creation December 2025
Bedouin woman ready to go
performance / concert
with Oum Nasser Mamina Sidaty (poems in Arabic), Zahra Bint Simali (ardîn, voice) Sophie Agnel (cordophone)
Arabic poems subtitled in English
Oum Nasser Mamina Sidaty's poems unfold in a field of intense existential tension. The “I” of the poems, the “I” of a brilliant young woman, is literally torn between belonging to a very strong, magnified culture, the nomadic Bedouin culture she inherited from a line of griots, and an indefectible aspiration to a free, modern life.
The tension is accentuated by the fact that Oum Nasser, while seeking to emancipate herself from the coercive aspects of Bedouin society, magnifies its culture: she is notably famous in Mauritania for being the first Mauritanian finalist in a major international Arabic poetry reading competition, where she generated both enthusiasm and controversy.
For Bedouin woman ready to go, Oum Nasser takes center stage in a field of musical tension:
on one side of the stage, the great iggawin (the Mauritanian griot caste) Zahra Bint Simali plays the ardîn (the mythical desert harp played by Bedouin women) and sings;
on the other side of the stage, the great French improviser Sophie Agnel plays the cordophone (an instrument of her own invention, a mini-piano with an electric bass neck).
On the one hand, the memory of nocturnal evenings spent in tents in the desert. On the other, postmodern urban sounds. But of course, as in the poems themselves, nothing is watertight. As the performance progresses, the immemorial rhythms of the ardîn contaminate the cordophone, while the latter's contemporary tones weave a new, unprecedented sound texture with the traditional instrument.
At the heart of this polarized sound field is Oum Nasser and her magnetic presence, which she drapes successively, as if changing skin, in multiple colored melafahs.
Bedouin woman ready to go is performed in Arabic with English surtitles.
Sophie Agnel is a French improviser (prepared piano) of international renown, moving from the demanding exercise of the solo to multiple encounters in situ with the greatest masters of contemporary improvisation (Michel Doneda, Daunik Lazro, Olivier Benoît, Catherine Jauniaux, ErikM, Roger Turner, Phil Minton, John Butcher, Jean François Pauvros, Thurston Moore, Joke Lanz).
In 2014, she joined the Orchestre National de Jazz (ONJ) for 4 years under the direction of Olivier Benoît.
She regularly participates in the creation of text/music performances based on major and demanding works: Testimony by Charles Reznikoff, La passion selon G.H. by Clarice Lispector.
She has also designed an astonishing experimental electroacoustic instrument, the cordophone / nOpiano, a combination of a small piano frame and an electric bass neck.
