“And the world came to Førde…”. It was in 1990 that Hilde Bjørkum created the Førde Festival or Førde Folk Music Festival, a small town of 12,000 inhabitants in western Norway.
See RFI VideosNorwegian postcard.
The theme of the 2022 edition: music in times of crisis. And these are 3 Ukrainian formations which open the edition with a palpable emotion: Marina Sadovska, Drevo & Dyvyna.
It is at the hotel bar that we meet Svitlana Metvedieva, one of the Ukrainian singers of the Dyvyna group. She has been living in Germany since March (the war). Not far away, Iranian singer Aida Nosrat is getting closer. Ukraine and Iran then unite their vocal cords. Impro. And interview.
Then we cross the Atine group before their concert. Atine is the unprecedented meeting of five musicians, Aïda Nosrat, Sogol Mirzaei, Christine Zayed, Marie-Suzanne de Loye and Saghar Khadem, gave birth to a corpus of rearranged Iranian songs, symbol of the heritage of their personal trajectories and rich in diversity: traditional Iranian, Arabic, flamenco, jazz and baroque music. The tar, the qanun, the voice, the viola da gamba and the percussions are brought together here to resonate the Persian poetry of the 19th century, but also unpublished compositions.
Then we meet with Sona Jobarteh by the river, at the Cardamom café in Forde. The Anglo-Gambian artist recounts her childhood in a family of griots, her determination to play the kora professionally, the academy which she created in Gambia in 2015. And the probable release of a new album 10 years later Fasiya…
Then we have Hallgrim Hansegård and the Sami musician and joik singer Torgeir Vasvik for the Leahkit project, a fascinating musical encounter between the founder of the dance company Frikar and the Sami world (see video by RFI Vidéos Leahkit). Torgeir, grandson of healers, comes from the far north of Norway. He lives in Oslo. Its singing, its practices are reminiscent of Siberian shamanism / animist vision of the world, where everything is connected, everything is alive. All the choices we make have consequences. For his part, Hallgrim is in constant search of everything that makes the history of Norwegian dance. He spent a few months in a monastery in the mountains of Wudang in China for a more interior approach to dance.
And since the artists dialogue with the invisible, it is only natural that we joined the singer, dancer and Haitian voodoo priest Erol Josue (see video of RFI Videos Leahkit + Erol Joshua). For RFI Videos, the newly formed trio performs an improvisation, between shamanic trance from Northern Europe and voodoo song from Haiti (based on an idea by Torill Faleide, communication director, of the festival. Residence in sight?)
Erol Josué has been the director of the National Bureau of Ethnology in Port-au-Prince. He is also pursuing a career as a singer. His last album Pilgrim was released in 2021 see the clip.
Erol Joshua to read on RFI Music.
Music
– Mariana Sadovska, Drevo and Dyvyna (Ukraine) Drovo Live Forde
– Atine (Iran/ Palestine/ France) Ey Shot Live Forde
– Sona Jobarteh (Gambia/Uk) CD extract Djourou by Ballake Sissoko see the clip and Gambia see the clip
– Torgeir Vasvik (Norway) Dudinka
– Erol Joshua (Haiti) Ren Sobo a.