Circus tackles trauma of Burkinabe children

By miming children juggling ammunition found on the ground or driven mad by fear, four acrobats hope to express what is too painful for words: how their native Burkina Faso’s conflict has ruined countless childhoods.

Titled Souffle (Breath), the Dafra Cirque’s latest performance “is about life … and when we talk about life we talk about hope, and hope means the children,” the troupe’s choreographer, Jean Adolphe Sanou, said after a performance in neighboring Ivory Coast.

For more than a decade, Burkina Faso has been at war with terrorists who have killed, kidnapped, raped or recruited thousands of the west African country’s children, according to the UN.

Rights groups such as Human Rights Watch also say the Burkinabe army and its allied civilian volunteer fighters have committed abuses, including toward minors.

Dafra Cirque does not touch on that part of the issue — the army has cracked down on criticism since taking power through two military coups in 2022.

However, for nearly an hour at a concert hall in Ivory Coast’s economic capital, Abidjan, the troupe’s performing quartet translated the despair, innocence and resistance of children facing the unspeakable for several hundred spectators.

Photo: AFP

Slipping into the skin of a traumatized child, one of the men executed a series of pirouettes, swaying steps and somersaults to mimic the onset of insanity.

For the troupe’s artistic director, Moustapha Konate, circus is an art that “makes it possible to bring together as many people as possible,” because it “draws them in through feats, beauty, fluidity of movement.”

In the 30-year-old’s eyes, dance is “perhaps the easiest way for us artists” to “deal with a topic.”

Konate’s position is clear: Dafra Cirque “takes a stand against the involvement of children in wars.”

Children have suffered more than any other part of the population from Burkina Faso’s spiral of violence, with more than 2,200 enduring grave abuses between 2022 and 2024, a UN report released last year showed.

Mostly attributed to terrorist groups, the most frequent abuses involve murder, mutilation, abductions, recruitment as child soldiers, exploitation and sexual violence.

Souffle takes inspiration from the lives of the artists, who traveled from their base in Burkina Faso’s second city, Bobo-Dioulasso, to perform at a festival in Abidjan last month.

Within the circus, “everyone has been affected” by the violence, Konate said.

Despite its dark subject matter, the show received a rapturous reception in the Burkinabe capital, Ouagadougou, and the troupe’s Bobo-Dioulasso hometown.

“Many people aren’t familiar with the circus,” Konate said. “Seeing circus mixed with dance … theater, juggling and storytelling was something new for them.”

Once the lights had dimmed and the spectators emptied out of the Abidjan events hall, Yeli Gnougoh Coulibaly departed, moved by the performance.

“It’s important for artists to put on shows about the terrorist violence in Burkina,” the 21-year-old said. “I’d say it’s a bit more subtle” and “less shocking than the news, because on TV … it’s scary.”