Cancelled: Ballad of the Spirits 

04.08.2024 / 18:00 – 20:00
With Logan February

Unfortunately the event has to be postponed for organizational reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience! A new date will be announced as soon as possible.

Reading and concert for Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru
With Logan February, Senthuran Varatharajah, Dongkyu Leo Kim

“No shoes, no music, just prayer.” This is how Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, the Ethiopian nun, composer and pianist, described her decade she spent in Gishen Debre Kerbe, a hilltop monastery she entered at the age of 19. Educated at a classical conservatoire in Cairo, she returned back to the piano after leaving the convent, composing devotional music deeply influenced by Ethiopian folk songs, ragtime, classical European music, gospel and the choral traditions of her country’s Orthodox Tewahedo Church. In 1984 she fled her home in Addis Ababa, relocating to Debre Genet monastery in the heart of West Jerusalem, where she lived in seclusion, until her death in 2023, with 99 years. Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru has dedicated her entire life to music as her own intimate language and form of prayer. In honor of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, the Nigerian poet and essayist Logan February and the Tamil-German novelist and Theologian Senthuran Varatharajah will read their own original poetry, as well as poetry of other writers, accompanied by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s sacred music, played by the pianist Dongkyu Leo Kim.

Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche (Chapel), Breitscheidplatz

In English
Free admission

Organized by Senthuran Varatharajah, Logan February and Mathias Zeiske
Event by DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program and CCA Berlin

Picture credit (from left to right): Senthuran Varatharajah, photo: Daniel Sänger; Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, Souvenirs, Vinyl-LP, © Mississippi Records; Logan February, photo: Paulina Hildesheim