Music Diversity at NYUAD

After a long time, I attended a NYU Abu Dhabi music event tonight. These have always been "different", and this one was, well, no different.

In this special performance, five specialist musicians from very diverse schools and cultures shared the stage: (left to right) American-based Peruvian computer musician Jaime Oliver, Ghanian traditional percussionist Gideon Alorwoyie, Indian traditional instrumental and vocal percussionist Akshay Anantapadmanabhan, British saxophonist Barak Schmool, and French computer-assisted composer/mixer Gérard Assayag. 

Each performed solos -- occasionally leading collaboration acts -- in turn, before a closing performance as an eclectic quintet.

As someone who works with computers, I was fascinated at a technical level by Mr Oliver's setup, which created electronic sounds based on the movements and shapes he made with his hands. Mr Anantapadmanabhan's traditional Indian percussion (top) was also very impressive, especially his vocal percussion.

And being both a jazz fan and a general performing arts fan, I thoroughly enjoyed the moves and chords in Mr School's act (bottom), in which he played saxophone to a backing track while synchronized video slides of him casually dancing to elements of the track were projected overhead.

Whatever the individual tastes for their styles of music, though, I understood, from overheard reviews on the way out, that many fellow attendees thought the final collaborative quintet performance was amazing -- an assessment with which I heartily agreed.

Corals and Crochet at NYUAD

To provide some context to its two-month-long exhibition of "crochet coral", beginning this week, NYU Abu Dhabi is hosting two panel discussions on crochet art, one of which I attended.

Each of the three crochet artists in the panel introduced their very different approaches to crocheting.

Shauna Richardson (left), spoke about her "crochetdermy" of animal forms with dense "skins" of crochet, including some inspired by public figures, and large outdoor projects like the three over-sized lions of Lionheart. As she confirmed, she does them in aggressive poses and natural colors, in order to avoid the toy look.

Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam's (center) presentation drew many amused reactions from the audience, since her contrasting use of bright colors and playful shapes in huge, heavy-duty, netting-type crochet installations made them popular as jungle gyms for kids (and some adults), as many of her pictures showed. These and some of her less physically interactive works additionally employed interesting use of layering, as well as deliberate anchoring and weighting for dramatic surface contortion.

Finally, Christine Wertheim (right) began her segment with a fascination comparison of crochet to the ferrite core memory boards used in computers nearly half a century ago, pointing out that contemporary women's handicraft skills made them naturals when it came to weaving core memory boards, and supporting her opening statement that "crochet is a digital technology". She is also a co-founder of the Institute for Figuring and its Crochet Coral Reef project, assembling brightly colored, organic-looking hyperbolic crochet surfaces that bunch up into forms that resemble corals. She described how the artists' allowing variation in the crochet "formula" resulted in diversity akin to that found in nature due to genetic mutations, and how they preserved their plastic waste for years to weave them into the project's "toxic reefs".

After the event, I had a look around the reef exhibition. You had to go up close to see the use of various waste materials -- such as plastic piping, cable ties, and bags -- among the brightly-colored yarn coral bunches, balls and stalks, and even some full-blown crochet marine fauna. There was much variation in size and shape as well, and some also included beads and other effects. A beautiful exhibition, and worth checking out on the Saadiyat campus before it closes on December 4th.

NYUAD Saadiyat Campus and Hamama screening

One of the first events of the NYUAD public programs season was a screening of the Emirati documentary film Hamama. I rarely pass up opportunities to watch a nice local film, so I signed up. Also, it would be a good opportunity to check out NYUAD's new campus on Saadiyat Island, to which its public events have been moved from various locations around Abu Dhabi city, and which also happens to be more conveniently located for me.

The campus is impressive: large, fitted well, decorated subtly and interesting architecturally, with broad paths, big courtyards, and spacious interiors. There is still some work going on in the area surrounding, but the inside seems about completed.

The film was introduced by a faculty member (top left) and screened (right) in a conference center auditorium, followed by Q&A with director/producer Nujoom al Ghanem and writer/researcher Khalid al Budoor (bottom left). While I think the POV shots detracted from the documentary style followed otherwise in the film (I'm sure blindness could have been conveyed in other ways, or established in a single fade shot), and some of the setups looked a little implausible (shayla on head with bare belly?), the film was overall a pleasant watch, with sharp cinematography, some interesting characters, a bit of humor, and good lighting, transitions and sound.

Dark matter explored at NYUAD

Dark matter is a physics concept that's as complicated as it is fascinating. Fortunately, NYU Abu Dhabi brought it NYU cosmology/astrophysics researcher, Professor Glennys Farrar, to explain it to us, with the added bonus of her infectious enthusiasm. In the course of the public talk, she expounded the background physics and presented the astrophysicist's case for dark matter's existence, as well as what she considers an "equally exciting" alternative: that current theories of physics are themselves in need of modification.

Piquing interest with a really cool video of dark matter in cosmic collisions way out in the Bullet Cluster (almost like a ballistics video, except over billions of years instead of fractions of seconds), she spoke about the challenges in detecting, as well as theoretically describing and modeling dark matter; she mentioned the Large Hadron Collider in this regard. She also spoke about contemporary hypotheses for explaining dark matter, such as the WIMPs and the H-dibaryon, and touched upon both dark energy and baryon asymmetry (topics deserving separate talks, it would seem).

NYUAD introduces FIND cultural platform for artists and scholars

If you are interested in UAE life beyond working and partying, NYU Abu Dhabi's cultural dialogue and mapping platform FIND might interest you. I attended the public event at which the university introduced the initiative and hosted UAEU professor Yasser Elsheshtawy and Cuadro Gallery director Roberto Lopardo to discuss their work as fellows.

Yasser Elsheshtawy (L) and Roberto Lopardo (R)

The speakers talked about their projects for mapping Abu Dhabi. Dr Elsheshtawy's academic approach focused on the hidden-in-plain-sight world within the "super-blocks" of the city, observing and analyzing the human dynamics and public culture of "interstitial spaces", such as the bustling "square with a tree" in the middle of a block between Hamdan and Electra. Lopardo, on the other hand, extended his 24-hour picture-a-minute trek modus operandi, successfully executed in a number of other major cities (including Dubai, the result of which I remember seeing at Cuadro a long time ago), to 20 second video clips, and played a few of those clips for discussion. The third fellow, Reem Falaknaz, was unable to make it to the talk; too bad, as she was studying the mountain communities in the Northern Emirates, and would have added a rural perspective to what was otherwise an interesting, but very urban-set discussion.

Judit Frigyesi on The Paradox of Classical Music

One of the best things about NYUAD's public programs is their inclusion of theater and music. This weekend, we had Judit Frigyesi, a professor of music at Bar Ilan University, visiting to talk about the "paradox" of (Western) Classical Music.

I was not quite expecting it, but there was a baby grand on the stage, which she used to demonstrate various tones, flows and "cliches" that are used to elicit abstract images in the mind of the listener, and dissect musical pieces into their component images. She described classical music as storytelling, albeit one not limited by text, and how this kind of storytelling is not encouraged by today's culture.

A lot of interesting topics were brought up during the Q&A, including composers' perceptions of the images in their own music, the role of silence in classical music performances, and the role of culture and context in how different kinds of classical music are received.

Jorge Flores on The World of Port Cities

European University Institute history professor and Vasco da Gama chair Jorge Flores visited Abu Dhabi this week to deliver one of NYUAD's public lectures. It was more of a reading, as he read from one of his texts, occasionally stopping to briefly comment or contextualize. The topic, titled "Between Hormuz and Malacca, circa 1600: The World of Port-Cities", was the major ports of the Indian Ocean - specifically Portuguese-held or -frequented ones - in the 1600s or thereabouts.

Flores began by talking about the perception of the era itself; noting that associating it with any one nation or faith was not appropriate, he emphasized the diversity of peoples plying the trade routes around the ocean. He spoke of the role of coffee and spices in driving the trade, and provided examples of cultural cross-fertilization, such as sacred cows and paan-chewing in Hormuz, and the fad of Persian-influenced attire taken up by the Siamese king (minus the turban).

We were treated to a lot of slides of old maps, engravings and illustrations, depicting the layouts of and lives in the old port cities. Some of these included visual poetry, the attempts of contemporary artists to portray the strange and novel things they saw to their people back home.

Flores spoke of the Portuguese arc of Hormuz, Goa and Malacca being clipped by the former's fall to the Anglo-Safavid alliance, and the latter's fall to Dutch-Johor alliance. The Inquisition among Portuguese communities in the Indian ocean was relatively subdued, due to local sensitivities. Still, there were (often valid) concerns back in the homeland that living abroad for long periods while exposed to foreign ways would change the merchants and those they took with them.

Eventually, the competition among the various port cities vying for the traders' patronage got so intense that a sort of meritocracy emerged, wherein the talented could find employment in even high places regardless of race or creed. Portuguese buccaneers even participated in the regional piracy scene. Their maritime prowess (and dependency) was so well-known that, as Flores described, they were thought of as being practically a nation of born sailors. As far as other Asians farther east were concerned, they were, variously, Malaccans, Indians or even "white Bengalis" - a testament to their integration into the trading culture around the Indian ocean.

Anna Deavere-Smith at NYU-AD

Anna Deavere-Smith is not only an accomplished actress and playwright, she also happens to teach at NYU. And while I was expecting only a talk about her work and influences (which we did get at the NYU-AD event), I was pleasantly surprised with more than half-an-hour of her performing her signature, pioneering style of "documentary theatre" live for all of us. Wow ... just wow. All of it was amazing, but my favorites were the impressions of the New Orleans doctor from her recent vignette series on healthcare, and the one of the imam from the series about grace. Not only were her impressions of very diverse characters supremely convincing, the material being acted out was poignant. So not to be missed!