Concerts, dance performances and film screenings will feature in NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Centre’s new season.
Beginning on August 31 and running until May, the ninth season will also see the return of the popular two-day music event, the Barzakh Festival.
“Over the past nine years, the Arts Centre has been committed to creating a platform for audiences to discover unfamiliar disciplines, artists and works, with a promise of inspiration, stimulation, reflection, and fun,” says the centre's executive artistic director Bill Bragin.
“We are proud to once again commission new works of regional relevance and international significance that showcase the richness of our programming and the development of the UAE’s cultural output, bringing several world premieres and even more regional premieres to the nation.”
Here are some of the main highlights of the centre’s programme, with more artists to be announced at a later date.
Arts and Dance
The season features several arts exhibitions an dance performances, with some to be revealed later in the year.
Opening event Now Is When We Are (the stars), is an immersive exhibition featuring 5,000 individual points of light and a 496 channel sound system.
Taking place from August 31 to September 3 and September 5 to 10 at The Black Box, an unseen narrator guides audience members through the various spaces as they light up the rooms with their movements.
Also announced is Mehek, the latest work by British-Indian choreographer Aakash Odedra and acclaimed Indian Kathak dancer Aditi Mangaldas.
Exploring society’s conceptions of love, the performance will take place at The Red Theatre on February 7 and 8.
The concerts
During the latest season, a number of artists will be making their UAE debut.
The Asian Dub Foundation will bring their jungle rhythms and sharp bass lines to The Red Theatre on September 22.
Known for their 1998 Mercury Prize nominated album Rafi’s Revenge, the group will hit the NYU Abu Dhabi stage with new songs to play courtesy of latest album, 2020’s Access Denied.
Some of the storied history of bossa nova music will be celebrated in a concert by Bebel Gilberto on September 30 at The Red Theatre.
The Brazilian singer will perform a collection of songs dedicated to her father, Joao Gilberto, who has been accredited as one of the pioneers of the popular genre.
The home-grown world music event, Barzakh Festival, returns to The Red Theatre on March 1 and 2.
Tunisian singer-songwriter Emel Mathlouthi and Egyptian folk music collective Mazaher will also perform, with the full eclectic line-up to be revealed later in the year.
More concerts will also be announced in the future.
A film concert
There is also a new classic film experience accompanied by live music that is scheduled to take place at The Red Theatre on October 5.
The experience will have the Philip Glass Ensemble score the 1982 movie Koyaanisqatsi, which has an original score by Philip Glass.
The experimental film is hailed as a masterpiece of its form and consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and natural landscapes in the US.
For the full list of announced shows and ticket prices, visit www.nyuad-artscenter.org
Iran's dirty tricks to dodge sanctions
There’s increased scrutiny on the tricks being used to keep commodities flowing to and from blacklisted countries. Here’s a description of how some work.
1 Going Dark
A common method to transport Iranian oil with stealth is to turn off the Automatic Identification System, an electronic device that pinpoints a ship’s location. Known as going dark, a vessel flicks the switch before berthing and typically reappears days later, masking the location of its load or discharge port.
2. Ship-to-Ship Transfers
A first vessel will take its clandestine cargo away from the country in question before transferring it to a waiting ship, all of this happening out of sight. The vessels will then sail in different directions. For about a third of Iranian exports, more than one tanker typically handles a load before it’s delivered to its final destination, analysts say.
3. Fake Destinations
Signaling the wrong destination to load or unload is another technique. Ships that intend to take cargo from Iran may indicate their loading ports in sanction-free places like Iraq. Ships can keep changing their destinations and end up not berthing at any of them.
4. Rebranded Barrels
Iranian barrels can also be rebranded as oil from a nation free from sanctions such as Iraq. The countries share fields along their border and the crude has similar characteristics. Oil from these deposits can be trucked out to another port and documents forged to hide Iran as the origin.
* Bloomberg
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Points about the fast fashion industry Celine Hajjar wants everyone to know
- Fast fashion is responsible for up to 10 per cent of global carbon emissions
- Fast fashion is responsible for 24 per cent of the world's insecticides
- Synthetic fibres that make up the average garment can take hundreds of years to biodegrade
- Fast fashion labour workers make 80 per cent less than the required salary to live
- 27 million fast fashion workers worldwide suffer from work-related illnesses and diseases
- Hundreds of thousands of fast fashion labourers work without rights or protection and 80 per cent of them are women
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Children who witnessed blood bath want to help others
Aged just 11, Khulood Al Najjar’s daughter, Nora, bravely attempted to fight off Philip Spence. Her finger was injured when she put her hand in between the claw hammer and her mother’s head.
As a vital witness, she was forced to relive the ordeal by police who needed to identify the attacker and ensure he was found guilty.
Now aged 16, Nora has decided she wants to dedicate her career to helping other victims of crime.
“It was very horrible for her. She saw her mum, dying, just next to her eyes. But now she just wants to go forward,” said Khulood, speaking about how her eldest daughter was dealing with the trauma of the incident five years ago. “She is saying, 'mama, I want to be a lawyer, I want to help people achieve justice'.”
Khulood’s youngest daughter, Fatima, was seven at the time of the attack and attempted to help paramedics responding to the incident.
“Now she wants to be a maxillofacial doctor,” Khulood said. “She said to me ‘it is because a maxillofacial doctor returned your face, mama’. Now she wants to help people see themselves in the mirror again.”
Khulood’s son, Saeed, was nine in 2014 and slept through the attack. While he did not witness the trauma, this made it more difficult for him to understand what had happened. He has ambitions to become an engineer.
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Their favourite city: Dubai
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Ads on social media can 'normalise' drugs
A UK report on youth social media habits commissioned by advocacy group Volteface found a quarter of young people were exposed to illegal drug dealers on social media.
The poll of 2,006 people aged 16-24 assessed their exposure to drug dealers online in a nationally representative survey.
Of those admitting to seeing drugs for sale online, 56 per cent saw them advertised on Snapchat, 55 per cent on Instagram and 47 per cent on Facebook.
Cannabis was the drug most pushed by online dealers, with 63 per cent of survey respondents claiming to have seen adverts on social media for the drug, followed by cocaine (26 per cent) and MDMA/ecstasy, with 24 per cent of people.
