Female musicians band together to challenge gender stereotypes and celebrate regional sounds
▶ Hiya Live is a 12-hour online event with 21 artists, writes Ellie Sennett
In the space of 12 hours, the all-women Hiya Live event aims to change the perception of the region’s music scene. For one, it wants to do away with the “Middle East” moniker, altogether.
Curated in celebration of Women’s History Month, the online festival will run on Saturday and Sunday, March 13 and 14, streaming from radio and video platforms across a range of partnering music collectives. These include Radio Alhara, Disco Tehran, Future Female Sounds and Ballroom Blitz.
The event is the brainchild of Lebanese journalist and DJ Shirine Saad and Natalie Shooter, co-founder of the Beirut Groove Collective. It is an offshoot of Saad’s podcast of the same name, which celebrates the new generation of south-west Asian and North African female musicians. It’s a venture born of years of research on the region’s contemporary music scene, as well as the historic influences it draws from.
“We wanted to take it from a research project to something that was more celebrated,” Shooter tells The National. The duo also want to ensure the festival acknowledges as many of the region’s cultures and identities as possible.
“We’ve got artists from Iran, Armenia, Tunisia, everywhere. It was really important for us to do something that was connecting across the region,” Shooter says.
The line-up, which brings together 21 musicians, spans several genres and styles, from Alsarah, the Khartoum-born singer-songwriter and “self-proclaimed practitioner of East African retro-pop”, to Armenian DJ Lucia Kagramanyan who is based in Vienna.
For Egyptian singer and visual artist Zeyada, Hiya Live can help highlight her artistic output from this past year. She says the pandemic gave her the space to finish an album, collaborate with other artists and even develop new music projects.
“This was something really beautiful I think to come out of [lockdown time],” she says. “[Hiya Live] is showing a community now, and I don’t think there’s been something like that here before.”
Showcasing that community of regional women, Zeyada says, is the festival’s most important feature. “The stronger any of us women get, the stronger everyone gets,” she says.
“There’s this idea that women have to compete with each other. Even if we don’t do it, men say we do, and it’s not true, and it doesn’t work that way … So I feel like this [event] airing and being out there is, if anything, solidifying this idea that we grow together.”
Award-winning Tunisian producer and DJ Deena Abdelwahed is also involved. Her distinct experimental dance tunes carried her music career from Tunis to Berlin, and she often harnesses her production skills to blend rhythms from more traditional Arabian genres into a glitchy, contemporary electronic sound.
Abdelwahed says her biggest hurdles in the industry came from Europeans over-romanticising her experience as an outspoken Arab woman, and that she’s excited Hiya Live can offer an answer to that.
“More [the] French media journalists, they really wanted me as clickbait for their articles … Like, they’d ask me: ‘Oh, was it so bad in Tunisia?’ – kind of [as if to say] thank you to France. My challenge was how to express myself as Deena, not as a little girl coming from a Third World country.”
With Hiya Live, she says, they can start to break that stigma, “that stupid idea of ‘poor Arab women’ and actually listen to them”.
Saad and Shooter agree, and are precise in their language. For them, centring the region means there’s no need for the term Middle East at Hiya Live. After all, east of who and where?
“We’re trying to change the narrative around the region and around gender,” says Saad.
“In the music industry, it’s no secret that there’s a problem with sexism, but also a problem of white supremacy. The DJs that end up succeeding are white men, even though they’re often playing the music of the so-called Middle East or global south.
“What we’re trying to do is say: ‘Let us play our own music, and maybe what we play will change your perception of what our music is about.’” Shooter says: “Music is the resistance, in itself.”
The performances will be virtually sprinkled around the world, promising backdrops from the mountains of Dahab, Egypt, to Beirut nightclub Ballroom Blitz, and French rooftops overlooking the Pyrenees Mountains.
Saad and Shooter hope the digital blending of geographies will help to create a more meaningful connection. “There are so many ways in which we are separated ... I mean we have Iran, Armenia’s under siege, Lebanon has been going through hell, Egypt, Palestine ... We’re saying: ‘OK, we can come together, we can overcome these boundaries.’ For me, that’s the beauty of it,” says Saad.
It’s an ambitious, and rather heavy, undertaking, but Hiya Live’s architects understand there’s power in constructing an event that brings joy and celebration to the fore.
So what are the organisers most excited about? “Having a party!” says Saad. “Spending 12 hours with all of these incredible women and allies from around the world.
“We’ve worked super-hard to make all of this happen and we have beautiful presentations. We’ve been so isolated, and this digital festival is going to allow people to come together in a way that maybe they wouldn’t have with visa, budget or geographic problems. This is going to be such a magical moment.”
Let us play our own music, and maybe what we play will change your perception of what our music is about
SHIRINE SAAD
DJ and organiser
Hiya Live runs on March 13 and 14, 3pm to 3am. More information is available on the event’s Facebook page