Part 1 of our inside view Off the Stage: @altingunband talk about their influences. Turkish folk Pink Floyd, Thai psychedelia, Afrobeat (including @RealSeunKuti). All their songs start with fold songs of vocals + sax #BarzakhFestival
And now @altingunband are professing their love for their sound engineer Jasper and one another. They play all their music analog. @almoharek’s @BasemAbuarab praises how true to their sound they are.
Most of @altingunband’s fans in Holland are young people their own age, much younger than the age of their songs. In Turkey, they get older fans who know all the original songs they do. Many of those traveled to Jordan, Egypt too.
.@altingunband’s explanation of their music, mixing together so many different elements without losing their essence, is the definition of #BarzakhFestival, points out @mobakri
To start @MauriceLouca talks about the #Lekhfa album’s opening track, which started as a distorted drum loop. They then added bass line, and @Maryamm_Saleh had selected a text, which she set to a vocal line.
#Lekhfa’s songs take their lyrics from poet Mido Zoheir. How do they decide how to split vocals between @Maryamm_Saleh and @Tamer_AG? They split the lyrics in part to bring out the drama of the text.
Many of Lekhfa’s songs would need 20 musicians to play live if they wanted to recreate the record. Transforming it live, they kept minimizing and “summarizing” the record. By trying to recreate the record, it was “killing the live performance” @MauriceLouca
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Poet @thedesertpearl Danabelle Gutierrez visits @SabynJaveri’s @NYUAbuDhabi class Real and Imagined: Women’s Writing Across Worlds and discussed her transition from writing novels to poetry.
She also talks about the ongoing conundrum: where is home? She grew up in 3-4 different countries. She started her time as a poetry focusing on Love Poetry. She admits that it was in part a shield to protect herself from being self-revealing.
Discussion of @RebeccaSolnit and the way that female poets often get classified as “confessional”. “Even if I wasn’t revealing elements of myself in my poetry, people were still interpreting it as “confessional.”
If you want to preserve your country and your culture, you must protect your language.
Dubai based Egyptian chanter @ZigZagGhanim visits Maya Kesrouany’s @nyuabudhabi Arabic literature class in advance of his performance at #Hekayah tonight.
Language is sacred, but not just because it’s the language of religion, but also because of the role it plays in human identity. Language is a living being.
When languages encounter other languages, they change and morph. @ZigZagGhanim’s music mixes classical language and modern forms (like house music) - question: is that encounter “fusion”?
Starting the first @NYUAbuDhabi class visit by @RaviColtrane to two classes combined. Music Technology Fundamentals and What is Music?
Ravi answers the first question.
Music is organized sound.
He goes on to talk about his parents @JohnColtrane and Alice Coltrane. They were pioneers in building a home studio in their house when he was a child. John passed away before he could use it, but Alice used it frequently.
He launches quickly into a discussion of sound, and the role that microphone choice profoundly influences his sound. He built his own recording studio in 1999, built around a Tascam early 24 track unit - tape and hard disc based. It changed everything. Then Pro-tools etc entered
In the wake of @NYUAbuDhabi Climate commitment yesterday, listening to the conversation on Creative Placemaking and the tension between cultural tourism vs serving local community via @GCDNet’a Adrian Ellis. Gonna listen to @AlserkalAvenue’s Vilma next
Interesting conversations about what qualifies as quality of live and how the pandemic reshaped behaviors, needs, and wants, patterns of development and redevelopment. And what we need from our art.
As the conversations goes on, focus on values-based work in terms of behavior, and accountability, but also imagination, storytelling, expression and civic responsibility
This morning, @candocodance Artistic Director Charlotte Darbyshire talks to Lee Singh’s Movement and Meaning class in the @NYUAbuDhabi 1st Year Writing Program. Starts with a brief history of the company and how their decision making process functions.
They started with collective leadership. Eventually funding channels led them to more singular leadership. Post-pandemic they are again thinking about collective leadership, and majority led by people with disabilities.
Discussion about creative restrictions. Charlotte reflects that their limitations are primarily financial. The big curatorial consideration is balancing well-known choreographer/ reputation with riskier, lesser known choreographer