Behind the Frame · Ku Kyooto · Pt 2/4 — Blair Koono: Reclaiming the Creative Self

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 pr...