guilty of killing his father?
At first he was hailed as a hero who rescued a suffering country. Then he was rejected
by his own sons and stoned to death before the wall of Thebes by the very people
he’d saved. He’s a man on the run, consumed by suffering, by an obsession. If he’d
come to terms with his human weaknesses, he wouldn’t have gouged his eyes out. I
end my Oedipus by looking at what I think is the most serious issue–the refusal to
forgive. The choir exhorts the gods to praise the hero after his vain ordeal.
It’s an appeal to reason…
Forgiveness doesn’t heal everything but it can make some things better. Is there
any sin so serious that it can never be forgiven? Is evil 100 percent evil, or can
we find a little crack within that can draw it closer to good?
You stand for deep-rooted African values, just like the character you played in
Rachid Bouchareb’s film Little Senegal (2000). Do you think these values are under
threat?
I’m always afraid of that, but I try to fight with words and culture. For example
in Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second city, my children and I opened a cultural
centre a few years ago. I set it up in the courtyard belonging to my father, a very
large space. Today it’s a place where you can learn music, percussion and painting,
a meeting place where we invite foreign painters to teach courses. We also wish to
make it into a computer training centre. Besides which, we are seeking to create
a university of African traditions where we could develop ways to preserve this heritage
and deepen knowledge of our culture.
You also set up the Mandeka Theatre in Mali, which encourages literary and artistic
creation.
We founded the Mandeka in 1997, at the same time as France was deporting charter
plane loads of Malian and Senegalese immigrants every day. While that was happening,
actors in Bamako were still asking me how they could come to France, as if they were
blind to how immigrants were being treated. When I advised them not to go, they’d
stare at me as if to say: “Look at you, you’re doing alright over there, and so are
your sons.” The easiest way out in the end was to say I couldn’t help anyone in coming
to France. But I was ready to do what I could by finding them jobs, courses or training.
This is what I had in mind when I founded the Mandeka–stopping young people from
fleeing, helping them to win respect through having a job and showing people what
they could do. Antigone was performed in France by actors from Mandeka. Les Bouffes
du Nord agreed to produce Oedipus, in which Mandeka’s Malian actors will perform
with French ones.
African theatre and films still have a very low world profile, unlike African
music.
There is no African cultural policy. Our filmmakers don’t have the money to produce
and distribute their work. A few years ago, a lot more films were given loans against
eventual box-office receipts from France because their subjects, often ethnographic,
attracted donors. But as African directors became interested in other issues and
left folklore to one side, they secured less and less money. As for the actors, for
years you could look through the budgets of African films and not find any mention
of them.
In Mali and Burkina Faso, the film authorities do what they can, but that doesn’t
go much further than lending you vehicles and cameras. And it’s even worse for theatre.
The troupes you see abroad, in Europe, have to live off their own resources. You
can’t even say they were once better off. When I founded my own dance troupe in Burkina
Faso in 1971, I received no funding. I went into debt to buy musical instruments
and costumes. Several times the government seized them so they could represent the
country in foreign festivals or greet a visit by the French president–without ever
giving us anything in return.
Do you feel you’re carrying a message from Africa?
Let’s be modest. Africa is vast, and it would be pretentious to speak in its
name. I’m fighting the battle with words because I’m a storyteller, a griot. Rightly
or wrongly, they call us masters of the spoken word. Our duty is to encourage the
West to appreciate Africa more. It’s also true that many Africans don’t really know
their own continent. And if you forget your culture, you lose sight of yourself.
It is said that “the day you no longer know where you’re going, just remember where
you came from.” Our strength lies in our culture. Everything I do as a storyteller,
a griot, stems from this rooting and openness. |
