FLAMBOYANTS! Full Production (Brooklyn)

Réunion Island-based theater company Tilawcis brings their latest work, Flamboyants!, on a North American tour this fall. This work of documentary theater with music explores the remarkable intersections of Creole culture and identity between the geographically distant communities of Réunion Island, New Orleans, and Puerto Rico through music, storytelling, and gorgeous projections.

Five languages are spoken on stage, and nearly a dozen instruments are played, fusing maloya, bomba, and Mardi Gras Indians songs. The piece explores themes of memory, identity, resilience, connection, and cultural transmission through the prism of the Creole experience. It shines a light on the richness of Creole cultures and their capacity to overcome historical oppression.

Flamboyants! is a philosophy as much as it is a work of theater. Despite the 10,000 miles that separate Réunion from New Orleans, the Creole languages spoken in those two places are close linguistic cousins. Maloya musicians use the same Canna indica seeds in their kayamb instrument (a rectangular rattle made of sugar cane tubes) as bomba musicians use to create maracas in Puerto Rico. While the ties between these cultures have long been lost, their ancient, resilient wisdom, connected by the African diaspora, once again finds a home on stage in the celebration of Creole identity that is Flamboyants!

Plot Summary: Réunion Island. While a cyclone rages, a man curses his name before throwing himself in the Indian Ocean. He has no idea what repercussions this action will have on the other side of the world. From Puerto Rico to New Orleans, Creole peoples will unite to teach him his true history. A work of musical theater, documentary and fictional, even fantastical in certain moments, Flamboyants! asks us to interrogate what stories our own names carry, the ways we’re interconnected, and the cultural resilience of those who fight to not be forgotten.

This project is funded in part by the Zankel Music Fund.

The US tour of Flamboyants! is supported by Theatre & New Forms, a program of Villa Albertine.