Las Huelgas Manuscript (14th century) / Sufi Chant / Creation
6 female singers and organetto
Guest artist: Alia Sellami, vocals

This programme bears the echo of thebaids in different places, religions, languages and eras.
A tribute to feminine spirituality, it is the fruit gathered from our own deserts, where we share a taste for questioning, doubt and wonder. Symbolic of a chosen, intimate solitude, or a real, physical desert, these two spaces are consonant in their immensity. Medieval music, poetry and contemporary music invite us to explore them.
The desert of Thebes was the refuge of the first Christians, and since then the name Thebaid has been applied to any place, even a symbolic one, where people isolate themselves to lead a life of asceticism and prayer, where they “empty” themselves of the world to achieve a second birth. Evocative of withdrawal and trial, but also a place of revelation, the desert links the three monotheistic religions.
In the Middle Ages, in the West, the desert referred to the hermitage, forest, islands, monasteries—A metaphor for a solitary life in which people come to contemplate ‘invisible realities’, pray and sing. Among the Sufis, Khalwa describes both the action of isolating oneself and the place where one isolates oneself: nature, the desert, the cave, the cell. It is a path to knowledge through ‘enlightenment and spiritual openness’. The use of song, the breath embodied in sound, has always been associated with worship as a means of meditation, prayer and ecstasy.
In the Christian Middle Ages, we turn to the manuscript of Las Huelgas, a women’s monastery founded in the twelfth century in Spain, a land where East and West converged for centuries.
The deserts of the East are evoked by the voice of Alia Sellami singing Sufi songs handed down orally from generation to generation.
Today’s thebaids are present with a contemporary piece, Khalwa, by Alia Sellami, as well as improvisations.

> Released in May 2024 – Bayard Musique