Rima Khcheich, Rabih Mroué, Tony Overwater

With: Rima Khcheich (vocals), Rabih Mroué (flute), Tony Overwater (double bass) and Tarek El Ariss (reading poems).

The Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain and the Festival d'Automne à Paris present this programme in co-realisation.

The Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué duo presents two “non-academic conferences” and a concert-performance in collaboration with Rima Khcheich. Rabih Mroué makes frequent use of the former concept in order to create presentations which adopt the various mechanisms of the conference format whilst opening them up to the various possibilities of performance. In doing so, the duo plays upon the ambiguity which is inherent in this form of subversion. Added to this, for the first time, is an artistic proposition featuring poems set to music.

N'importe où (2007) pays homage to the female poet Etel Adnan as well as the male poet Abbas Beydoun, two prominent Lebanese literary figures. Rima Khcheich sings their poems in the classical Arabic musical vein, while Rabih Mroué on flute and Tony Overwater on double bass summon up a hybrid counterpoint tinged with pop and jazz.

Biographies

Rima Khcheich is a Lebanese singer and well renowned for having given its rebirth to the Andalusian form Muwashah, as well as to the traditional Arabic repertoire of the 19^th and 20^th Century that she both teaches and explores. Rima Khcheich started her singing career at the age of eight and at the same time she joined the Beirut Oriental Group for Arabic Music as the soloist of the band. And in 1995 she started her own projects with concerts in Lebanon, Europe and the Arab countries by presenting the most difficult repertoire of Arabic vocal music in contemporary styles and arrangements. Her album Hawa received the Arab Creativity Award of the year 2014.

Rabih Mroué was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1967 and currently lives in Berlin. Actor, director, visual artist and playwright, he has written and directed several plays, including Who’s afraid of representation (2005), How Nancy wished that everything was an April fool’s joke (2007), Photo-Romance (2009), 33 rpm and a few seconds (2012), So little time (2016), Borborygmus (2019), Sunny Sunday (2020) and Hartaqāt (2023) in collaboration with Lina Majdalanie. His work, at the crossroads of theater, performance and visual arts, blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, using videos, photographs and historical documents to challenge the hegemony of archives. He is also a contributing editor to The Drama Review (New York) and is co-founder of the Beirut Art Center (BAC). Rabih Mroué was also a member of the International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures, Freie Universitat in Berlin in 2013-2014. Then, from 2015 to 2019, he was a director at the Münchner Kammerspiele in Germany. His creations have been presented in many countries, notably at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, at the MoMA in New York and at the Center Pompidou in Paris.

Tony Overwater is an award winning bass player whose sound and unique way of playing have established him as a key player in the European music world. He is a remarkable solo performer and leader of his own projects but also a collaborative and attentive sideman. He is well known for his pioneering work in Arab music. He has developed a unique new playing style on the acoustic bass which allows him to play the microtonality of the Arab scales. He has been studying the maqams (scales), rhythms and songs of classical Arab music. He recorded several albums with different groups of musicians and eventually became the musical director of Rima Khcheich’s ensemble. Regularly Rima Khcheich and Tony Overwater play duo concerts in which they perform classical Arab music in muwashah style in which the acoustic bass replaces the Oud. This has never been done before and is highly successful at festivals around the world.