"Intermedial Indian Ocean" - a day of music, dance, poetry and more at Reichshof Bayreuth
Abstract
- Abstract
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On 13 November 2021, Prof. Dr. Ute Fendler and Prof. Dr. Clarissa Vierke invited the interested public to an exciting and eventful day dedicated to the Indian Ocean. Music, films, dances, photographs and poetry transported the audience to the East African region, whose artistic and medial forms of expression are often shaped by the beautiful landscape and maritime lifestyle in which they were created.
In the evening the event even saw the world premiere of filmmaker Harrikrisna Anenden's "Draupadi's veil".
This recording shows part of the event. The performances of musician Tao Ravao, dancer Luis Sala and a poetry performance of Abdilatif Abdalla and Clarissa Vierke.
People & roles
Origins & context
- Title
- "Intermedial Indian Ocean" - a day of music, dance, poetry and more at Reichshof Bayreuth
- Language
- English
- Date
- December 8, 2021
Identifiers & sources
Full text
- Transcript
- since yesterday or the day before yesterday we have had the idea of using texts and dance and poetry so you are very much part of an experiment today and i just want to say a bit i want to tell you a bit about the poetry um it's actually abdellatif abdullah and me and 11 other people whom you can see on the second slide yeah many other people we've been working on translating swahili poetry for the last six years and so we are a group of east african scholars others are based in in europe and the us and we have most of this poetry is actually from the beginning of the 19th century so it's among the earliest poetry we actually have from the east african coast it's attributed to a very important political figure one of the idi gumi he was a political leader on the island of lamu almost the border to somalia so it's an island in kenya now really at the margin of the nation state very close to to somalia and at his time he was not only well he was an elected political leader very powerful on the battlefield as a military leader as well because he defeated the much more powerful um well city state the neighboring city state of pata and before he did that um they actually exchanged lots of poetry in the field because that's quite common of the 18th and 19th century all political figures all important political leaders were also important poets in the swahili context or the other way around you could not become a political leader you could not become elected if you were not also a very prominent poet so later on then people decided because he's still very much part of people's memory people also remember lines attributed to him but already in the 19th century there was the idea these these songs the kind of poems they are going to get lost so people started to write them down and they used arabic script because that was the normal script before the colonial powers the british and the german actually introduced roman script so we have lots of different manuscripts from… Read the full text about 1,586 words
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