As part of the exhibition ‘32: The Rescore (curated by Bhavisha Panchia), this project in two parts was presented at the Sharjah Art Foundation between September 2019 and January 2020. The entails two pieces: About the Time We Didn’t Wait (2-channel video piece) and Conversational Score: Choreography for Imaginary Dār # 1 (printed music/choreographic score).
On About the Time We Didn’t Wait (2-channel video):
1932 was the year the First Congress of Arab Music took place, but it was also the year that oil was discovered in Bahrain. Set against these two events, a digitally rendered figure from a future-past addresses his fellow pearl-diving musicians in a monologue to describe their position as musicians working in the Gulf region. Take a speculative approach to addressing the role of folk musics within and outside of Bahrain, the work highlights the exclusion of the Gulf region from the 1932 Congress, and in so doing, offers a counter-narrative in which the pearl divers of Bahrain lay claim to the sovereignty of their musical traditions despite exogenous economic and cultural forces.
On Conversational Score: Choreography for Imaginary Dār # 1 (printed music/choreographic score):
Set as a counterpoint to About the Time We Didn’t Wait, this combined music and choreography score highlights the general absence of the body from ethnomusicological discourse on music in the Gulf region. Such absences not only puncture the rituals from which some folk music practices are derived, but they also erase the very communities celebrating such practices. To further highlight the absence of the body from musical scores, including those created for the 1932 Congress of Arab Music, this score suggests both a music and a movement the border on the supernatural. The supernatural element alludes to the genesis of musical forms in the Gulf, especially the story renowned in Bahrain of how three pearl divers accidentally learned Fijiri music from djinn as part of a deal to save their lives. When one follows the actions suggested in the score, the corporeal erasures within traditional scores are gesturally undone. The score offers an agency to those practicing folk music in the Gulf and liberates the notion of the dār.
