Arabesques

[vimeo 45000586 w=500 h=375]

Arabesques: “La Rosa,” Rocío Màrquez and Christian Boissel, International Sacred Music Festival, Fez, Morocco, June 2012 from Theresa Whitehill on Vimeo.

I am merely a member of the audience, attending the music festival, using my iPhone to capture a moment in my life that I have been waiting for since I was 19 (now 54) when I traveled to Granada, Spain, and first understood the importance of Federico García Lorca, and became myself a poet. He wrote a number of poems in homage to the Andalusian Moorish poets, and this video is an homage in return. Rocío Màrquez and Christian Boissel put his poetry to music and perform for an international audience in Fez, Morocco, a center of scholarship and heartland to the Sufi tradition of the Muslim religion. A lifetime of understanding came together…

In this video, they are interpreting the poem, “La Rosa” from García Lorca’s Divan del Tamarit, “Divan” being the Arabic for a literary collection, and “Tamarit” the area outside of Granada that was Lorca’s family home.