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. 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 h
