NON – Tribute to Samir Kassir – Original Version

This play, written in homage to Samir Kassir, murdered on June 2, 2005, draws on the material of memory, war, fear and fascination that the composer transforms. In the steps of the dancer roar the sounds of machine guns, explosions, in a fight and ritual almost bullfighting, a tragic dimension that reinforces the feeling of an inalienable freedom.

The music of “No” takes place in two parts: life with the knowledge of fear, its taming, the game with violence and the exchange of polarity. The body hesitates, trembles agitated then enters fight with the external noises, essentially those of a night of war, explosions, bursts of submachine guns, shells blasts. The fight intensifies until the incandescence, place of fire and enjoyment, where the bombs seem to explode under the steps of the dance. From this culminating point a slow decrescendo gradually leads the dancer into another space where everything is blurred. We hear voices, shrouded in unreality, a melody from another world and a few bursts of war in the distance. And the body continues for a long time its frenetic figures while it no longer emits any sound. A silence that emphasizes the confinement of suffering inside the body, the after-effects of a violence that has finally dissipated.
In the image of death that removes the clash of life.

set
1 dancer – 1 electroacoustic broadcast system

“(…) As for the Lebanese No Yalda Younes, it is unheard of. In nine minutes, this novel leaves the impression of a cyclone. The play, written in homage to Samir Kassir, Lebanese historian and journalist murdered on June 2, 2005, draws a man-woman-horse body as he knows how to do flamenco when he does not take his feet in a polka-dot dress. As in suspension, the dancer hammers the ground as if to cover the music of Zad Moultaka, who erupts the violence of the war. The bombs and the bullets burst under Yalda Younès’ feet until exhaustion and disappearance in the darkness and silence. An edition of the Antipodes in full flight. ”
Marie-Christine Vernay, Libération, March 14, 2008
“(…) a” child of war “, for whom creation is” a way to reverse the process of violence by making it no longer undergo but control. ” It is precisely the sounds of war that are the basis of his latest work, Polyphem, named after a medium-range subsonic anti-ship missile specialized in surgical strikes. (…) In this set of nine plays, Zad Moultaka explores the sensitive worlds, from panic fear to crazy utopia. It goes from the memory of a world gone – Another silence, sung in Arabic by the soprano Françoise Kubler on a text of Bab el Chams, Elias Khoury – in the magnificent No, homage to the Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir, murdered on June 2, 2005 .

Flamenco dancer Yalda Younes performs a wild zapateado to the sound of a bombing recorded in Beirut. Between contemporary Western writing and sensitivity related to Arabic music, Zad Moultaka draws a cosmogony of our time, Azur, room for accordion and tape played by Pascal Contet, An-Nas, chamber music inspired by the last surah of the Koran , “The Men”, performed by the Contemporary Orchestral Ensemble.
Marie-Aude Roux, The World, November 29, 2007