4100 YEARS
RE/VERBERATIONS
WITH HALIM EL-DABH
Online Invocations 20.03.2021 16:00–00:00
With Halim El-Dabh, and Medhat Aldaabal, Lois Alexander, Jessie Cox with Wu Wei and Nicola Hein, Ali Demirel, Jessica Ekomane, Mena Mark Hanna, Ali Hasan, Sofia Jernberg, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, Lorenzo Sandoval and Ute Wassermann
Streamed via our Facebook and Youtube channel
Programme
ROOM ONE: BEYOND A NOTE. ANNOTATING HALIM El-DABH | |||
16:00 | In Memory of BONA KINGSLEY MANGA BELL | ||
16:10 | HALIM EL-DABH SPEAKS | ||
16:15 | Welcome | ||
| 16:30 | WORLD PREMIERE | ||
16:55 | Dance Interlude | ||
17:05 | PANEL 1: ANNOTATING HALIM EL-DABH | ||
| 17:50 | VISUAL INTERLUDE | ||
ROOM TWO: BEYOND A FRAGMENT. MEKTA IN THE ART OF KITA | |||
18:00 | WORLD PREMIERE | ||
18:10 | Sofia Jernberg, 2015, One Pitch: Birds for Distortion and Mouth Synthesizers | ||
18:30 | Sofia Jernberg, 2021, To Bathe Sore Hearts | ||
LIVE FROM SAVVY CONTEMPORARY | |||
18:40 | Halim Speaks | ||
18:45 | Dance Interlude | ||
19:00 | PANEL 2: MEKTA IN THE ART OF KITA | ||
19:45 | VISUAL INTERLUDE | ||
LIVE FROM HAUS DER BERLINER FESTSPIELE | |||
20:00 | WORLD PREMIERE | ||
ROOM THREE: BEYOND THE SCORE. UNTIMING TIME IN HALIM EL-DABH | |||
| 20:45 | Dance Performance | ||
21:05 | SAVVY team reads Halim El-Dabh | ||
21:20 | WORLD PREMIERE | ||
| |||
LIVE FROM HAUS DER BERLINER FESTSPIELE | |||
22:00 | WORLD PREMIERE | ||
LIVE from SAVVY CONTEMPORARY | |||
| 22:35 | WORLD PREMIERE | ||
| 23:05 | DANCE INTERLUDE | ||
23:20 | Panel 3: BEYOND THE SCORE. UNTIMING TIME IN HALIM EL-DABH | ||
| 23:55 | DANCE PERFORMANCE | ||
00:15 | Halim Speaks | ||
In this very special year, we continue to honour Halim El-Dabh by thinking, listening, playing, singing, dancing and summoning the voices of vitality as he has been doing for decades in his sonic endeavours. Halim El-Dabh would have turned 100 years old this month and would have continued to carry the 4000 years of pyramids, making him 4100 years old.
To celebrate the scope, diversity and depth of the work of musician, Pan-Africanist, creative musicologist, seminal composer, and philosopher Halim El-Dabh, and to open our research, exhibition and performance project HERE HISTORY BEGAN. TRACING THE RE/VERBERATIONS OF HALIM EL-DABH we invoke voices, homages, imaginations and musical visions into a day-long INVOCATIONS of musical performances.
This first iteration of our INVOCATIONS series on El-Dabh brings together some of the most crucial elements in his own history: sound, movement, and performance. For this occasion, we have deeply and carefully listened to Halim El-Dabh’s work through the years and commissioned composers, musicians, dancers, visual artists to explore ways to relate to and conjure his spirit through their own artistic language. It includes re-enactments of El-Dabh’s musical compositions that become an inspiration to the artists invited. Together, we honour El-Dabh by sharing, underscoring and commenting on his practice, annotating his presence and absence in the complex history of the Western contemporary and electronic music canon.
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
INVOCATIONS CURATORIAL TEAM Kamila Metwaly, Lynhan Balatbat, Lili Somogyi, Onur Çimen
INVOCATIONS PRODUCTION TEAM Sagal Farah, Billy Fowo, António Pedro Mendes, Ola Zielińska
GENERAL MANAGEMent Lema Sikod
MANAGEMENT Jörg-Peter Schulze
COMMUNICATIONS Anna Jäger
GRAPHIC DESIGN Juan Pablo García Sossa
SOUND ENGINEER Olivia Oyama
LIGHT Sanja Gergoric
STREAMING Boiling Head Media
Funding This project has been kindly supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues, the Goethe Institut and Deutschlandfunk Kultur.
Project Partners MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues and Deutschlandfunk Kultur
Thanks Over the last four years, we have worked to build up an archive of El-Dabh, which was made possible only by the immense generosity and knowledge shared by Halim El-Dabh, with continued support by Deborah El-Dabh.
This archive has been built paper by paper, sound upon sound, through intensive research and collaboration with those who worked closely with Halim El-Dabh, his friends and family, and various institutions. We would like to extend our warm thanks to: Habeeb El-Dabh, Dawn Carson, Ron Slabe, Grant Marquit, Magda Saleh, Cara Gilgenbach (Kent State University Libraries. Special Collections and Archives), Jan Senn and Melissa Olson (Kent State Magazine), Nick Patterson (Music Librarian at Columbia University), Seth Cluett (Columbia Computer Music Center), Oliver Tobin, Ellen Graff, and Peggy Lyman (Martha Graham Company), Alice Shields, Thom Holmes, George E. Lewis, James Vaughan, Hasan Hajuri, Tommy McCutchon, Colette Lucas (The MacDowell Colony), Janet L. Stanley (Smithsonian Institution), Jeff Ingram (Standing Rock Cultural Arts), Robin the Fog (BBC Radio 4), Jeff St. Clair (WKSU), Nasri Zacharia and B. Lorenzo Roaché (Harlem International Film Festival (Hi)) and the archives of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Archives, Smithsonian Institute and Howard University Archives.
A SPECIAL THANK YOU to Deborah El-Dabh and to everyone who has supported us in the making of this exhibition and keeping Halim El-Dabh’s legacy and memory alive.
