Musician El Safi Mahdi: I Formed A Singing Choir for Port Sudan City

* We produced a work that describes Sudanese status

* These (…) are obstacles to the choir’s reunion

Musician and composer Al-Safi Mahdi, Professor of Music Composition at the College of Music and Drama and Maestro of the College Choir, completed the establishment of a new singing choir in the city of Port Sudan as his first post-war project since his departure from Khartoum.
Al-Safi Mahdi is active during this period in many of the new artistic works that he has completed and which are being prepared.
In this Interview the most important achievements of the past period and the old and new choir talk in this part.
The rest of the discussion is on different topics.

Interview: Magda Hassan

* There is an active artistic movement in Port Sudan. What are your efforts in it?
We began to establish a choir of young men and women from Port Sudan, with the help of artists coming from Khartoum. There was no choral singer other than Nader Osman, and he was the only one from the college choir.
It was founded by young men and women in Port Sudan. This was an experiment in founding that we started from the first month after our arrival. It is now nine months .
We conducted courses in music sciences with the participation of colleagues in the club, non-student musicians, and amateur young men and women.
We held a course for three months, and they graduated and obtained certificates, and we began the second course.
*Describe your poetry when you were absent for the first time from participating in national songs during independence?
We have not missed independence celebrations and patriotic songs
. Since the founding of the Port Sudan Choir, in the first two months, we have created a very large operetta that the choir presented at an event at the Port Sudan Writers and Artists Union entitled (With Your Love of the Heart, Sing). Lyrics by Mahmoud Al-Jili from Al-Hani. I received the poem before I arrived in Port Sudan, a month after the war. He sent it. I have a friend with the idea that it could be an operetta in which artists inside and outside Sudan will participate, but it did not happen as planned and we implemented it here.
It was one of the beautiful experiences available on the media
* Was it filmed as a video clip?
We aspired to film a video clip because it was presented with the participation of a number of big artistic names from eastern Sudan and the Red Sea State. Artists Mohamed Al-Badri, Adel Muslim, Yasser Ibrahim and Al-Toum Qormi participated with the choir in the solo performance.
Sidi Dushka and Haider Port Sudan were supposed to participate, but it did not happen due to circumstances. . The work progressed at the Union Theater and was attended by a large audience. The work describes the condition of the Sudanese and gives hope for a better tomorrow and the inevitable return.
*What about your new artwork?
Recently, we produced a video song with lyrics by Al-Mahi Abu Omar from Al-Hani, sung by Nader Osman and directed by Al-Tayeb Siddiq.
It was filmed on the southern pier of Port Sudan with the wide participation of traditional dance groups such as the Samaka band, the Hausa children’s band, and a children’s group from Beni Amer, and the appearance of a number of dramatists, Abdel Rahim Qarni and Mustafa. Ahmed Al-Khalifa, Al-Sir Musa, Awad Shakespeare and others
*We miss the College of Music Choir. Do you differentiate between a displaced person and a refugee?
We all miss the choir, and we have made serious attempts to bring it together, but the war situation has spread people across the vast areas of Sudan, in addition to the difficulty of movement and later housing, and this is a great suffering that has made gathering them in one place difficult (to be continued).