After the Rehearsal

A ghost hesitates to appear, a fiction refuses to follow the director’s orders, and all international organisations have disappeared from East Africa.

In the garden of a colonial villa in Bujumbura, five actors gather. They were summoned here to rehearse a theatre piece about a future in which all international organisations and NGOs have left East Africa. But now, as the director herself is not there, they cannot do anything but wait, and share a few stories. Nested in a mythological setup with an absent director, an unruly fictional character, a ghost and a wanderer, they tell stories about the sphere of development aid and the inequality it claims to fight. After an essayistic introduction, their narrations drift between report, fairy-tale and gossip. In an attempt to grasp a an increasingly elusive world, these monologues were developed out of stories, ideas and experiences from 5 years of artistic research and exchange between a Burundian and a German filmmaker.