At Coachella in 2012, Tupac Shakur appeared on stage to emotional cheers, sparking a dime-a-dozen articles explaining how the 2D image of the late rapper was even possible. Now, through the growing power of hologram technology, Umm Kulthum will take the stage in Dubai for a one-of-a-kind performance on Thursday and Friday night.
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The iconic Egyptian singer – a muse to everyone from Led Zeppelin to Bob Dylan – rose to fame with songs like “Enta Omry” and “Sirit El Hob”. Born in 1898, she made a name for herself through her commanding vocals and arresting stage presence, waving her signature white handkerchief as she stood tall at the mouth of sold-out theatres. But the singer died in 1975 – more than four decades ago… So how will people get a chance to see her perform today?
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Show director Hasan Hina and his team of six at New Dimension Productions – including fellow executive producer Mahmoud Beasha – were able to recapture Umm Kulthum’s essence for the upcoming 55-minute live production – thanks to a technique called photorealistic 3D modeling. It’s something we’ve seen in major Hollywood blockbusters before – think young Tony Stark or Carrie Fischer in Star Wars.
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“We basically mold a 3D model that is accurate to the original person, which is then animated using a motion capture system,” explains Hina. “It took us exactly a year.” Egyptian actress Sabreen, who played Umm Kulthum in a 1999 eponymous television series that aired in Ramadan, performed the singer’s tracks for motion capture, which took about a month’s time in total, before the team got to work at a studio in Dubai.
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“We captured all of [Sabreen’s] body data, all her muscle reactions, and we applied them to the 3D model. The result is a 3D model that is being animated by a real human being, which makes it very, very realistic,” says Hina.
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Tupac’s performance kick-started the hologram craze. But with the evolution of audio-visual capabilities, Hina has been able to take things a step further. “In Tupac’s case, they just made him appear as if he's walking on the stage. So for the audience, it's an exact replica of what Tupac would do,” says Hina. “In our case, we created very special one-minute sequences for each song for the way Umm Kulthum is going to appear [on stage]. Each one of those transitions is infused with the colours of her dress.” In one sequence she wears a red dress and appears from an elegant, gentle cloud of smoke that fills the stage. Another transition is purely made from strings of silver and gold. “It's not just like, 'Here you go, here's what Umm Kulthum looked like,’” explains Hina. “No, it has to be like a movie – there's a buildup, there's a story and there's an end.”
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Umm Kulthum’s hologram first graced the stage in 2013. It was a comparatively short and limited performance created for the launch of the television channel MBC Masr in Cairo. But computer graphics at the time were not as advanced, and Hina’s team had to resort to a technique called rotoscoping, where they would manually extract Umm Kulthum from archival black-and-white footage and add colour overtop, a process that was time-consuming at best. “The resolution is limited to the original video, and unfortunately, Umm Kulthum was always shot on a medium or long camera lenses, so you wouldn’t be able to see her facial details – you wouldn’t be able to see her smile,” says Hina. They only managed a six-minute production at the time. Six years later in Dubai, however, with Umm Kulthum will perform for nearly a full hour. She will be accompanied by a live orchestra for four of her biggest hits: ‘Enta Omri’, ‘Sirit il Hob’, ‘Alf Leila w Leila’ and ‘Lissa Fakker’.
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32-year-old Jordanian national Hina says he did not have any reservations or negative feelings about taking on the ambitious project – only “complete excitement”. “Every pixel has to be perfect. People will go in and experience something that is completely flawless, because it's not a joke. The respect people have for her is of a whole different caliber,” he says.
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“There's something maybe most people don't know about Umm Kulthum and why she had this phenomenal voice. She had an additional vocal line [to] normal human beings. That's why she was able to go beyond the normal levels of audio that [we are used to]. If you notice at her events, the microphones were always at least two meters away from her, because her voice was so strong that you don't actually need the mics – they were just to support rather than through to actually broadcast,” he continues.
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“The other thing is that Umm Kulthum was actually the maestro. She was leading the music with her voice and her body movement; the kerchief in her hand was acting as the stick that the maestro holds. Imagine someone who was capable of singing, leading an orchestra and holding a performance for four hours straight without even getting tired.”
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The full Umm Kulthum experience has been staged only once before, earlier this year in Al-Ula in Saudi Arabia. According to Hina, they did not see the audience’s reaction, but heard it. “People start screaming. At first, there's a moment of silence when she appears on stage, because everyone is shocked and then it just turns into claps and cheers,” says Hina. “For people who actually had the chance to see Umm Kulthum live, you're taking them back 50 years… All their memories, all their emotions from that era will come back to them in that moment.”
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Sanaa Nabil, who counts Umm Kulthum as a grandmother – though, more accurately, she is her great-grandmother’s sister – will also be at the event to perform two songs. She began singing at the age of 9 at school events. Nabil appeared on the televised competition Arabs Got Talent earlier this year. She performed ‘Ifrah Ya Albi’ on the show and got the Golden Buzzer from actor judge Ahmed Hilmi.
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Hina doesn’t plan on stopping here. Not only are they planning more hologram concerts, but even the resurrection of classical Arabic plays. “We've been asked to do something for [Egyptian singer] Abdul Halim Hafez. At the same time, we are pitching to host a concert in Saudi Arabia for [Saudi performer] Talal Maddah, which is going to be a very emotional concert; may he rest in peace, he actually passed away on stage and didn't complete his last concert, so it might be very emotional to approach this,” says Hina. “We're considering doing projects that are beyond musical concerts, like the recreation of old plays such as Madrasat Al Mushaghibeen – those iconic plays that we watch all the time, but we never experienced on stage. The possibilities are endless.”
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