From June 9th to 11th, we celebrated 25 years of Africalia at the Rencontres Dramaturgiques de Kinshasa. Our partner Tarmac des Auteurs thereby kicked off our anniversary celebrations on the African continent. For three days, the biannual festival for dramatic reading treated audiences to plays on the theme of love. The closing day was dedicated to our 25th anniversary.
Les Rencontres Dramaturgiques
In June 2025, Tarmac des Auteurs organised the fourth edition of its dramatic reading festival ‘Les Rencontres Dramaturgiques de Kinshasa’, an initiative launched in 2019. The festival offers authors a platform for reading their plays. To help the artists prepare for the festival, Tarmac invites an experienced theatre professional to coach them in their acting, guide rehearsals, and stages performances. This year, Moroccon actress and director Sanae Assif was invited as resident mentor to Kinshasa.
Love in its many forms
After about ten days of thorough preparation, the actors were ready to present the results of their hard work on stage during the three days of the Rencontres Dramaturgiques. For this fourth edition of the festival, on the occasion of Africalia’s anniversary, Tarmac picked love as the central theme for the staged plays. The organisation explains why : ‘To talk about love these days is to take stock of what makes us human’. The festival line-up included both classic and new theatre texts.
For the opening night, the young actors, both experienced and beginners, reinterpreted William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’. For many of them, this was a revelation. Watch here how they added their personal touch to this iconic work! On Tuesay June 10th, the actors took a more experimental approach with Joël Pommerat’s more modern play ‘La Réunification des deux Corées’.
Africalia 25
The closing day was entirely dedicated to Africalia’s 25th anniversary and marked our long-standing partnership with Tarmac des Auteurs. The evening opened with a discussion between cultural operators, artists, and partners of Africalia. Together, they highlighted the decisive impact of Africalia’s support on the professionalisation of operators, authors, and actors. After the round table discussion, the festival closed on a humorous note with a staged reading of Shinzo Aanza’s ‘Histoire générale des murs’, directed by Noël Kitenge. The cocktail reception following the performance was the icing on the cake to launch our anniversary celebrations!
©Tarmac des Auteurs
