Dawn Images

An interesting music workshop at the World Culture Festival on Wednesday, conducted by French musician Zakaria Haffar, enabled young music students of the Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, and a sizeable number of music lovers to learn a great deal about the finer points of polyphonic musicianship.

Haffar divided the groups into two. Male members in the audience were asked to sit to his left and female members to his right.

He then gave them certain exercises to follow, beginning with a warm-up exercise. With simple routines, such as requesting them to open their mouths and let out voices that rose and fell intermittently, he engaged the youngsters, who participated in the exercise enthusiastically.

The French musician intelligently made one group use their lower register and another their upper register. Although there were fewer women in the audience, they, too, followed the pattern.

After 13 or 14 minutes of the exercise, he gave all the participants a piece of paper on which Pakistan’s national anthem was written with notations. To explain how polyphonic sounds work, Haffar asked different groups to sing different voices and phrases. The French musician then made them sing the anthem in a variety of voices, such as the tenor’s voice or using the bass.

In the theatrical component of the festival, a play titled The Interview by Gillian Rhodes from the US was performed.

It was mainly a one-person show, ably performed by Ms Rhodes.

As the name of the piece suggests, it is about a character who is being interviewed by a Big Brother-like voice.

There are four chairs placed in the middle of the stage, signifying the four important phases in the character’s life. For example, when the voice asks her to share something that she hasn’t thus far shared, the character talks about her younger days when she wanted to make it big in the world of entertainment.

But as things often pan out in showbiz, all that glitters does not turn out to be gold. The second phase is about her father’s precarious financial status and her quest for peace. And so on…

The Interview focuses on the ‘looking back’ aspect of life when one is pushed to do so. Whether that situation is a figment of the character’s imagination is up to the audience to decipher.

Earlier in the day, a children’s play, Gangster Hunting with Daisy Detective, was presented by a Norwegian theatre group, Erler Teaterkompani. It was a well-attended programme.

Originally published in Dawn, November 5th, 2026