By miming children juggling ammunition found on the ground or driven mad by fear, four acrobats hope to express what is too painful for words: how their native Burkina Faso’s conflict has ruined countless childhoods.
Titled Souffle (Breath), the Dafra Cirque’s latest performance “is about life ... and when we talk about life we talk about hope, and hope means the children,” the troupe’s choreographer, Jean Adolphe Sanou, said after a performance in neighboring Ivory Coast.
For more than a decade, Burkina Faso has been at war with terrorists who have killed, kidnapped, raped or recruited thousands of the west African country’s children, according to the UN.
Photo: AFP
Rights groups such as Human Rights Watch also say the Burkinabe army and its allied civilian volunteer fighters have committed abuses, including toward minors.
Dafra Cirque does not touch on that part of the issue — the army has cracked down on criticism since taking power through two military coups in 2022.
However, for nearly an hour at a concert hall in Ivory Coast’s economic capital, Abidjan, the troupe’s performing quartet translated the despair, innocence and resistance of children facing the unspeakable for several hundred spectators.
Photo: AFP
Slipping into the skin of a traumatized child, one of the men executed a series of pirouettes, swaying steps and somersaults to mimic the onset of insanity.
For the troupe’s artistic director, Moustapha Konate, circus is an art that “makes it possible to bring together as many people as possible,” because it “draws them in through feats, beauty, fluidity of movement.”
In the 30-year-old’s eyes, dance is “perhaps the easiest way for us artists” to “deal with a topic.”
Konate’s position is clear: Dafra Cirque “takes a stand against the involvement of children in wars.”
Children have suffered more than any other part of the population from Burkina Faso’s spiral of violence, with more than 2,200 enduring grave abuses between 2022 and 2024, a UN report released last year showed.
Mostly attributed to terrorist groups, the most frequent abuses involve murder, mutilation, abductions, recruitment as child soldiers, exploitation and sexual violence.
Souffle takes inspiration from the lives of the artists, who traveled from their base in Burkina Faso’s second city, Bobo-Dioulasso, to perform at a festival in Abidjan last month.
Within the circus, “everyone has been affected” by the violence, Konate said.
Despite its dark subject matter, the show received a rapturous reception in the Burkinabe capital, Ouagadougou, and the troupe’s Bobo-Dioulasso hometown.
“Many people aren’t familiar with the circus,” Konate said. “Seeing circus mixed with dance ... theater, juggling and storytelling was something new for them.”
Once the lights had dimmed and the spectators emptied out of the Abidjan events hall, Yeli Gnougoh Coulibaly departed, moved by the performance.
“It’s important for artists to put on shows about the terrorist violence in Burkina,” the 21-year-old said. “I’d say it’s a bit more subtle” and “less shocking than the news, because on TV ... it’s scary.”
Japan has started its first nationwide survey of animal cafes amid concerns over animal welfare, hygiene and public health, a government official said, bringing greater scrutiny to the popular but lightly regulated sector. The desktop survey, which began this month, will examine the number of facilities, the types of animals they house and the conditions they are held in, and how visitors interact with the animals. Exotic animal cafes, where visitors can interact with species ranging from otters to owls and marmots, have become popular attractions for Japanese and foreign tourists. However, researchers say some facilities keep threatened species, raising
Several areas of Thailand’s capital city Bangkok were inundated by continuous rain from Thursday afternoon to yesterday morning that has disrupted traffic and forced some residents to evacuate. Major canals in Bangkok filled with accumulated rainfall exceeding 20cm, officials said yesterday. Floodwaters spread across the city, particularly in the central and eastern parts, blocking roads and stopping traffic. The Thai Meteorological Department warned that the heavy rain would continue in most parts of the country through today, citing a strong low-pressure system over the central region and strengthening southwest monsoon conditions. More than 84,000 people in 21 provinces nationwide were
Yemen’s Saudi-led coalition early yesterday said it had intercepted two ballistic missiles and two drones launched by the Iran-backed Houthis toward the kingdom. The coalition said in posts on social media that the missiles were headed towards Khamis Mushait and the drones toward the capital, Riyadh, adding that it was monitoring the missile threat and drones launched at the kingdom, without providing further details. The Saudi Civil Defense had sent alerts overnight for Khamis Mushait and Abha, but not for Riyadh. The Houthis, who control the most populous parts of Yemen and much of the north, have been launching attacks
OLD WOUNDS: Protestant marchers seized on an overturned injunction to stage a march, which drew thousands of counterprotesters to block the road in Portadown UK leaders called for calm as a tense standoff with residents seeking to halt a pro-British Protestant march through a primarily Catholic area stretched into the night on Sunday, in one of the worst crises for Northern Ireland in the past few years. The tensions were triggered after a Belfast appeal court overturned a High Court injunction in the early hours of Sunday to clear the march by the Orange Order to go ahead for the first time since 1997. The Parades Commission, Northern Ireland’s independent body regulating contentious processions, had authorized 35 Orangemen to march silently along Garvaghy Road in Portadown,
RSS