ARCHIVES 2009 / Radio Muezzin

It was while listening, on the heights of a Middle Eastern capital, to the call to prayer reverberating from mosque to mosque, that Stefan Kaegi had “the most impressive acoustic experience of [his] life”. Back in Berlin, he read in a newspaper that the calls to prayer in Cairo were going to be systematically broadcast on the radio: a muezzin, chosen after a competition for this task, works behind a microphone in a station, while his voice is broadcast to all of the city's mosques. A rite perpetuated in its singleness is replaced by a massive dissemination process, taken in charge by the Ministry of Religion. “What does the aura of this ceremony become?” Stefan Kaegi asks. By inviting, after patient fieldwork, four muezzins from Cairo to go up on stage to recount their existence and experience, Stefan Kaegi tracks back the original value of the call. Each of the muezzins gives it his tempo, his voice, his interpretation, a specific vibration, while describing the mechanisation and professionalisation process underway. But rejecting exoticism as well as simplification, it is above all the lives of these individuals with their singular destiny that the show presents to be heard and seen. Inserted into an extremely dense social fabric, they assume very different roles, from the upkeep of the mosque to the reading of the Koran abroad in other Muslim countries. These men also offer us theatre: the ways in which they meet, in which their gestures reconstruct their universe, in which they talk, and talk to each other, in which they sing and repeat themselves; these ways of being together, in a performance, form the living frame of Radio Muezzin. As a counterpoint, sounds circulate, the radio being integrated into the very heart of the mechanism, the images enclose their existences, offering a visual, affective and memorial, in short, a sentimental context, to each one's presence on stage. Like the voice, the grace and the emotion of a blind muezzin, calling and vibrating on a backdrop of the colourful streets of Cairo. ADB