Rania Khallaf found with Werner Hasler simply marvellous At 9pm sharp, and Werner Hasler appeared on stage at Al-Azhar Park's Geneina Theatre. Jubran wore a black dress with no make-up whatsoever; and in the faint light she gave a strange impression -- as if in watching her, you have moved into your own grave. This may sound like a gloomy description but it really refers to a sense of the soul being at rest, the mind relaxed and the body free to sway. Life and death, along with nostalgia, grief and joy, all coexist in Jubran's songs. Born in Akka in 1963, Jubran, by now internationally renowned as singer and oud player, learned classical Arabic music from her father, Elias Jubran, one of a handful of genuine oud makers in the Arab world today. As the lead singer of the Palestinian band Sabreen for 20 years, she was hailed as the voice of resistance -- making the present performance, Wameedd, a seemingly contradictory move. "I was born in a land of amazing contradiction," she laughs. "Maybe it's okay if I add a little contradiction of my own. In the late 1990s, I worked with hip hop bands in France, which made me interested in other music and different sounds. I tried to figure out why I was attracted to them," she now responds to the astonishment on my face. Wameedd was the result. An ongoing project begun in 2002 in collaboration with the Swiss musician, it comprises a unique experiment in mixing Oriental melody with electronic sound. "This kind of music gives me a chance to rethink my roots from a different viewpoint," Jubran goes on. It was in 2002 that Jubran moved to France to produce her first solo album, where she also received a Pro Helvetia residency in Switzerland. She has been presenting work in Europe and the United States since. Is she in a better situation? "There is no such thing for me. I am never in a good situation whether professionally or in human terms. But the experience I got from working with Sabreen still lives inside me, and it's still maturing. I had many questions then and now I just have more questions." Certainly, performing under occupation cannot have been an easy choice. "Of course, we suffered greatly from lack of freedom. To survive in those conditions is a miracle that occurs every day; we had to surpass many obstacles, it was a daily fight, having to live in a big prison." For his part Hasler, 38, quietly dismissed the notion that his collaboration with Jubran might be a kind of East- West exchange or intercultural encounter. "The cultural aspect of our meeting is not the core issue. What counts is the personal aspect: the way we met, and worked together; our deliberate thinking of personal issues, etc. Of course, there are musical questions, history is being questioned too, but there is no Eastern or Western culture, there are things that overlap. Already, in a small country like Switzerland, the traditional music is different from my own music as a Swiss musician." Jubran elaborated: "What I like in Hasler is his own research and his own way of musical treatment through his machines. He truly and always attempts to find new, challenging solutions. So, contradiction, as you can see, is not a barrier." For Wameedd Jubran chose a very eclectic miscellany of Arabic poetry: the Lebanese poet Paul Shaoul, for example, who deals with the Lebanese civil war; the Iraqi poet Fadel Al-Azzawi; all males except for Aicha Al-Arna'aouty, a Paris-based Syrian and, according to Jubran, "one of very few distinguished female voices on the cultural scene". She sings, but you listen to her screaming. She seems to weep out the phrases, bringing the words out of the deepest point in her frame, and swaying ferociously while she does so. With little background on Arabic music, Hasler is absorbed in adjusting his electronic machinery (connected to a laptop before him). While Jubran is singing, silence prevails. I turn to the next seat to find two Japanese young women, among many other foreigners, in deep concentration. Jubran squeezes her neck, goose-like. So spontaneous is the performance that one tends to believe they are improvising. In fact everything is precisely planned. "There is a structure for every song," Jubran says. "We spend hours together, rehearsing the development of each song, how it starts, progresses, and ends. We work on all the details until we have reached a rhythm." The audience's reaction is impressive indeed, and Jubran says she usually has a warm reception, "though for different reasons". She does not have access to many Arab countries and insists that she does not sing for anyone in particular: "Whenever there is an opportunity, I go and sing." The graph of Arab singing is on a downward curve, she agrees. "And it is because we are somehow trapped between our dreams and our situation as Arabs. The rate of our frustration is really high. I can not read this differently." She does not like to talk about her homeland all that much, especially not about the current tension among Palestinians: "I am in no position to pronounce on this. It is very chaotic in Palestine. I do not understand the situation. But I am pretty sure that there are people who want it to be different." Besides Wameedd, Jubran is now working on her next album, Makan.
