Iranian Theater Festival 2011

Details

Parent Category: Other Festivals

Category: Theater

Published on Wednesday, 02 March 2011 22:05

Written by L E Shannon

The Iranian Theater Festival is running March 3-26, 2011 at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn, New York.  This is the first festival in New York devoted solely to Iranian Theater.

Iran, one of the oldest civilizations in history, has created many rich traditions of performance from ancient times through the modern day. Persian theater, influenced by Arab, Assyrian and other cultures of the Middle East, is a vibrant heritage that remains woefully underrepresented on American stages.

The festival includes plays in Persian and English,  newly-commissioned contemporary works from Iranian-based playwrights and participants of the Fadjr International Theatre Festival and a special celebration of the traditional Iranian New Year’s holiday, Nowruz.

A special celebration of the late theater legend Reza Abdoh will include exclusive screenings of complete films of his original productions The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice and Quotations from a Ruined City. Special panel discussions are being held by Dar a Luz company members, including Sabrina Artel, Juliana Francis-Kelly and Tony Torn.

FREE EVENTS:

Cover Girl / Pen Pals Meet: A Conversation Between Eliza and Salar
Thursday, March 3 @ 8pm
Two free events together in one evening to kick off the festival!

Cover Girl
Written and performed by Safa Samiezade'-Yazd
An Iranian American woman growing up in St. Louis feels like a stranger in a strange land. She uses her veil to cover herself, and the veil becomes a kind of "childhood home." Gradually, in dance interludes between her stories, she strips away all false interpretations of the veil, examining what "veiling" really means in Iran and in the United States.

Pen Pals Meet: A Conversation Between Eliza and Salar
Presented by Thinking Persons Theatre; Iran & NYC
In 2008 Eliza Bent received an email from Salar Sardary, an Iranian university student, who asked about how to view American Theatre Magazine online. From that interaction, an unlikely sporadic pen pal friendship formed. Two years later the pen pals meet officially over Skype and have a conversation, live on stage.

Nowruz
Sunday, March 13 at 5pm
Join The Brick and the 2011 Iranian Theater Festival for a pre-Iranian New Year party. This annual Persian celebration dates back millennia to pre-Islamic ancient Zoroastrian rituals marking the Spring Solstice.  We will  have traditional food, music, poetry and other entertainments to mark "Nowruz" or New Day. Traditional celebrations stretch over a period of 13 days of visits, charity, renewal and reconciliation with the last day reserved for picnicking in the outdoors.

TICKETED EVENTS ($15):

Aviary (A preview excerpt) / In Media Res / White Rabbit, Red Rabbit
Three shows for the price of one! 90 minutes, all together.
Mon March 7 @ 8pm, Tue March 8 @ 8pm, Mon March 14 @ 8pm (Talkback with the Artists @ 9:30pm), & Tue March 15 @ 8pm

Aviary, A preview excerpt
Created by Brendan Regimbal & Samara Naeymi; NYC
In a lush world of dense media-scapes, dance and traditional storytelling are used to collide the story of Scheherazade and her sister with the Victorian era’s Isabel Burton and Jane Digby.

In Medias Res
Written & performed by Sade Namei; NYC
In Medias Res explores the identity of an Iranian-born actor who journeys through the space of identity, nation, and sex. Haunted by a sense of pride and responsibility, she is compelled to change past and recent history with her instrument, her voice.  This play was originally performed as a part of an ensemble piece at PS 122 with workshop nudges of performance artist and activist Tim Miller. 

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit
Written by Nassim Soleimanpour; Iran & NYC
Soleimanpour's postmodern theatrical happening receives its New York premiere replete with murders, suicides and rabbits. "Requirements for the performance: Two glasses of water. A copy of this play." 

Bootleg Islam
Written & performed by Negin Farsad
Presented by Vaguely Qualified Productions; NYC
A one-woman comedy about a California-raised Iranian-American girl gallivanting around the streets of Tehran, Iran. She travels to this Middle-Eastern hotbed for a cousin’s wedding and discovers how ridiculous oppression can be, how delicious the third world has become and how hard it is to keep a chador on.
Wed March 23 @ 7pm (Talkback with the Artists @ 8pm), & Fri March 25 @ 9:30pm

The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice
With Tom Fitzpatrick, Alan Mandell, Joselito Amen Santos, Borracha, Juliana Francis Kelly
Directed by Reza Abdoh
A video of Reza Abdoh’s landmark work with Obie Award-winner Juliana Francis-Kelly. “Abdoh visualized an Orwellian society in the 21st Century where sex is punished by death. He heard a monstrous vice cop scream at a married couple named Orpheus and Eurydice, 'We're gonna bore desire right out of you.’"
Friday, March 18 at 7pm (Talkback with original Dar A Luz company member Juliana Francis-Kelly @ 8:30pm)

Ka
Written by Siavash Pakrah & Directed by Gyda Arber
Presented by The Fifth Wall; NYC
Three slaves, entombed in their Master's crypt, search for faith, meaning and a way out of their prison.  Before their air is gone. And before The Master arrives. Join us in a world of double and triple meanings that sheds light on contemporary Iran, where one thing always stands for another. Translated into English for the first time.
March 9 @ 8pm (Talkback with the Artists @ 9:30pm), March 11 @ 7pm, March 19 @ 3pm, March 24 @ 9pm, & March 26 @ 9pm

Kharaji / Foreigner
Written & performed by Jaleh Stoltz; Philadelphia, PA
This is a personal exploration of faith, identity, and culture in an increasingly complicated world. Stoltz uses dance and theater to reenact her religious upbringing in the Baha'i Faith and a solo-journey to the Islamic Republic of Iran to find the roots of her religious convictions.
Thu March 17 @ 7pm, Sat March 19 @ 9pm (Talkback with the Artists @ 10:30pm), & Sun March 20 @ 2pm

Quotations from a Ruined City
With Sabrina Artel, Brenden Doyle, Anita Durst, Tom Fitzpatrick, Mario Gardner, Mel Herst, Peter Jacobs, Tom Pearl, Ken Roht, Tony Torn, Tom Walker, John Yankee
Text by Reza Abdoh and Salar Abdoh, Directed by Reza Abdoh
A video of one of Reza Abdoh’s final productions. “Quotations From a Ruined City is a sort of apocalyptic follies: an evening of song, dance, poetry, nudity and torture set in a world whose center has clearly long ceased to hold. Created and directed by the gifted young theatrical cult artist Reza Abdoh, the work is a kaleidoscopic catalogue of images of decay and destruction that range through the centuries and around the globe.” The New York Times review from 1994. 
Sunday, March 20 @ 4pm (Talkback with original DAR A LUZ company members Tony Torn and Sabrina Artel @ 5:30pm)

Silken Veils
Written & Directed by Leila Ghaznavi
Presented by Pantea Productions; Valencia, CA
An elegant hybdrization of Rumi poetry, marionettes, shadow puppets, live performance, animation, and contemporary Iranian history, Silken Veils in an original work showing the turbulence and passion of family during the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Told through the eyes of Darya, the daughter character in this piece, we see how the Revolution pulled down her family as she recounts her memories to her fiancée on their wedding day. Fringe First Nominee at the 2010 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Fri March 11 @ 9pm (Talkback with the Artists @ 10pm), Sat March 12 @ 4pm, & Sun March 13 @ 1pm

Something Something Uber Alles
Written by Assurbanipal Babilla & Directed by Michael Yawney
Performed by Matthew Glass; Miami, FL
A bizarre and dramatic journey of epic proportions, as our lonely actor recalls the life of a man whose only noticeable feature is that he is Hitler's doppelganger. Listen as he is discovered by two gay pastry chefs and inducted into a Hitler worshipping cult located miles and miles below the F Train in Midtown Manhattan.
Fri March 4 @ 7pm, Sat March 5 @ 7pm, Sat March 12 @ 6pm (Talkback with the Artists @ 7:30pm), Fri March 25 @ 7pm, & Sat March 26 @ 2pm

Three Eternal Days
Written by Mohammad Ebrahimian; NYC
University students in war-torn Iran wrestle with Rumi, The Quran and The Book of Revelations as their families struggle to survive. But when the air-raid sirens sing out, whose ethos will truly matter? A cultural, historical, religious, mythical tour de force set during the time of the Iraq missile attacks on Iran. The play is steeped in the traditional Ta'ziyah and the devotions of Saint Reza. Three Eternal Days is a contemporary work translated into English for the first time.
Sat March 19 @ 6pm, Sun March 20 @ 8:30pm, Mon March 21 @ 8pm, Tue March 22 @ 8pm (Talkback with the Artists @ 9:30pm), Thu March 24 @ 7pm, & Sat March 25 @ 6:30pm

2 Stories That End in Suicide
Presented by Piehole; NYC
This production uses video, puppetry, and live actors to tell the story of contemporary youth in Iran, and the limitations of Western media representations. The play is drawn from two seemingly disparate novels (Cesare Pavese’s Among Women Only and Sadegh Hedayet’s The Blind Owl), as well as the censorship laws required by the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance and the blogging habits of young Iranians. Tying these threads together with our distinctive brand of strangeness and humor, ideas of private and public suffering are probed as the repressed and complex conditions in Iranian society are examined.
Thu March 17 @ 9pm, Fri March 18 @ 9:30pm (Talkback with the Artists @ 11pm), & Fri March 25 @ 11pm

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit
Written by Nassim Soleimanpour; Iran & NYC
Playwright Soleimanpour's postmodern theatrical happening receives its New York premiere replete with murders, suicides and rabbits. "Requirements for the performance: Two glasses of water. A copy of this play." Additional performances Sat March 5 @ 9pm (performed in Persian by Soheil Mostajabian), Sun March 6 @ 5pm (performed in English by Soheil Mostajabian; Talkback with the Artist @ 6pm) & Sat March 26 @ 4pm

About the Brick

The Brick was founded in 2002 by Robert Honeywell and Michael Gardner. Formerly an auto-body shop, a yoga center, and various storage spaces, this brick-walled garage in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was completely refurbished as a state-of-the-art performance space. Since then, The Brick has launched, produced and presented hundreds of world-premiere stage works from New York emerging artists and theater-makers from around the globe. The theater company is a proud member of New York’s burgeoning Indie Theater community and informal home to an ever-expanding family of artists and avid theatergoers. The Brick received a 2009 New York Innovative Theatre Foundation Caffe Cino Fellowship Award for being “an Off-Off Broadway theatre company that consistently produces outstanding work.”

For more information, visit www.bricktheater.com.

Iranian Theater Festival
March 3 - 26, 2011

The Brick Theater
575 Metropolitan Avenue
between Union and Lorimer)
Brooklyn, NY


Photos:
Ka (photo by Gyda Arber)
Silken Veils (Photo by Nick Shoub)
2 Stories that End in Suicide (Photo by Emily Friend Roberts)

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