“In the footsteps of Rumi” at the Arabesques festival, Persian views – Libération

Kiya Tabassian and her group, the Constantinople ensemble, set the 13th century poet and mystic to music with Ghalia Benali.

It is not entirely by chance, a word inherited from Arabic, that the choice to honor the greatest Persian poet as an introduction to the Arabesques festival, which takes place from September 10 to 20 in Montpellier, is to be believed. At a time when we are trying to oppose fractured communities on the altar of religion, returning to Rûmî, apostle of a form of ecumenism, is the best way to protect ourselves from any form of inquisition. This is in any case one of the wishes stated by Kiya Tabassian, a native of Tehran and a resident of Montreal for a while. Having grown up with the author born more than eight centuries ago in Balkh (now Afghanistan) and having already visited some of his writings, he will have waited a long time before “to find an original idea, which puts into perspective the plurality of this poet philosopher”.

He found it in 2018 when he met the singer Ghalia Benali. “By her personality, she is the ideal person to sing Rumi in Arabic. Beyond the fact that she is an extraordinary singer, she is an artist in the full sense of the word, who lives her passion at every moment of her life, not without a grain of madness,” explains at the other end of the connection the creator of the Constantinople ensemble, the melting pot of a host of projects which since 2001 have been investing in medieval music to find material to create contemporary works.

The mystic’s fertile eloquence

So this is how he extracted from the Divân-e Shams-e Tabrizi one of the master thinker’s major works written in the h