At the Fireplace - Blair Koono
KuKyooto Show Details
The production runs on April 18th and 19th at the Uganda National Theatre, with two shows each day at 3:00 PM and 6:00 PM.
Tickets are available at UGX 50,000 for VIP, UGX 30,000 for ordinary seating and UGX 20,000 for students and children.
They can be purchased at the National Theatre, New Life Church Kireka or online through KariTickets.com [https://karitickets.com/event/KU_KYOOTO].
There was a time when stories did not need stages. No lights. No microphones. No tickets. Just a fire and people gathered around it. That is where KuKyooto begins not in the polished corridors of contemporary theatre, not in the glow of professional lighting rigs, but in the ancient, sacred space where a father speaks, a grandfather remembers and a community leans in to listen. Before theatre became formal, before it was packaged into auditoriums and ticketed experiences, before we started measuring its legitimacy against imported standards and external frameworks, storytelling lived in spaces like this. Intimate. Raw. Necessary. And it is precisely this space that KuKyooto is trying to reclaim, not as nostalgia, but as a living, breathing assertion that the way we once told stories still holds power, still holds truth and still holds us.
Through a deliberate and thoughtful collaboration with The MuFrame Podcast, this is not simply about documenting a production or promoting a show. It is about stepping inside the minds of the creatives who are rebuilding that fire from the ground up, one log of memory and one spark of intention at a time. It is about understanding what drives a generation of Ugandan artists to look backward in order to move forward, to excavate the old ways not as relics but as foundations. And one of the most compelling voices in that excavation belongs to Blair Koono Mathias, an actor, voice artist, music director and performer whose journey through dance, music and theatre has been anything but linear, yet somehow always pointing toward the same centre.
Before the titles arrived, before the credits rolled, before the recognition began to crystallise around his name, Blair was simply someone who needed to be on stage. The way he describes it carries none of the vanity one might associate with a hunger for the spotlight. “I always told myself I was born for the spotlight,” he explains, “not because I wanted attention, but because that is where I felt alive.” That distinction matters enormously because it separates the performer who seeks validation from the performer who seeks expression. For many creatives, the journey does not begin with strategy or career mapping. It begins with instinct, a pull so deep and so persistent that ignoring it feels like a small death every single day. Blair’s early life was saturated with performance in its most organic forms. Music was in the house. Drama was in the air. Movement was in the body. His parents, each gifted in their own right, carried elements of that artistry and somehow, almost mysteriously, it found its way into him, not as a learned skill but as an inheritance, something already written into his bones before he ever took a formal class or stepped into a rehearsal room.
But instinct alone is not enough to sustain a life in the arts. There comes a point, sometimes gradual, sometimes abrupt when passion must confront reality, when the romantic notion of being an artist collides with the grinding demands of being a working creative in a space that does not always value what you bring. Blair is refreshingly unsentimental about this collision. He has seen too many people confuse passion with purpose and he has watched too many talented individuals burn out because they could not tell the difference. “People are passionate about things that are not their purpose,” he says and there is a weight in that observation that only comes from having walked through the fire himself. For Blair, the shift happened when he began to understand that loving something and being called to something are not always the same thing. Purpose came first - that deep, almost spiritual alignment with a path that feels inevitable. Then passion, the fuel that keeps you walking that path even when it gets dark and lonely. And finally, professionalism, the discipline that turns raw gift into reliable craft.
Training at institutions like the Mariam Ndagire Film and Performing Arts School did not give Blair his talent. He was already carrying that. What the training gave him was clarity. Clarity in how to approach the craft, how to handle a script, how to treat art as work rather than whimsy. Because theatre, as he puts it plainly and without romance, is not a hobby. “It requires work. Long hours. And sometimes going places within yourself you would not normally go.” That last part - the interior journey - is what separates the committed artist from the casual performer. You cannot fake the kind of excavation that real performance demands. You cannot pretend to go into the dark corners of human experience and come back with something true. That takes training, yes, but more than that, it takes a willingness to be uncomfortable, to be vulnerable, to be seen in ways that are not always flattering. And that willingness, Blair suggests, is not something you can teach. It is something you either have or you do not and the only way to find out is to stand in the fire and see what remains.
Blair is not an artist who fits neatly into any single category and one gets the sense that he prefers it that way. Actor. Music director. Performer. Storyteller. Voice artist. Choreographer. The list of what he does is long and varied and to an outsider, it might seem scattered or unfocused. But there is a coherence beneath the surface, a thread that runs through all of it and that thread is the act of making meaning through performance, regardless of the medium. When asked where he feels most honest, however, his answer is unexpected and revealing. “In my music,” he says, not because it is the most polished or the most technically accomplished of his pursuits, but because it is already processed internally before it ever reaches an audience. “By the time I sing something, I have already said it in my heart.” There is something profoundly powerful in that confession. It suggests that performance, for all its public-facing glory, is not always the most honest space. Sometimes honesty lives in what is processed quietly, privately, in the chambers of the heart long before the microphone is turned on or the stage lights come up. The music becomes a translation of something already real, already felt, already lived. And perhaps that is why it resonates differently because it is not being manufactured in the moment but simply released.
The conversation takes a turn toward the practical when Blair begins to speak about how he navigates different creative spaces and what emerges is a kind of survival manual for the working artist. How do you enter a room full of strangers, each with their own energy, their own expectations, their own unspoken rules? For Blair, the answer is simple in theory but difficult in consistent practice. “I read the room.” Different spaces demand different versions of yourself. Some rooms welcome vibrancy and volume; others require restraint and quiet observation. Some environments encourage physical warmth and easy familiarity; others maintain boundaries that must be respected. Learning to discern which is which and adapting accordingly without losing yourself in the process, is a skill that no acting class explicitly teaches but that every working creative must eventually master. And within all of that adaptation, all of that careful calibration of presence, there is one thing Blair refuses to compromise: himself. “What I protect most is myself,” he explains, “because if I lose that, I cannot give anything real.” This is the quiet, often invisible battle that many creatives fight daily, balancing adaptability with authenticity, knowing when to adjust and when to stand firm and sometimes, perhaps most painfully, knowing when to walk away from a room that asks too much of your soul for too little in return.
At one particularly striking moment in the conversation, the dialogue shifts into uncomfortable territory, the kind of honest reckoning that rarely makes it into polished interviews. “Actors are liars,” Blair says and the words land not as an accusation but as an acknowledgment of something fundamental about the craft. Actors are trained to create emotion, to simulate truth, to make people believe in realities that do not exist. They can cry on cue, rage on command, fall in love with strangers for the duration of a scene and then walk away unchanged. And sometimes, Blair admits, that ability bleeds into real life in ways that are not entirely comfortable to examine. He has lied to people and been believed because he is good at what he does. He has performed sincerity so convincingly that even he, in the moment, might have been unsure where the performance ended and the truth began. The question that lingers, unspoken but unavoidable, is this: where does the actor end and the person begin? Is there a clean boundary or is the line perpetually blurred, shifting with each role, each room, each version of self that is summoned into being? Blair does not offer a tidy answer and perhaps that is the point. Perhaps the work of the artist is not to resolve these tensions but to live honestly within them, to acknowledge the complexity without pretending it can be simplified.
When the conversation finally lands on KuKyooto itself, Blair’s energy shifts. He is no longer speaking in abstract terms about art and identity and professionalism. He is speaking about something concrete, something that belongs to him and to the collective of young artists who have poured themselves into this production. In KuKyooto, Blair plays SON1, a role that places him at the heart of the narrative, but his involvement does not end there. As the General Music Director, he sits at the intersection of story and sound, shaping the sonic landscape of the production with the same intentionality he brings to his performance. And for him, the music is not decoration, not background texture, not filler between scenes. It is memory made audible. “The music brings us back to the authenticity of African rhythm,” he explains and there is a quiet fervour in the way he says it. Not chords, not the structured compositions of Western musical theory, but rhythm in its rawest, oldest form. Chant. Spoken word. The kind of sound that existed before formal theory was invented to categorise it, the kind of sound that belonged to people before it was extracted, analysed and repackaged by institutions that never understood its soul. This is the music Blair is trying to resurrect in KuKyooto not as a museum piece, but as a living, breathing force that still has the power to move bodies and stir spirits.
But behind the beauty of theatre, behind the noble intentions and the artistic vision, there is a harsh and unglamorous reality that every independent production must face. Resources. Or more precisely, the lack of them. “We are trying to do something that costs millions with nothing but faith,” Blair says and the words carry the weight of countless sleepless nights and anxious rehearsals. This is the reality of so many young creatives in Uganda and across the continent. Big vision. Deep talent. Urgent stories that demand to be told. And means that never seem to match the magnitude of the dream. But instead of waiting for permission, instead of postponing until the conditions are perfect, they build anyway. They scavenge, they improvise, they pour their own limited resources into the work because the alternative, silence, delay, surrender is simply not an option. That is what makes KuKyooto more than a production. It is an act of resistance against a system that tells young African artists that their work is only valid when it is properly funded, properly staged, properly validated by the right gatekeepers. It is a declaration that the story matters more than the stage it is told on, that the fire does not need a theatre to burn.
This brings us to one of the most urgent and underexamined questions in the entire conversation: who gets to define what is “professional”? For too long, African theatre has been measured against standards that were never designed for it. Structured stages. Formalised rehearsal processes. Imported frameworks of what constitutes legitimate performance. These standards, inherited from colonial and post-colonial structures, have quietly done the work of convincing generations of African artists that their indigenous forms of storytelling are somehow less than, somehow in need of elevation or refinement to meet an external benchmark. Blair pushes back against this inherited thinking with clarity and conviction. “If our way of telling stories is different,” he insists, “it does not mean it is unprofessional.” The fireplace becomes the perfect metaphor for this argument. No stage. No lighting rig. No formal structure to speak of. And yet, for centuries, stories were told around that fire. Lessons were passed down. Communities were shaped and reshaped by the narratives that circulated in those intimate, flickering circles. So what, ultimately, makes something legitimate? The structure that contains it or the impact it has on the people who receive it? The frame or the fire?
At its core, KuKyooto is not trying to compete with contemporary theatre on contemporary theatre’s terms. It is not interested in proving that it can be just as slick, just as polished, just as “professional” as anything coming out of London or New York. What it is trying to do is far more radical and far more necessary. It is trying to remind us of something we have collectively forgotten in our rush toward modernity and global recognition. Storytelling did not begin with institutions. It began with people. With shared space. With the simple, profound act of listening to someone who has something to say. And maybe, just maybe, the real work now is not to reinvent theatre from scratch but to return to its essence, to remember that the most powerful stories have always been told by ordinary people in ordinary places, not because they had the best equipment or the biggest budgets, but because they had something true to pass on.
We are living in a time of relentless speed. Content is everywhere, flooding our screens and our minds with a ceaseless torrent of information, entertainment and distraction. Stories are told and forgotten within hours. Attention is fragmented into ever-smaller pieces and the idea of sitting still for something truly sitting still, truly listening, truly being present feels almost countercultural. Depth is disappearing, replaced by the quick hit, the viral moment, the disposable narrative that asks nothing of us and leaves nothing behind. Ku Kyooto pushes against all of that. It asks us to slow down. To listen with the kind of attention our ancestors brought to the fireside. To remember that there was a time when stories were not consumed but received, not scrolled past but carried forward in the heart. And more importantly, it asks us to sit with some difficult questions: What stories are we telling now, in this moment and who are we telling them for? What stories have we stopped telling and what have we lost in that silence? And what would it mean to gather again, not around screens, but around something real, a fire, a stage, a shared space and simply listen?
KuKyooto is not just a show. It is an experience, a reflection, a return. It is an invitation to remember something that was never entirely lost, only buried beneath the noise of modern life. And maybe, just maybe, it is a reminder that the fire is still there, waiting for us to gather around it once more, to tell the old stories and make room for the new ones, to sit in the warmth and the flicker and remember who we are.
Show Details
The production runs on April 18th and 19th at the Uganda National Theatre, with two shows each day at 3:00 PM and 6:00 PM. Tickets are available at UGX 50,000 for VIP, UGX 30,000 for ordinary seating and UGX 20,000 for students and children. They can be purchased at the National Theatre, New Life Church Kireka or online through KariTickets.com [https://karitickets.com/event/KU_KYOOTO].
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