Wael Shawky has made his name reinterpreting seminal texts, in particular in Marseille in 2013 with his film trilogy inspired by Amin Maalouf’s story Cabaret crusades. He now presents his first stage piece at the Festival. In a set made up of hundreds of tiny objects representing the cities of Aleppo, Baghdad and Istanbul, Wael Shawky invites singers of fidjeri, the traditional music of Persian Gulf pearl fishers, to revisit the Song of Roland. Based on this eleventh-century text recounting an episode of Charlemagne’s battle against the Saracens, Wael Shawky reverses the West’s often stereotyped attitude to the East, intertwining myth, history, literature, and storytelling techniques borrowed from several different cultures.
Performance presented in co-realisation with the Mucem and in collaboration with Kampnagel, Hamburg and Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris
Performance within the "Sommet des Deux Rives"
