October 30, 2023 at Studio Emad Eddin
SCENE, this workshop, led by Aristide Tarnagda and Odile Sankara, aimed to take a look at the concept of staging in the theatre. What motivates stage writing? What are the founding materials and elements? Participants were invited to deepen their understanding of the director’s role in setting the scene: what lies behind the desire to direct? How do you direct actors? How can we avoid betraying ourselves?
Tarnagda and Sankara lead a group of 15 participants through their own journey and philosophy of staging. The relationship between director, actor, text, and audience were explored, guiding the participants into understanding how to reproduce their unique vision of the world on stage.
Aristide Tarnagda is a playwright, director and actor from Burkina Faso. Since 2016, he has directed Les Récréâtrales festival in Ouagadougou. Tarnagda is the author of over twenty plays and directs most of them. In 2017, he earned the Grand Literary Prize for Black Africa for his two collections of plays, Façon d’aimer and Terre rouge.
Odile Sankara studied theatre theory at the University of Ouagadougou before joining the late Amadou Bourou’s Compagnie Feeren, with whom she went on to make her professional stage debut in Emmanuel Genvrin’s Millennium, in 2001. Her meeting with Jean-Louis Martinelli in 2004 propelled her to international fame. Sankara has since performed in twenty shows, on stages across Europe, Latin America, and Asia.