Calling it a ‚poem‘ displays my intention of the performance being an encoded experience rather, than a concert. A performance, which is not necessarily directly and consciously accessible, but rather forms a steady set of impressions, following an inner pulse and rhythm, from which each participant in the audience can derive their own unique and specific meaning. The emphasis being on multi-sensory intake on predominantly emotional level of perception. An impression hopefully strong enough to be unescapable: an experience, reaching out beyond reason and beyond the borders of an experiencing self. A cautiously packaged ‚life lived’. It aims to be an experience shared through art. For this I have used a density of elements interlocking with each other, creating a simultaneous story-telling on different layers of the performance: aiming at solving certain aspects of my own, oftentimes conflicting, performance history, while also recounting my lived biographic experiences and growth through the social participation the Oud facilitated and paved for me. It is a highly personal, biographic and subjective work, I will still work on refining with time.
Inspired by specific personalities I have encountered during my first year of the Masters program and performative experiences I was enacouraged to make, I have opened my work to the multilayered world, my perceptions and experiences in it, I often find difficult to express through one art form alone. For many years I felt conflicted about the fact, that different artworks inevitably kept seeking into my ‚concerts‘, creating a sense of failure at being a ‚musician only‘. I played music on different type of stages throughout my life: in orchestra, in chamber settings, solo, acoustic, amplified, in different rooms, spaces and contexts and the ones I felt most at home or unified with, were not necessarily traditional type of music stages.
I have always used different art forms to express myself, but despite having a history of studying visual art at some point in my life, and being hired professionally in some of them consistently, those aspects of my creativity mostly stayed hidden and secluded to privacy, unless in the moments I could not avoid some of them contributing to a couple of my mostly musical performances. One important aim of ‚In-between‘ is the attempt to console and consolidate those seemingly contradictory tendencies of my creative output, embracing the possibly most chaotic and diverse output I have allowed myself to create to date. It is an experimentation with an extreme richness of texture, multi-disciplinary elements, for the sake of understanding, which aspects can lead to which effect, contain what emotional value and bare the chance of what type of communication (being that I understand art as one possible form for human communication).
Rather than ‚homoeopathically‘ adding other elements to ‚spice up‘ a music concert, I wanted to give each one an equal place of existing along each other, letting them interact and affect each other, being curious rather, than dismissive, about what they can bring out when interacting and potentiated. Just as experimenting with extremes in music dynamic, I wanted to experiment with extremes of multi-layered expression, to gain a better sense of it and be able to dose it in the future in a more conscious way. I understand the entire concept as ‚music‘ and ‚spacial literature‘, because of the fact of how important the rhythm and dynamic, or an inner flow, the colors and characters/moods were to me in the process of creation and the effect on the audience they through its physicality alone already might have.
I am a Polish immigrant to Germany, living in Sweden in the 21st century with a complex background and identity. It does not appeal to me, to simply 'reproduce', yet: this repertoire is so deeply entangled with my instrument and my Oud playing and practice. By staging this part of the repertoire and setting it into a personal context, suddenly it made all the sense to share it in this most authentic way and I was able to forgoe incorporating the cultural aspect of it, while performing it. I simply made the experience I have with it, the performance itself, bringing it to a meta-lvel. Or: re-contextualizing my relation with the music as the performance-context.
Integrating Memory and Biographic Elements - sharing the experiences I made, recounting my history with the Oud
Going on stage today playing some sort of tradition, which derived in the 'Golden Era of Arabic Music' in mid 20th century in Egypt and the Levant is an anachronistic act of music making, which combined with my cultural origins and background creates even more questions. I am not a cultural representative of a tradition, however deep I might come to embody it with time or as my teacher once said: "I am not a museum."
My motivation derives from being captured by and being curious about specific sounds and expressions. It is comparable with that of a love story: the encounter leaves me engaged and involved for the span of years, it shapes who I am becoming over a long amount of time, but it does not fully make me this, which I encountered, I do not 'become' it. My life simply grows and shifts with it and in return I am too, even if so slightly only, affecting and changing it myself. It is a story of a musical, cultural and emotional mutuality.
The Oud has not only existed within my life, but rather, paced my life and my experiences for me. Through it I have gained a privileged access, interacting with a whole culture, its people and their stories. Coincidally, not intentionally. By addressing and sharing the experiences I have made, the moments I lived through and briefly sketching out my journey with the Oud (in the form of short chronological memory scenery) I was able to avoid a cultural 'cross-dressing' I am often enough either accused of or praised for and which never is my intention.
I have mostly avoided performing so called 'traditional' repertoire in my own concerts.. For once, while not being a native to a language, I do not want to simply 'imitate', but also 'express' - which is a very striking challenge I am pursuing. I am not happy by merely 'playing' and presenting a piece of music, which you can simply look up on any plattform in its original sound.
