Bintou Wéré, l’Opéra du Sahel

A contemporary story about Africa

Paris 

25/10/2007 - 

An African opera? This is the challenge an ambitious team of African actors, directors, producers and musicians undertook in staging Bintou Wéré, l’Opéra du Sahel. The opera had its ‘avant-première’ in Bamako in February 2007 and was then performed in the Netherlands. Now, after a period of rehearsals at La Manufacture des œillets, in the Paris suburbs, four dates are to be performed at the prestigious Théâtre du Châtelet, in Paris (25 - 27 October). Drawing on topical subject matter, the opera recounts the story of a caravan of young Africans trekking across the desert in the hope of making a new life for themselves in Europe. RFI Musique hooks up with Wasis Diop, the opera’s musical and artistic director and Zé Manel Fortes, who composed the score.

RFI Musique: What’s your personal definition of opera?
Zé Manel Fortes: I’d say opera is drama told through music. Around 1600, poetry recitations started being performed on stage and they automatically gained an extra dramatic edge. Where I come from our griots - the way they pass on history as part of an oral tradition and sing about great events of the past - are actually tapping into the opera tradition.

Wasis Diop: Opera is a story recounted through songs where all the drama and emotion of what’s happening on stage has to be conveyed to the audience. The Opéra du Sahel tells a contemporary story which is terribly dramatic. It tells the story of these young kids following Bintou Wéré across the desert. They’re prepared to die on the barbed-wire fences of Melilla if needs be in order to get into Europe. That’s a story we hear every day! And that’s exactly what opera is – simple stories about the human condition and life’s dramatic ups and downs… The creation of this opera was based on the relationship between north and south. That’s the fundamental idea behind it. The show had its ‘avant-première’ in Bamako and the artists involved were all trained in Africa, too.

Wasis Diop, around ten years ago now, you were famous for singing a song about Samba the shepherd boy living as an illegal immigrant in France….
WD: That’s right… And maybe in some ways the Opéra du Sahel can be seen as a sort of sequel to Samba? After all, you have to admit, nothing’s really changed much over the past ten years… It’s always the same individual stories that recount the same harsh realities, stories that revolve around the same contradictions, the same essential dramas. Zé Manel’s motivations and my own are very much anchored in those realities. We both feel we have to tell these stories, rewriting them in our own way, so that we can do our bit for progress – not just the progress of Africa, but the world as a whole. Basically, our combat is for humanity.

A whole range of countries feature in the Opéra du Sahel including Senegal, Mali, Guinea-Conakry and also Chad. How did you manage to mix the musical colours of sub-Saharan Africa with opera - which, at the end of the day, is a very Western musical concept?
ZMF: When we originally started work on the project it was very difficult to decide which direction to go in. After all, this is the first time anyone’s ever done an opera like this so we had nothing to look to to see how it could be done. We ended up working like in any other style of opera and basing things on the libretto. That’s the real starting-point in opera. And we just took if from there, experimenting to see what worked and what didn’t… The important thing about the Opéra du Sahel is that we’ve created an opera that really corresponds to our cultures. This is an opera that lives and breathes Africa. You can even feel the heat!

How did you go about getting all the different artists involved?
WD: Well, like just about everything else in Africa, it was extremely complicated. Once we had the libretto as a working basis we started auditioning for the show. We went round a whole stack of different places in sub-Saharan Africa with the addresses of musicians and people we wanted to meet… But needless to say we never found anyone as easily as that. It took a bit of searching… We ended up hooking up with the most incredible musicians, especially in Guinea. It was there that I met "les jolies", three female singers doing polyphonic vocal harmonies, a very old tradition that’s extremely complex. Everyone calls them "les jolies" (the pretty women) because every morning they consult one another to check they’ll all be wearing the same dress that day. I was totally blown away when I heard them sing! This was exactly the Sahel we were looking for!

ZMF: Another great discovery we made in Guinea was the tounè…An exceptionally rare flute we came across in Conakry…

WD: In the Opéra du Sahel, there are koras, balafons, percussion, ngoni, traditional Peul flutes, all the "classic" instruments from the Sahel but we also included the tounè, a very rough and basic type of wind instrument that has practically disappeared from sub-Saharan Africa now. It’s the stuff of Maghreb folklore today, in fact. It produces a very powerful sound when you play it, a bit like a bagpipe without the bellows…

What’s the main thing you’re trying to do with the Opéra du Sahel?
ZMF: For me it’s about trying to show the full diversity of the Sahel, through the soloists, the musicians and the chorus…We wanted to produce a genuine opera that would take into account the cultural specificity of each region. The same sun shines on northern Mali and Conakry, for instance, but the realities of day-to-day life are very different in each country…

WD: What counts most for me is the idea of communicating emotion…You know, on the opening page of our libretto for the Opéra du Sahel I drew a picture of a ladder. At the bottom of the ladder there are the Africans and at the top the moon symbolising Europe. That’s the essential drama behind this whole show.

Bintou Wéré, l’Opéra du Sahel, 25, 26 & 27 October at Le Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris : http://www.chatelet-theatre.com/

Eglantine  Chabasseur

Translation : Julie  Street