Rwan­dan Records

walk­a­ble music the­ater

Upon hear­ing the word Rwan­da, most peo­ple prob­a­bly think of the geno­cide that began 25 years ago in April. There has been mas­sive eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment since then and the coun­try now presents itself as an “African Tiger”. But Rwanda’s younger gen­er­a­tion, like Germany’s, has to grap­ple with a dif­fi­cult lega­cy. Cross­ing mag­nif­i­cent visions of the future with yearn­ings for dis­persed tra­di­tions, Diet­rich and Kipfmüller, the Rwan­dan spo­ken word artist Eric 1key and the Berlin-based com­pos­er Klaus Janek have devel­oped “Rwan­dan Records” – a record label, sound stu­dio, bar and archive of per­son­al rec­ol­lec­tions. The project presents a new and unusu­al per­spec­tive on iden­ti­ty in a glob­al con­text. In Rwan­da and Ger­many, there is a sim­i­lar inter­est in pop cul­ture and the key­words used in pub­lic debate – iden­ti­ty, migra­tion, com­mu­ni­ty, inte­gra­tion, home, tra­di­tion and pros­per­i­ty – are the same. But in Rwan­da, they are asso­ci­at­ed with com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent visions and thus gain new, expand­ed mean­ings. After record­ing many con­ver­sa­tions with many peo­ple in Rwan­da, Diet­rich and Kipfmüller have cre­at­ed a het­ero­ge­neous ensem­ble of voic­es. This work of walk­a­ble musi­cal the­atre is at once sound instal­la­tion and radio play, con­cert and staged space, whose acoustic archi­tec­ture is shaped by the audi­ence. The com­po­si­tion moves between dif­fer­ent times and worlds, between tra­di­tion­al songs, pop music and elec­tron­ic sounds. The voic­es of the ensem­ble and its sto­ries become a mov­ing live sym­pho­ny. The audience’s move­ments are tracked so that at the end vis­i­tors can down­load and take home with them a per­son­al album of the sto­ries that they heard. Only the files that are lis­tened to will be saved. The oth­ers will van­ish. Indi­vid­ual deci­sions thus enable col­lec­tive knowl­edge to be pre­served or active­ly for­got­ten. A nar­ra­tive that tran­scends genre and cul­ture will emerge on the basis of a com­bi­na­tion of dif­fer­ent times, visions of the past and the future, as well as breaks in people’s biogra­phies.