Creative Collaboration

Our story begins five years ago when Ulfah Arts founded with one driving force- an aspiration to develop Ulfah in to an organisation which can produce something as artistically rich as Hakawatiyyah – The Storyteller. But our ambition was not to just produce an artistic product , it was to produce an artistic product developed by everyday muslim women, a benchmark to empower Muslim women through music.

Over the years Ulfah Arts has tasseled with prejudice and ignorance to make music and other arts forms more accessible to muslim women. In our quest we have met supporters who have gone out of their way in helping us develop an artistically rich future for all Muslim women. British Council has been one such supporter.

Thanks to British Council and their Creative Collaborations project , we were able to connect with the artistic team of the famous Dam Music Festival in Kosovo and thus began to build our partnership in March 2009. After visiting each others work and learning more about each other we both (Ulfah Arts and Dam Festival) decided that we had enough common ground to realise a collaboration. We formulated the first ideas for this work during a visit by Dam Festival Director Dardan Selimaj to the UK in May 2009 . We knew we came from two different worlds and bringing them together not only presented many challenges but also created small cordon around the creative flexibility we had due to geographical fraction between the two artistic teams in UK and Kosovo.

The work started early January 2010 with the tour of five UK cities by the storyteller, Alia Al Zougbi and the Kosovon composers supported by Cambridge based interfaith scholar and pianist, Rosalind Parker and lead by Naz Koser. We met around 20 – 25 women in each city, from all walks of life, diverse cultures upbringing, race, academic levels, we were mostly received with open arms, but sometimes a hint of suspicion around our motives of this project. Music in Islam is still as controversial today than it has ever been for women. So bringing religion and music together head on, aroused curiosity in some and some stayed away. However, once the workshop started and the storyteller began her stories with musicians in the background, their perspective changed , a slight gust of creativity opened up their closed arms, they shared their stories like they have never shared before, some even saying that they would not hear stories without music.

The women brought stories from Qur'an and Hadith and we all learnt so much about how these stories are used today in 21st century. Women talked about the lack of recognition from men to being queens of their homes, to role models such as Margaret Thatcher and how the epic stories give confidence to the business women of today.

Our commissioned storyteller from UK Alia and three Kosovan composers began work with Alia sending through three epic stories that the women had narrated and chosen as the core of the concert script.

Thus began the composition of the commissioned new music by the Kosovon composers, deadline , six weeks.

The UK team which included the storyteller Alia Al Zougbi arrived for the world premiere of the concert at the DAM Festival in Kosovo on 28th March 2010 and not having heard the music, were expecting baptism through fire! Once all the artists got together and organized themselves we started to hear the music and stories and knew we had created something truly special. The concert premiered , as scheduled in Kosovo on 31st March 2010, thankfully the hard work by the entire creative team paid off and the production was applauded by the audience for it's musical genius and artistic ingenuity. So we turned our sights to the UK and with further ambition we set work straight away. In the spirit of Rumi we have taken inspiration from all in UK and Republic of Kosovo and present for the first time , a concert which openly embraces two worlds. We don’t have the language to describe the experience yet, and look forward to reactions across the world but leave you with a few words from Rumi in anticipation.

Oh heart, sit with someone
who knows the heart;
Go under the tree
which has fresh blossoms

- Rumi

Ulfah Arts UK and Dam Festival Kosovo