Here is an excerpt of a blog from singer and flautist Sarah Hayes for Highlight Arts on a project with Lahore singer Sara Kazmi.
I spent a truly immersive week with Highlight Arts in May. While poets from Glasgow and Lahore workshopped new ‘transcreations’ of each other’s work, singer Sara Kazmi and I were in the room above, busily putting together a musical collaboration to feature alongside their readings. It was a completely new challenge for us both to make a cross-genre, cross-cultural collaboration of this kind. And in three and a half days!
Sara and I quickly found a number of connections between our respective folk traditions. Some concerned common features of both, such as storytelling, repetition, and music for dancing. Others related thematically (the textile industry in Glasgow and Lahore, bird and animal imagery illustrating wider subjects). We brought together music with a tradition or function (a pipe march to be played at the end of the day, and a song to bring rain), contrasted songs and poetry from female and male perspectives, and explored their use of metaphor (spinning wheels and anthropomorphised alcohol).
Read the rest of the blog here.
Download Sarah’s ‘When I First Came To Caledonia” to play on your radio show.
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