By Ziad Nawfal

Sam Shalabi and Alan Bishop’s performance piece (and then some) on Friday 18 March, offered something unexpected and radically different from the concerts of the preceding night. The two men, collaborating for the first time, had spent several weeks in Sharjah in order to record ambient soundscapes and impregnate themselves with the mood of the city. The resulting performance integrated pre-recorded sound fragments, live playing (Shalabi on electric guitar and oud, Bishop on amplified acoustic guitar), and Bishop’s inevitable and riotous ranting and raving. Bishop spent the first few minutes of the set walking among the seated audience, hiding his face behind a scarf and sporting a colorful umbrella, while Shalabi triggered the electronic soundscapes and improvised on guitar. Bishop eventually climbed on stage, at which point proceedings took on a more dramatic turn -- in the Shakespearean sense of the word. Standing behind a cluttered table, he relied on various objects (a torchlight, a portable radio, menus for local restaurants, artist catalogues, to name but these) to deliver a captivating spoken-word “routine”, adeptly mixing deadpan humor, vaudeville, and hilarious assessments of the Sharjah milieu. T-shirts decorated with the sentence “E = Tahrir Square” were blasted towards the audience; dog yelps and various animal sounds were emitted; and Stevie Wonder, playing on the same night in neighboring Abu Dhabi, was saluted sarcastically. The two men ended their hour-long performance with a magnificent improvised duet of oud and acoustic guitar. Sharjah has not witnessed anything quite like this before, I’m sure, except maybe for Lebanese electro-acoustic musician Tarek Atoui’s Un-drum performance during the previous edition.

The last concert from Score for a Biennial, the music program of this year’s Biennial, gathered Moroccan-born, New York-based free jazz pianist Amino Belyamani and Mauritanian singing legend Dimi Mint Abba. Hailing from vastly different musical backgrounds, the two performers succeeded in merging their practices into a uniform ensemble of tunes, posed somewhere between African tradition and freeform jazz. Dimi Mint Abba’s husky, tremulous voice soared and leaped, while Belyamani followed her complicated scales on his re-tuned piano. He accompanied Mint Abba and her band (featuring a guitar player, a drummer, and a backing vocalist who also plays the tambourine) to perfection, with the diva often shouting encouragements from across the stage. An adequate conclusion to a difficult proposition, and a promising achievement from the Biennial’s associate curator Haig Aivazian, who master-minded these four concerts.