From 1st of May until 6th of May Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) is on in Harare Garden and its surroundings. This year there will be four contributions from Norway.
30/05/2007 :: The Norwegian Embassy has been supporting the festival since the beginning in 1999, and this year the Embassy is presenting an accordion duo comprising of two world class accordion players, Geir Draugsvoll and James Crabb.
They are playing two concerts, on Wednesday the 2nd and Thursday the 3rd of May. On the first concert they will be playing compositions by Mozart, «Fantasy in F minor» and Mussorgskij, «Pictures at an Exhibition». Since the actual paintings from that exhibition has gone missing, the Embassy asked one Zimbabwean artist, Anthony Benhura to remake the paintings when listening to the music. The paintings are to be displayed throughout the festival and will be at the venue during the concerts. The artist had never heard the music before, and the results have to be seen.
The second concert is in connection with the ongoing Norwegian celebration of Edvard Grieg. The accordionist will play Peer Gynt Suite 1 and 2 in collaboration with the Zimbabwean theatre group CHIPAWO. CHIPAWO will act extracts from the play by Henrik Ibsen. Special about this edition is that they are mixing the classical composition with Zimbabwean traditional songs and instruments. CHIPAWO put up the full play by Ibsen last year, and those who attended one of the performances will remember that they had adapted the play into a Zimbabwean setting.
They will still have the Zimbabwean adaptation, but this time with focus on the Norwegian music. Neither the musicians nor the actors has done anything like this before, and they all look forward to this new way of collaboration.
The venue for both concerts will be Aon Zimbabwe Recital Room.
Mozart and Mussorgskij will be played on Wednesday at 3.30 pm.
Peer Gynt will be played on Thursday at 2.30 pm.
There will be more Norwegians participating:
On Saturday the 5th of May, two Norwegians staying in Zimbabwe, working at Zimbabwe College of Music, Hanne Kihlman Evang and Håvard Evang, will be playing together with amongst others Chiwoniso Maraire. This concert will be a meeting between traditional Zimbabwean music and western music, between people with different ways of expressions and music styles.
Global stage, Saturday 5th of May, 3 pm.
Later the same day, same stage, the Umoja ensemble will perform together with Oliver Mtukudzi. Umoja is a collaboration between young artists from Norway, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Mozambic and they are holding yearly work shops in the different countries. This year they will stage a work shop in Zimbabwe, right after HIFA.
Global stage, Saturday 5th of May, 5.30 pm.