Three mahallahs (Turkish word for districts) are situated in the three corners of a village, each one far from the others. Each one has their own square, stores, tombs, and festivals. And each of them naturally believes their own are the best, ensuring that the rest of the world is aware of this… In a dystopian village, a female singer accompanied by video projections and otherworldly or completely tangible sounds, is called to explore three communities, inside a mosque. Songs and images come together to clash, fight, and leave their pieces behind. The singer collects all that is left to create a new, harmonized, modern space, that nobody knows whether it will stand the test of time or not. In the end, are these mahallahs as different as they thought they were?
The audiovisual performance The Trail of Tears is based on a real historical event. In 1830, the U.S. government ordered the five remaining Native American tribes living east of the Mississippi River, known as the civilized tribes, to take all their belongings and relocate from their ancestral lands. The forced journey of the Indians towards the mainland in winter, which passed down in history as “the trail of tears”, carried within it many dangers. Many Indians lost their lives on the way to their new homeland. The Trail of Tears is one of the last chapters of the extensive European advance in America, resulting in the demise of the native populations’ civilizations. The performance will use excerpts from Erich Scheurmann’s book The Papalagi, original texts, and evidence from historical sources.
*Featured in the performance will be Iannis Xenakis’ piece Rebonds B for solo percussion, Lefteris Papadimitriou’s musical composition Variations for Piano, and Vasilis Kountouris’ (Studio 19) sound composition Beats & Pieces.
*We would like to thank Proti Yli Publications for kindly providing the excerpts from the book “The Papalagi” by Erich Scheurmann.
The new piece by Yannis Belonis Journey Across the Balkans for Symphony Orchestra, Mixed Choir, and Narrator focuses on the conflict that influenced the cultural dynamics among the Balkan peoples: while chauvinism of nation-states “enforced” the enhancement of national identities, the frequent mixing of populations along with numerous, consecutive border shifts often led to a fusion of traditions and deep intercultural interactions. Therefore, musical cultures that developed in Southeastern Europe, with their distinct differences and similarities, have created a particularly interesting and colourful musical mosaic that keeps evolving through modern sounds, illuminating the complex and often unexplored aspects of the cultural fermentations that have occurred within the Balkan peninsula throughout the centuries.
The music of all the Balkan peoples was processed uniformly to create a performance involving a symphony orchestra, mixed choir, and a narrator. The latter, through the reading of Harris Sarris’ well-documented texts, will shed light on the conflicting and interconnected cultural identities of the people in the region. The performance’s musical journey begins in Greece and returns to its starting point, after traveling through all the states of the Balkan Peninsula – Bulgaria, Turkey, Albania, Serbia, North Macedonia, Romania, Montenegro, Croatia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.