Residency project:

Sarambeque! is the immersive storytelling in concert form of France and Portugal’s involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade, using the words and music of those who lived through it – from La Rochelle to Louisiana, the Canary Islands to the Caribbean. Our project presents, for the very first time, music from a virtually unknown early Portugese manuscript of vibrant, rhythmically driven songs for two sopranos and baroque guitar written by an anonymous musician of colour, and in local dialect; juxtaposed with melancholic, ruminative, more or less contemporaneous baroque guitar, lute and theorbo solos from the courts of Louis XIV and XV.