An audio-visual performance (premiered April 2002, Strange fruit, Beirut)
Using 2 CD players, an audio mixer, 2 VCRs, a video mixer, a live mike, a plethora of pedals and a live camera and projector, Khan mixes the music he has created out of the intersection between the tabla and electronica to the video loops shot and edited to accompany that music. Connecting the music to a library of video images that arise out of an imagistic engagement with the city and mixing this with directed, repeated statements transforms the performance into an invitation to ponder upon the relation the body politic holds to itself. This is an attempt at producing a cultural practice that is popular, exciting, challenging, liberating, questioning and dangerous.
tabla dubb is an attempt at fashioning a public media that uses a foundational element in popular egyptian musical culture (the tabla), within the context of a performance based on three media: music, video, and the direct statement, to create a new cultural practice where the politic of shared co-habitation in a city where power is contested on a daily basis is investigated in a concise and concentrated form. Refusing to engage in the reductionist discussions around the “traditional and contemporary” imposed by the orientalizing discourses of the dominant institution, tabla dubb attempts to sidestep the insecurities of having to constantly define your identity that is continuously promoted by official culture.
tabla dubb has already been performed at “Strange Fruit” in Beirut, a cinema transformed into a club and is currently scheduled for several performances on the streets of cairo as well as youth centers this summer and in various international festivals next year. tabla dubb should be performed in public spaces.
1. dub dub [ mp3 ]
2. mysticism dubb [ mp3 ]
3. Sha’abeya [ mp3 ]
