With L’Intraitable beauté du monde, you stage the fictional meeting of Édouard Glissant and Sony Labou Tansi…
Etienne Minoungou: This diptych puts two performances that I have already brought to the stage face to face, like in a mirror: Le Tremblement du monde and Si nous voulons vivre. The idea is to bring them into dialogue over the course of a single evening, to let them be heard differently through their simple proximity. I wrote Le Tremblement du monde in 2024 with Aristide Tarnagda and Felwine Sarr. It is a collage work woven from around forty books by Édouard Glissant, a journey through his poetic, philosophical, and political thought. As for Sony Labou Tansi, I had already worked on his political thought about ten years ago. It was a reading-performance of open letters and poems, initially titled Sony l’avertisseur entêté. Sony always sought to warn us and shed light on the future of the world. I recently renamed it Si nous voulons vivre. These are the two voices I hope to make resonate in Avignon this summer: two essential visions of the world, two prophecies, in a way.
What subjects drive them?
EM: They both imagine systems of thought that go beyond their own geographical conditions: from the Caribbean archipelago or from the Congo, they attempt to speak to humanity as a whole. That is what fascinates me about them. Glissant offers a discourse of relation and globality, of poetics as a force capable of transforming reality… If we are to escape this world that seems to be dying, we must invent new utopias. We must change our imaginaries. The thought of Sony Labou Tansi is probably less well known. It is a wake-up call that unsettles certainties by forcing humanity to confront its darker sides: modern slavery, systems of domination… His poetic thought is a constant exercise in lucidity. His theatre is a theatre of urgency, where language becomes a weapon for survival.
Why did you feel an urgent need to bring their words and their utopias to the stage?
EM: I am always struck by how relevant their words remain today. In 1980, Sony Labou Tansi wrote this sentence, which still resonates powerfully: “The injustice imposed on the Palestinians will have played a major role in the rise of terrorism.” Glissant shifted the Eurocentric perspective through which the world is so often viewed. For this thinker of creolisation, what threatens our identities is not immigration or invasion: what threatens our civilisations is economic hegemony. Both offer a radical critique of neoliberalism, but they do not stop at denunciation alone. If we have reached the end of one system, then we must create others, together. If the promises of this economic system have not been fulfilled, or if they have become promises of death, then we must establish new utopias in our collective imagination, utopias in the service of life. Their hopes and prophecies go even further. They dream of a world that would be less anthropocentric, where attention would not focus solely on the future of humankind, but on that of all living things. They invite us to rethink the humanities by extending them to animal and plant life as well.
As an actor, you perform in the manner of a storyteller-philosopher. You create a sensitive and deeply physical connection with the audience…
EM: I try to summon again the tradition of speech within the village, of the palaver, that is, the circle of the storyteller or griot, the bearer of news and the historian of the present. I try to create the space of a Parliament, a place where people deliberate together. In this sense, it reconnects with the Greek tradition of the agora. But my theatre also has something in common with stand-up, with moments of poetic and political brilliance. All of this unfolds within the atmosphere of a musical oratorio. In L’Intraitable beauté du monde, the Danish saxophonist Katrine Suwalski and the Burkinabé multi-instrumentalist Simon Winsé accompany me on stage. They are the two other poets of music with whom I present this diptych. But the true protagonist is language itself. The stage is extremely stripped down. There are only a few props, no set design, and lighting used to sculpt spaces and atmospheres.
Throughout your creations, you have been developing a theatre of conversation…
EM: As I move forward in my own work, I keep refining and sharpening this aesthetic. My relationship with the audience is one of collective deliberation. Far from being an actors’ performance, it is more a space where words and voices circulate. That is how I have always approached the stage. This belongs to a history that probably began with the founding of the Récréâtrales in Burkina Faso in 2002. When Dieudonné Niangouna invited me to perform M’appelle Mohamed Ali (2014), I decided to hand over the reins and devote myself entirely to the stage. I performed that text 350 times in around forty countries. It was with this one-man show that I inaugurated a cycle of theatre conceived as a space for social discussion. In Burkina Faso, theatre is not only a place for entertainment and performance. It is a place where society attempts to enter into dialogue with itself. With Moi, Mohamed Ali, I began to make the relationship between stage and audience more porous, to open up spaces. I continued this work by staging Le Cahier d’un retour au pays natal by Aimé Césaire (2017), and later Traces, discours aux nations africaines during the Art Week in Avignon (2020). Always alone on stage, I refined my aesthetic of theatre as a space for social discussion, then gradually opened it up to live musicians. I believe I am bringing to a close this cycle, which I somewhat abusively call the Pentateuch—the book of five—with the prophecies of Glissant and Sony… before opening a new chapter that will be more intimate than political.
Interview conducted by Sylvie Martin-Lahmani on March 2026