Dorcy Rugamba

A group of Rwandan artists performs in the Auschwitz trial investigation as judges, as victims or, in the witness box, as torturers and other minions of the Nazi regime. Why this dressing-up? Rather than telling the story of their own genocide, still hardly known worldwide, why have these Rwandan artists work on the genocide of the Jews, which has been featured in plays and on the screen time and again?

Perhaps because dressing-up belongs to the very essence of theater; perhaps it allows a special way of telling the truth. Through theater, actors are offered masks, characters whom they pretend they have nothing to do with personally. However, the character is never totally someone else; there is no such process that would enable us to transmute entirely into the life, the history, the time and culture, the identity of another.

Between the actor and the character whose story he tells, there is the play, which features the actor’s own nature as well as those of the other as described in the script. Between yesterday’s Europeans 20 years after the Shoah when Weiss wrote The Investigation and today’s Rwandan citizens 15 years after the genocide of the Batutsi, there are virtual beings, hybrids, carrying with them the history of two drifting worlds, who are able to describe the common characteristics shared by all absolute crimes.

By investigating the Nazis’ crimes, we are prosecuting the crimes of our own time, a time that has yet to recover from the earlier crimes of Auschwitz. If we had in fact recovered, no crime of a comparable nature would ever have been possible again. All this challenges us, not only as Rwandan citizens, but also as artists and, above all, as human beings. It inevitably leads us to question the world, which not only allowed another genocide to take place in total indifference but seems unable to learn from this crime to spare future generations. Another genocide could be perpetrated after Auschwitz because the conditions of such a crime are still to be found in the world. What are they? Our project is not to answer this question but rather to share in reflection with an audience.

Our intent is to confront the world in which we all live today with one of its most unspeakable aspects, expressed by our desire to re-investigate this crime, which purports to tell us about yesterday and other people. Instead we suggest a representation of our own fears, our own disillusions, our own expectations. We neither mean to prosecute the culprits as such, nor even to symbolically condemn the acts. Our aim has nothing of a solemn comforting mass in which one would recite “never again.” It is a stage performance on the human condition here and now.