Friday, December 17th, Al-Bustan presented Musings and Music: Al-Bustan’s Homey Holiday Concert which streamed virtually at 7 PM EST. You could url up with your family to enjoy our screening of a dabke performance, accomplished writers presenting their work, and beautiful interludes by a professional violist.
Meet the performers:
Ahmad Almallah holds a Ph.D in Classical Arabic Poetry from Indiana University Bloomington. He is currently a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, working on writing a book on Arabic love poetry and the ghazal. He has found inspiration in Philadelphia to work on writing poetry and has been involved with Al-Bustan in the past such as working on our project “Words Adorned: Andalusian Poetry and Music.”
Noam Keim is a trans Jewish Arab who grew up working-class in France after their family emigrated there from Israel. They spend their days working to heal the trauma of prisons with people impacted by the legal system. They are a transformative justice practitioner, a student of somatic, a medicine maker, and they spend most of their time thinking about the in-betweens and interconnectedness of it all.
Natacha Yazbek, Ph.D., is the Associate Director of the Center on Digital culture and Society and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. A multimedia journalist and former foreign correspondent, her research focuses on race, rights, an invisible structures of discrimination that have survived the digital transition in journalism, the impact of digitization on war, protest and their surrounding narratives and the interplay between social media platforms, trauma, and memory. Her literary nonfiction work and photography have been published by Penguin, Polity, Sage and Getty Images. She is most recently the author of “Spin,” featured in the first anthology of essays by Arab women reporting from the Arab world.
Al-Baydar Dabka USA is Palestinian-American dabka troupe based in New Jersey. Al-Baydar recently was commissioned by Al-Bustan to perform for our Solidarity with Palestine Day event that took place last month.
Violist, Hannah Rose Nicholas is dedicated to music as a means for building relationships with other cultures. Currently she plays in the New World Symphony in Miami under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, and was recently appointed Principal Viola of the Central City Opera Orchestra in Colorado. She is inspired and influenced by the music, literature, and art from the Middle East and Jewish culture. She regularly collaborates with Iranian composer Sahba Aminikia, working together to explore ways of integrating contemporary Middle Eastern poetry into the music through speaking, recorded narration, and the character of music.
