For the past 23 years, Oméga Dream, who wants to leave his country, has wandered the quays of one of Africa's great ports without ever managing to board a ship. There, he meets Julie Rose, whom he saves from the police guarding the ships. She tells him she's waiting for Benson-de-la-mer, the legendary smuggler, who's supposed to help her leave the country. Together, they'll try to board a ship, tell their story, talk about their country, about this overpowering desire to leave it, but also of the fear of leaving. The Undefined, half-griot, half-storyteller, and ghostly witness to the events, tells us of the repeated attempts and failures of those who “commit” to leaving. But isn't the border between hope and lie sometimes very thin? A story we're not used to hearing, that of the impossibility of migration.
The Cameroonian author, director, and actor Denis Sufo Tagne, aka Sufo Sufo, has appeared in over fifteen plays in Cameroon and abroad. Starting in 2009, he turned to writing and has since become a prolific author, with a dozen plays in which he explores different forms and worlds. In 2014, he was awarded the Visa creative grant for a residency at the Tarmac des Auteurs in Kinshasa, but also the Odyssée grant for a residency at the Maison du Comédien Maria Casarès in France. That same year, his text De la mémoire des errants won the top prize at the Conakry Univers des mots residency. He worked on a writing project spanning three continents (Cameroon, France, Canada) with French author Gianni Gregory Fornet and Québec writer Martin Bellemare, with whom he created Par tes yeux for the Festival de Limoges in 2017.
His play Debout un pied, partly written during a residency at the Maison des Auteurs in Limoges, won the Prix SACD 2017 for best play in French and the Prix des Écrivains Associés du Théâtre 2017.
Debout un pied by Sufo Sufo is published by Espaces 34 (2018), with the support of the centre national du livre.
Distribution
Read by Lamine Diarra, Annette Gatta, Karim Barras, Tom Adjibi
Conception and coordination Pascal Paradou
Direction Armel Roussel
Artistic collaboration Valavane Koumarane
Sound creation Pierre-Alexandre Lampert
Production
Coproduction RFI and Compagnie [e]utopia
With the support of the SACD and its programme for culture and radio, Wallonie-Bruxelles International
