Cambridge Festival - Yalalla: Jewish Saharans Singing to Birth

Dr Vanessa Paloma Elbaz presents new stories and exhibits shared with the KHOYA Sound Archive online platform, celebrating Maghrebi traditions on family and birth.

Moroccan women's repertoires in the Maghreb, particularly those which are sung during marriage and childbirth, are at the heart of the sonic cementing of communal power for minority groups. Muslim and Jewish women's oral traditions have also been used to resist colonial powers and form a strong group identity within gendered spaces. Today, few people remember that these songs even exist.

Following 2021's online launch of KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive with the trilingual online platform Yalalla: Jewish Saharans singing to birth, Dr Vanessa Paloma Elbaz will present a choice of new materials gathered from the public through the Yalalla platform.

The event will also include a live chamber performance of new compositions celebrating fertility, inspired in the Yalalla platform's repertoire. This live event, featuring both Cambridge academics and Jewish and Muslim cultural stakeholders from Morocco, will provide historic, linguistic, cultural and musicological context to how contemporary families ritualise cultural transmission, fertility and birth.

yalalla.org.uk/
yalalla.org.uk/fr
yalalla.org.uk/ar