Musical Greeting from Reunion Island – Maya Kamaty
In association with Alliance Française de Pune
Maya Kamaty does not refrain from anything. Especially the right to branch off towards where she never thought of going. Born of a father-musician and a mother-story-teller isn’t necessarily determining to inspire you an artistic calling. The beautiful Creole language of her island, the rolling wind of Maloya, the traditional music and singing of Reunion Island, her native and living land, has played a big part in her life.
For a long time, the Maloya, ternary blues born of former slaves’ laments working on the sugar cane plantations, pride of the Reunion people and reflection of a thriving Creole culture, was banned by the authorities, un officially prohibited until 1981. Times have changed. Living blood of the kabars, those parties gathering family and neighbours that last till the end of the night, Maloya is today inscribed in the immaterial cultural Patrimony of Humanity of the Unesco. It’s living in daylight thanks to the shadow warriors who did everything so that it may not die. Among those who joined forces for its recognition and for the Creole language, Ziskakan appears in the lead. Created in 1979 under the label of a cultural association whose goal was the development and the propagation of the culture from Reunion, Ziskakan will be on the starting line of both a laboratory of ideas for Creole language and a music band. An ensemble within which Maya’s parents are militants, and who through theatre, poetry, dancing, singing, storytelling, music carry on with a range of values representing the culture from Reunion Island.
A culture which reveals to her thanks to distance. She left in 2006 for Montpellier to start cultural mediation studies, then cultural management, Maya was born a second time when blossomed the seed sown by her parents and the gang who came around the house, there, on the island, in the Heights , in the village of Plaines des Palmistes, between the woods and the sky swarming with stars. In Montpellier, the young student joined the GrènSemé band as a choristerandappeared on stage in 2008 at the Sakifo Music Festival in Reunion Island. When she returned there to settle home, 5 years ago, Maya already knew which “lane” would be hers. She would sing and write, she would make her home Creole dance, full of meaning and history.
In 2013, Maya Kamaty was the first woman to win the Alain Peters Prize and the Indian Ocean Music Prize.
