Aristide Tarnagda

It was in Burkina Faso that Aristide Tarnagda, born in 1938, studied sociology at the University of Ouagadougou. His passion for the theatre very quickly took hold of him and he launched himself into a career as an author and actor before becoming a director. In 2004, his meeting with the writer Koffi Kwahulé at the Festival Récréâtrales of Ouagadougou marked a decisive turning point in his career, placing writing at the very heart of his artistic life. Author of a dozen or so plays, Aristide Tarnagda anchors his narratives in the realities of Burkina Faso, but transcends them through an evocative power that permits him to be heard well beyond his country's borders. His fictional characters, as recognizable as they are in the African landscape, always express themselves in words of vibrant motion, which resonate in each spectator, whatever his or her geographic origins. It is this power that permitted Aristide Tarnagda to reply to the many invitations he has received from abroad. This led to his writing on a commission from Eva Doumbia Franco do Brésil in São Paulo in 2009, after having had his writing heard in 2007 at the Comédie-Française with Exiles 4 as well as at the Théâtre National de Bretagne with 333 Million Cardiac Arrests and Ways of Loving, two plays written with the authors collective Lumière d'août, during his residence at the TNB's school of which Stanislas Norday was the study director at the time. That same year, 2007, the public of the Festival d'Avignon discovered his writing with The Tears of the August Sky, a reading at the Jardin de la rue de Mons.