Corinne Allal appeared last week at Beit Avi Chai, as part of the Sipurim B'Mono series, hosted by radio and television personality Yoav Kutner. Thin, laughing, with a hospital bracelet on her wrist. Her battle with cancer came up right at the start of the conversation. "This is pain we are not familiar with," she said. "But I told the doctors that I wanted to perform, and they released me immediately." It was not an ordinary performance nor a regular cultural event, but a face-to-face meeting with the thin line between life and death. "On a thread of love, to live and not die," she sings in her song Lichyot (“To Live”). More than 200 pairs of eyes in the crowd prayed with her.
With subtlety and wisdom, Kutner navigated the conversation between the stations of her life and her musical career. Her childhood in Tunis, growing up with a father who was a Mossad agent ("But he said that if I talk about it something could happen to me, so why take a chance"). Her first TV appearance, alongside Arik Einstein and Yehudit Ravitz, in the music video for Atur Mitzchech ("You started from the top", Kutner said). They discussed the audience's difficulty accepting her at the beginning, because she was so unconventional, and talked about her attempt to rough up the high voice she had then, to step on it, "like an olive harvester".
Bassist Or Edry was a guest and spoke about the path Corinne paved for her and other women, when she dared to invade the male dominated world of musical production.
At the end of the show, Kutner suggested that they schedule another show soon, for when she feels better. "But I feel good now," Corinne said with a smile that went on and on, "we can already schedule it."
The truth is that Corinne Allal's passion and effort to play and sing stood out much more than the difficulty. The audience sang with her, cried, stood and cheered. It was a rare testimony to the power of music to move people and to bind them together; And to the power of one cultural icon, a strange bird, who truly performed as if her life depended on it.
Read more about Corinne Allal here.
Photo credit: Nikolay Busygin
