FULL Muadschizat al Jamal or Das Kamelwunder & Burka Baazi (Banlaky) Festival alf laila wa laila 6 Vienna 2011 sirene Operntheater

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: Muadschizat al Jamal or Das Kamelwunder & Burka Baazi  
• Composer: Banlaky Akos   
• Libretto: Kristine Tornquist    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
• Venue & Opera Company: Expedithalle der ehemaligen Ankerbrotfabrik Wien, Vienna, Austria  
• Recorded: August 2011
• Type: Staged Opera Live
• Singers: N/A
• Conductor: François-Pierre Descamps  
• Orchestra: PHACE / CONTEMPORARY MUSIC  
• Stage Director: Kristine Tornquist  
• Stage Designer: Jakob Scheid  
• Costume Designer: Markus Kuscher  
• Lighting Designer: Edgar Aichinger  

Information about the Recording

• Published by: sirene  
• Date Published: 2012  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
• Subtitles: nosubs  
• Video Recording from: YouTube     FULL VIDEO
•  

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

BURKA BAAZI (DAS BURKA-SPIEL) البرقع بازي
Musik. Akos Banlaky https://www.sirene.at/site/assets/fil…
Konzept. Kristine Tornquist

00:00 Burka Baazi
07:38 Applaus

Most of the time, what is particularly interesting is hidden. The gold reserves in the safe. The scandals in secret files. The nakedness in clothes. A hundred years ago in Europe, too, rural women hid their hair under headscarves and men decently covered their heads with hats. 1200 years ago in the caliphate only elegant women wore veils as a privilege, simple women remained unveiled. The veil comes and goes like all other fashions, but for religious, cultural or political power it always draws the line between the public and the intimacy on the body. The burqa – as just a variant of the full body veil in the Middle East – leaves women only hands and feet as public body parts, everything else is obliterated and locked into intimacy, reduced to the family and sexual function. According to this criterion, one would have to attest an almost desperate lack of interest in the physical world in the western world, whereas the Afghan Taliban are perverse lasciviousness, since to them the female body appears so provocatively interesting that it has to be hidden up to the nose and made taboo. A thing as closed, worthy of protection and secret as the female body in Afghanistan arouses tremendous curiosity and attraction. Because what precious miracle is hidden under the blue plastic? The Afghan women’s band “Burka” gives an answer with gallows humor

MUADSCHIZAT AL JAMAL (DAS KAMELWUNDER) عجب الجمل

Orient and ornament are, it seems to me, related in nature. The static-monolithic structures of the region between Morocco and China, which offer little room for the fundamental development of society or of the individual, correspond to an art where the human being is not a questioning-searching subject, but an eternal archetype of the fable, hero of adventures, from which it emerges unchanged; an art that – whether Moorish buildings or Chinese opera, Egyptian maqam or Balinese dance – fascinates us with the dialectic of sensuality and abstraction, opulence and monotony. But what if the person, or more precisely: the woman – because in the patriarchally governed societies that are organized according to clear religious rules, the woman is always the problem, the question, the missionance, the minor in the hard major of the war trumpets – rebels against her assigned role of being merely a veiled decoration when it emerges from its shadowiness, shows its human limbs and frees itself in the ecstasy of dance, of revolution? A question that in some societies in the region may well be answered today. And what can the music do there … It accompanies this self-development carefully and reverently, with monotonous, amorphous polyphony, a pulsating network of voices that condenses and intensifies, only to break the hard chord of the law.

The second pantomime is completely different. The main character is an animal: innocent and mysterious, one with itself – even if this oneness is sometimes painfully and adventurously tested – unveiled, therefore absolutely erotic, free from subject and gender; naive hero of a fairy tale, whose plot he does not counterpoint with any psychology: an answer where no question has been asked: in short, it is a Sonatina in F major. AKOS BANLAKY