MUNLATO

Kind : Dance and Music of cultural interbreeding

Prize list : MASA 2003, CONADEA 2002, FAR 2003

Date of creation : 01/08/2000

Munlato: Abidjan Miracle of Utopia Pan. Founded in 2000 by a former companion of Kiyi M'Bock, Eyock Epouck, MUNLATO the company can boast of not having lost time to reach a national and international reputation that other, less fortunate, still waiting. For four years, this young company dance and traditional music is the torchbearer of an art genre, the musical, she was able to regenerate by providing a touch more dynamic. Indeed, MUNLATO integrates each of his compositions effects of theatricality rather original in using the mimetic representation of situations evoking the endemic problems of African society: sorcery, tribal warfare, corruption, AIDS, etc.. The costumes, makeup and sets are designed in a dramaturgical perspective and aesthetic reminiscent phraoniques epics and the Golden Age of ancient Nubia. Within the company, a music section, "Munlato Power" led by conductor Cameroon Expédy Nazer, recorded his first album in 2002. Getting cross multiple genres including bikutsi Cameroon, the Balkanization of Congo, and Gbegbe mapouka Côte d'Ivoire, and performed songs in Lingala, Bete, Duala, Baule, Dioula and French. The first opus rich sonorities of traditional electronic group Pan exception is unfortunately not yet distributed in Europe. The "MASA Festival 2003" was not a success. This "off" held alongside the institutional MASA in all communes of Abidjan has suffered most of the "traffic problems" (the police barricades) that result in a kind of 'virtual curfew'. But there was more to deter Munlato to make a spectacle. This company has a forty young dancers and musicians living in the district of Kumasi, where it has no fixed premises. Yesterday greeted by a bush on the corner, she camped in a school until the fall. It gathers a dozen Ivorian and foreign origins pooling their legacies. Its director, Epouck Eyock Cameroonian is like Were Were Liking, the founder of Villa-Kiyi where he spent three years. His ambition is to follow this example: create a phalanx of true artists. He played on two tables: one of neo-traditional shows that the plastic is cleverly modernized (the masks are made from gourds and cans of beer); other original songs combining rhythm Ivorian villagers to sounds like modern music makossa and soukouss. The model of what will be the first cd Munlato is a complete success: the texts are of rare quality and a disarming sincerity, shamelessly evoking all the current problems of Africa.