23 July 2010
OCCUPIED RAMALLAH: Arabs and Israelis boogeyed ecstatically in the occupied West Bank late into the night on Tuesday as ‘70s band Boney M belted out their nostalgic disco tunes at an open-air concert.
The Ramallah event was part of the 12th annual Palestine International Festival of Dance and Music, a six-day music and dance festival taking part across the West Bank to highlight water shortages in the occupied territory, where Israel controls shared resources.
British-born Palestinian singer Shadia Mansour, popularly known as the “First Lady of Arabic Hip Hop,” opened the festival on Sunday.
The lineup included a concert by French-Algerian rai singer Faudel on Wednesday as well as performances by the Ballet Espanol de Murcia, Jordanian composer Tareq al-Nasser and his Rum Group, a Georgian dance theater troupe as well as many local music and dance groups.
Nearly 15 years after they broke up, Boney M is still going strong. Individual band members have used the name of the disco group as a franchise and have been holding concerts around the world.
The band, which won global fame with their catchy disco numbers, drew a crowd of several hundred on Tuesday. Among them were Israeli citizens who had travelled to the West Bank in defiance of an official ban.
The Jamaican group that was founded in Germany in the mid-’70s offered a repertoire of favorite songs like “Daddy Cool,” “Belfast,” “Ma Baker” and the iconic “Rasputin” – many of which have gone gold and platinum.
For many Palestinians who attended the concert, the chorus – “Ra Ra Rasputin” – was sweet music that sounded more like “Ra Ra Ramallah.”
The crowd cried out for more when the band played “Daddy Cool,” one of their first hits that shot them into disco fame in the mid-’70s and kept them at the top of the charts into the mid-1980s.
Another hit – “By the Rivers of Babylon” – was discreetly kept out of the Ramallah repertoire, possibly for politically correct reasons since the lyrics include the line, “We wept, when we remembered Zion.”
The band was feted with thunderous applause when Maizie Williams, a founding member, shouted, “We love Palestine. We love you all, people of Palestine.”
Human rights groups say that the water supplied by Israel does not meet Palestinian needs, but also point out that the Palestinians have failed to set up the infrastructure and institutions necessary for the water sector.
Organizers hope to attract 13,000 visitors during the festival which closes on Friday with performances in five West Bank cities as well as in Palestinian port town of Haifa, which is within Israeli borders.
As the administrative center of the Palestinian Authority, Ramallah is not infrequently the site of activist-oriented art.
On July 13 representatives of Palestinian artists Emily Jacir and Yazid Anani announced that Ramallah Municipality had removed two billboards the artists had created, claiming that the works were “problematic.”
The municipality gave neither advance warning nor specific reasons for why the billboards were removed, the artists said, and the Mayor of Ramallah and the Director of the Municipality refused requests to put the billboards back up for public viewing.
The works stem from Jacir and Anani’s series of public interventions entitled “Al-Riyadh.” The artists’ statement describes the works as “critical of the recent proliferation of gated communities and … an attempt to raise awareness and spark dialogue regarding the destruction of Ramallah’s architectural heritage, the decline of the Palestinian collective political project in Ramallah and the emergence of a city entrapped by neoliberal politics and neocapitalist structures under occupation.”
The billboards featured the creation of a new gated community in place of the old architecture in the heart of Ramallah, as well as a new business tower replacing Ramallah’s fruit and vegetable market.
The works, which were organized in collaboration with the municipality were put up on July 10 at 9 am and removed by the municipality 24 hours later. – AFP with The Daily Star
Copyright The Daily Star 2010.
