Elisabeth Rieger, one of SEKEM’s good friends and advocates, helped to organize a visit and collaboration with a German Choir to SEKEM. She tells about the insights of their experience singing in Egypt and discovering SEKEM Initiative.
This sounds like agriculture – but it is pure culture!
Since many years I am working with SEKEM and spent recently 2 years working in the eurythmy training in SEKEM School. Joining SEKEM Choir has been a very nourishing input once a week – and because of this refreshing result of singing, I joined the Cairo Celebration Choir with my SEKEM friends. After 2 years of wonderful rehearsals and concerts, this idea came to mind: could it be possible that this Egyptian Choir meets with my German Choir and together we sing? This shy question I asked the Egyptian and German leaders of their choirs and both said: why not?
The growing fruit started in Germany and soon enough, people wanted to travel to sing together with Egyptians. But this growing of an idea had to go through many doubts, like finding a cultural sponsor to finance this project and the changing of our singing partner. In the end 61 people set off from Berlin to Cairo and got to love the Egyptian people, food, ways of being and solving problems. So this seed was fully unfolded: to meet another culture and get inspired from the different ways of being!
In the mornings we discovered Cairo and the old pharaonic culture and in the evenings we crossed the Tahrir square and the bridge over the Nile to have rehearsals in the opera house with young Egyptian musicians of today. One of the morning tours has been to SEKEM – of course – meeting the developing future of an Egyptian and international place and all my singing friends from Germany could not believe that SEKEM is really what it is – developing towards the future and working on many of our topics we have to solve as mankind today.
Thanks a lot to the SEKEM Community for welcoming so many singers and allowing us to meet all the companies and schools with excellent presentations of their work and process, and performing with the school choir on their end of the week celebration. You could not imagine the happy faces, planting 28 Neem trees on the Adleya farm on our way back to Cairo…we felt more than ever that we are a part of the future.
Elisabeth Rieger