Dorcy Rugamba

Dorcy Rugamba (born 1969) is a Rwandan author, actor, dancer, and stage director. Being a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which his parents and most of his family were murdered, much of his work is focused on this and other genocides. He has also acted in films. He founded the Rwanda Arts Initiative and the Kigali Triennial. His 2024 memoir dedicated to his absent family, Hewa Rwanda, une lettre aux absents is being presented in English translation as a performance accompanied by music, called Hewa Rwanda, Letter to the Absent, premiering in February 2025 at the Adelaide Festival in Australia.

Early life and education Dorcy Rugamba was born in Rwanda in 1969, the son of Cyprien and Daphrose Rugamba. Cyprien Rugamba (a Hutu man) was a writer, choreographer, composer, and museum curator, and Daphrose was a Tutsi woman. The couple introduced the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and the Emmanuel Community to Rwanda in 1990.

Dorcy was introduced to the performing arts by his father. This work was performed in Rwanda, France, Belgium, England, Japan, and the United States. He also wrote Retour de Kigali.

The Rwanda Arts Initiative, founded by Rugamba in 2012, has developed several of his projects.

In 2019 he created the opera Umurinzi ("the guardian"), to commemorate 25 years of the Tutsi genocide, and inspired by Rwandan tradition called "Guterekera". Umurunzi was performed at the Kigali Convention Centre. The script is based on testimonies of Genocide survivors. The play was produced in four languages: Kinyarwanda (the official language of Rwanda), English, French, and Kiswahili, an East African language. The opera was also shown on Rwanda Television, and part of it is available on YouTube.

By 2019 he had produced seven plays about genocide. In June 2024 he presented a performance of the same name at the Großes Haus theatre in Braunschweig, Germany, as part of the Festival Theaterformen, together with Senegalese multi-instrumentalist Majnun, whose name means "madman" in Arabic. ahead of being presented at the Adelaide Festival in Adelaide, Australia, in March 2025. In this work, he uses art as a form of healing. He has written about this work: "While Hewa Rwanda, Letter to the Absent addresses the genocide, questions of mourning, and a family that was nearly annihilated, I primarily wanted it not to be a commemorative text but a hymn to life, so the tone of the text deliberately embraces lightness, humour, poetry, music, and life in all its aspects". The work is a Rwanda Arts Initiative production. The performance is also being staged three times as part of WOMADelaide, and outdoor festival of music and dance which is part of the Adelaide Festival. In the presentation, he talks about what he learnt from his parents and what he saw, and how long it took him "to accept the unacceptable". By presenting such works, he remains close to those who are absent, honouring their lives and finding beauty and poetry in the world.

He is a narrator in the 2016 feature documentary about his parents, J'entrerai au ciel en dansant (I'll Enter Heaven Dancing).

He plays the character of Innocent in the 2021 Afrofuturist film Neptune Frost, co-directed by Rwandan playwright and actress Anisia Uzeyman and American musician and multimedia artist Saul Williams (who wrote the screenplay).

Other activities In 2012, Rugamba founded the Rwanda Arts Initiative.

In February 2024 he founded and became artistic director of the Kigali Triennial, Kigali's inaugural arts market.

Rugamba spoke at the ISPA (International Society for the Performing Arts) 2025 New York Congress.

Personal life Rugamba lives in Brussels and Rwanda.

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