Just like other sectors, entertainment and art were equally affected by the global pandemic, COVID-19. In Rwanda, public and social gatherings that include entertainment activities have been banned.

Among the affected is Mashirika Performing Arts and Media Company, the theatre company responsible for the annual Ubumuntu Festival. As many other public events, the festival which has created 30,000 audience since 2015 is set to go online. 

The New Times has interviewed Hope Azeda, the founder of Mashirika Performing Arts and Media Company, to shade more light on the changes. Below are the excerpts:

How specifically has COVID-19 affected Mashirika?

All our events have come to a standstill. We had three annual activities and six community intervention activities and they were all halted. We had collaboration with different companies on different projects and they all stopped. We still manage to pull out a few activities remotely and we will hold Ubumuntu Festival virtually.

How did you decide to hold Ubumuntu Festival virtually?

This is our first time holding it online and it is a very big challenge. But it also a time for us to shift gears, to adopt and realize that our audience is not just physically but a global audience. We think Rwanda and circles outside the country and continent.

That begs a question: what kind of content do we tailor for this kind of audience? It is even more challenging because our kind of art needs physical audience to connect to.

But we are confident that it will work because we have already started creating online audience with a project called A Hundred Stories of Home and they are starting to curate an audience. At first we thought our subjects that are very sensitive and can open wounds will not fit into social media world but people are actually buying it.

Since you have never done this before, how do you visualize it?

The way I visualize it, Rwanda is a sun and the festival will be its beams shining over through the world. We will be throwing light from our hearts to thousands of people in a very short period of time and internet is the best way to do so.

For previous festivals, we used to run three days. This year we will have 6 hours in three days, two hours every day, so it is going to be very compact.

We will still have content dedicated to young people as usual. To connect our audience, we want to create an anthem that will be sung by different choirs and singers around the world. We are still working on how much technology we have to play around with. We can do a lot with technology.

We will do our best to unpack every artistic aspect, spoken word, literature, music and dances and make the festival like it used be.

What new should we expect in the festival?

We are working with very big companies from around the world. The first company was going to come from New York and they were going to do Cartography. They were going to perform an art piece about stories of young immigrants and related topics. This was one of the top performances we were looking forward to. We are still figuring out how to do it remotely.

Many more companies from Spain, Germany, SiriLanka, United Kingdom, South Africa, Poland and the whole region was to be presented. Still all of this will be on board and enjoyed by our audience but only online.

Ubumuntu Festival has always been a spark of creativity and collaboration and our audience should expect nothing less.

The theme of the festival is Stop, Breath and Live. What was your inspiration?

The theme came to life in April 2019. That is when I realized that I personally was always running, I mean, busy with life that I never stopped. Whenever something is running, it needs to stop and breath otherwise it collapses. I realized it is time to stop and catch a breath to live.

This was also inspired by the rates of depression, anxiety and suicides that are taking toll on people these days. We no longer have time for others. Young people are drowning in drugs. We are not opening up about this. It is time to Stop, Breath and Live.