For a country that has imported performing arts events almost year-round, the arts festival organizer should perhaps look, much further and harder, for a kind of programme that would unlikely be presented outside such a privileged stage as a festival, even though that may translate as less excitement and lower ticket sales.  

Such is probably the case for the Asian premiere of “Sonos ‘E Memoria: In the Memory of Sardinia” at the Singapore Arts Festival. During the first part of this one-of-a-kind concert, the audience listened to original music compositions by Paolo Fresu, who experimented here in blending and bridging traditional Sardinian music and contemporary jazz, his favorite genre and probably one of the freest forms of music.

As they were performed live and energetically by seven veteran musicians on trumpet, flugelhorn, bass, mandola, bandaneon, violoncello, percussion, and a rare Sardinian woodwind instrument with three pipes called launeddas, in addition to a quartet of choruses, our ears were leading our minds to mostly unfamiliar yet generally fascinating territories.

Then, our eyes came into active operation when the black and white film, an edited collage of documentary footages shot in Sardinia from 1920s to 1950s, started to be projected on the screen above the musicians. The film, the editing of which prioritized thematic lines over chronology, showed Sardinian cycle of daily life, from housework, work in the fields, mines, and sea, to rituals and festivities of horse races and folk dances. It was here that we experienced the happy marriage of music and film as well as the people of the past and the arts of the present.

The final close-up image of two smiling women in traditional headdress stayed until the last note of music and lingered on in our memory long after the curtain. Although we still do not know who they were, and whether they were friends or sisters, we have already been acquainted with their ways of life and living.

Apart from two evenings of “Memoria”, the festival organizer, in late afternoon at the same venue, also held as a supplementary programme a free-admission screening of documentary film “Passaggi di Tempo” (“Passages of Time”), featuring interviews with the film and music artists of “Memoria” and showing the long process of how they put together this unique interdisciplinary and intercultural performance.

It was here that the audience heard film director Gianfranco Cabiddu, who came across these footages while conducting research at the Historical Archive of the Luce Institute 15 years ago and came up with the original idea for this project, intriguingly say that even though the people we watched on these footages were now dead, the music that accompanied them must be alive.

For many audiences who attended both, this writer included, it was a consummate experience that aesthetically transported us to the vibrant past of this Southwestern Italy island and a solid example of how to preserve traditional arts—not for the sake of history though, but for today and tomorrow.

written by Pawit Mahasarinand

pubished in The Nation on Wednesday, July 30, 2008

photo by Paolo Soriani , courtesy of National Arts Council