Oh How I love Oud

Big news here in Jerusalem! This weekend marked the beginning of the annual international festival of the oud! (pronounced ood)

The oud (according to Wikipedia) is a pear-shaped, stringed instrument similar to a lute used in traditional Middle Eastern music and East African music.

There are events throughout the next two weeks, all featuring the oud in some form or another. On Saturday night, I attended an event entitled 'Sufi Song and Dance.' It was performed at a small, intimate venue (actually the same one as the Avishai Cohen concert I attended a few weeks ago). There were only two performers: a man singing in Arabic and playing the oud, and a female dancer. The dance was a mix of modern, flamenco and sufi dance, and the dancer was truly incredible. Her body moved in ways I didn't think possible. The story seemed to be a sort of typical love saga, filled with a variety of intense passion, some anger and uncertainty etc., although the fact that all the words were in Arabic made it a bit difficult to actually follow.

One point of interest - on the one hand, this seemed to be a modernized version of a more traditional art form. The dance included some distinctly modern elements and I've heard from a number of people that the dancers in traditional sufi dancing (at least in public) are usually men, where as here it was a woman. However, I actually found this fact - that the dancer was a woman and the musician a man - to feel a bit anti-modern, or at least anti-feminist. In this scenario, the woman was completely lacking a voice. She was only there to be looked upon, whereas all of the speaking and the music came from the male. Even during the rare lines when the dancer actually sang along with the singer, her voice was barely audible, as his microphoned voice and oud overpowered her. I could be over-analyzing here, and it's totally possible that the roles taken were merely coincidental, but it stuck out in my mind anyway.

Overall, not the most amazing night of my life, but certainly an interesting performance, and a good reminder that we can all use a little more oud in our lives.