“Song of the North”

Bringing a Persian Epic to the World, With Help From 483 Puppets

Hamid Rahmanian has made it his life’s work to share the richness of Iranian culture. “Song of the North,” at the New Victory Theater, is just the latest installment.

The show, at the New Victory Theater in Manhattan, is aimed at audiences 8 and older. It’s the latest of Hamid Rahmanian’s projects drawing on the “Shahnameh.” Photo by Gavin Doran. Courtesy New York Times. 

by Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times

On a recent afternoon on 42nd Street in Manhattan, a mythological bird was preparing to take flight.

Backstage at the New Victory Theater, a black-clad puppeteer put on an elaborately stylized mask and stepped into a beam of light, throwing the shadow of fluttering hands onto a large scrim.

Nearby, two other performers were gearing up to practice a sword fight. Then the music started, and a crew of nine began a full run-through of “Song of the North,” an elaborate shadow puppet staging of stories from the 10th-century Persian epic the “Shahnameh.”

From the audience, the show unfolded like a seamless animation. But backstage, the next 80 minutes were half ballet, half mad scramble, as the performers grabbed hundreds of different puppets, props and masks stacked on tables and, with split-second timing, jumped in and out of the light beams streaming from two projectors.

Leaning against a backstage wall was the show’s creator, Hamid Rahmanian. His role? “Stressing out,” he said.

A Review on "The Persians" – women on the edge

5 Iranian Women are at the Centre of New Fiction Release, The Persians

This multigenerational saga of an Iranian family fleeing to the US during the 1979 revolution is both funny and poignant

by Joanna Cannon, The Guardian

Courtesy 4th Estate.

“She’d grown pale, her eyes frozen, like she’d seen her own ghost. But aren’t we all exactly that? Each the ghost of an unchosen path,” writes Sanam Mahloudji in her debut, a multigenerational story of five Iranian women from the prestigious Valiat family, separated by personal and political revolutions, and each struggling to accept the path not taken.

The narrative is shared between the five voices, as it shifts back and forth across 80 years. There is Elizabeth, the matriarch, who – not blessed with the perfect features of her sisters – becomes fixated on her looks (“this is the story of a nose”, she tells us). Eventually she falls in love with a boy who loves her back; unfortunately, that boy is the son of her family’s chauffeur: not an ideal situation in 1940s Tehran. Bowing to pressure from her father, Elizabeth eventually marries someone of her own class; frail and elderly by the time the 1979 revolution begins, she decides to remain with her husband in Iran. However, because the family is rich and high profile, and descendants of Babak Ali Khan Valiat, the heroic “Great Warrior”, as the revolution takes hold she insists that her two daughters flee the country for their own safety. Like many thousands of Iranians at the time, they choose to travel to the United States, the land of opportunity.

Seema, who struggles with being both an idealist and a housewife, tries to adapt to 1980s Los Angeles – or “Tehrangeles”, as it’s known, due to the high Persian population (the climate and mountains are reminders of home). Meanwhile Shirin, an outspoken events planner whose outlandish behaviour opens the novel with a bang when she is falsely arrested for prostitution, settles in Houston with designer labels and a mediocre husband.

The Artistic Journey of an Iranian Designer

 A New Book Shares the Artistic Odyssey of Iranian Designer Farshid Mesghali

Man & Lion (sculpture), 2006. © Farshid Mesghali; Courtesy PRINT Magazine. 

by Majid Abbasi, PRINT Magazine

In the 1960s and 1970s in Iran, with economic development and government support, as well as the expansion of activities and the establishment of various institutes and cultural centers, art and graphic design flourished. During these years, Iranian graphic design drew from the country’s rich visual heritage, eschewing the Swiss International Style, and found influences in Polish graphic design styles and the historical reinterpretations of Push Pin Studios. Farshid Mesghali is one of the most influential and prominent representatives of graphic art and illustration of this period. With a deep understanding of both Iranian and international visual languages, Mesghali creates works that, while poetic and simple, invite entirely personal and free interpretations. He often reimagines these diverse sources into innovative forms, embodying a generation that laid the foundations of the golden age of graphic design in Iran.

A comprehensive book, Selected Works of Farshid Mesghali, was recently published in Tehran by Nazar Art Publishing. This book, unparalleled in its kind, offers a relatively complete collection of Mesghali’s works in graphic design, illustration, painting, sculpture, and photography. It also includes essays exploring various aspects of his life and work by Mahmoudreza Bahmanpour (publisher and curator of Islamic Art at LACMA), Ali Bakhtiari (curator and writer), Behzad Hatam (graphic designer), and Amir Nasri.