Grappling with Extremism through Performance

For the twelfth edition and twentieth year in operation of Les Récréâtrales, a remarkably resilient theatre festival that takes place in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, the event’s organizers used as their theme faire visage. The phrase is taken from a work by the Senegalese novelist Mohamed Mbougar Sarr and resonated with the organizers and artists’ affirmed choice to face up, or faire face, to the multiple difficulties that one inevitably encounters in carrying out an arts event in such an economically marginalized country as Burkino Faso. In the past decade, this Sahelian West African nation has experienced profound political instability, as well as widespread insecurity resulting from the threat of violent separatist jihadist forces arriving from its northern region. The security threat has impacted nearly every aspect of life here. According to the Refugee Agency of the United Nations, the country now holds nearly two million internally displaced persons as a result of extremist violence, a figure that represents nearly one tenth of its population. The festival theme’s use of the term visage, a French word that refers specifically to the human face, thus constitutes a call to meet such demoralizing and often dangerous circumstances with a deep sense of humanizing dignity.