The Shahnama in Contemporary Iranian Art

Sadegh Tirafkan (Iranian, 1965–2013). Multitude 10, 2008. Digital photo collage, lambda print; H. 29 1/8 in. (74 cm), W. 44 1/8 in. (112 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, 2011 NoRuz at the Met Benefit, 2013 (2013.258). Courtesy Met Museum.

by Courtney A. Stewart, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Though the vast majority of the Met's Islamic collection comprises historical artifacts, we have recently started collecting contemporary art from the regions represented in our galleries. Deciding what exactly is included in the field of contemporary Islamic art is an issue that has been heatedly debated in past years, including most recently at a conference, Contemporary Islamic Art, Design, and Architecture 2015, that I attended in Singapore just a few weeks ago. Scholars have differing opinions of how to define or label works from this category, and our department takes its own particular approach. For us, the collecting mandate is that modern and contemporary works must relate to the historical collection.

A popular theme for some contemporary Iranian artists is to use iconography that refers to the Persian national epic, the Shahnama (Book of Kings), originally composed by Abu'l Qasim Firdausi (935–1020). In the work above, Rustam Returns at Age 30 after Being Brought Up Abroad, Iranian artist Siamak Filizadeh uses new media and popular culture to reference the hero Rustam. This same character appears in illustrations found in various manuscripts of the Shahnama, including the famous sixteenth-century version created for Shah Tahmasp.

Identifiable by his leopard-skin helmet in both the historical and the contemporary depictions, artists have usually portrayed Rustam in a manner that highlights his bravery and strength. In Filizadeh's work, he represents Rustam the hero as a muscular bodybuilder, with the letter "R" covering a red-and-yellow Superman logo on his bare chest. Here, he holds a rocket-propelled grenade launcher with a small decal of the film character Rambo and wears a Dolce and Gabbana belt. Contemporary Rustam appears with a tiled Safavid-style arch and rocks akin to those found in Persian miniature painting, as well as the Shahyad monument (Burj-i Azadi) built in 1971, considered to be the quintessential symbol of and gateway to modern Tehran. The work is a whimsical creation of an immediately identifiable character and uses visual cues to bridge chronology between historical and contemporary Islamic art.

Meanwhile, in Sadegh Tirafkan's Multitude 10, the artist creates a digital photo collage of young Iranian girls performing exercises in a gym class.

Taboos Become Toxic

An Interview with Mark Cousins

by Roland Elliott Brown, IranWire

Edinburgh-based filmmaker and film historian Mark Cousins is one of Iranian cinema’s most enthusiastic advocates. He drew attention to Iranians’ cinematic achievements in his 2004 book The Story of Film, and his 2011 documentary series The Story of Film: An Odyssey. He first traveled to Iran by road from Scotland in 2001. When he visited again in 2005 to make two documentaries, Cinema Iran and On the Road with Kiarostami, he met artist, actor, and director Mania Akbari, who was best known for her performance in Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten, and for her own film, 20 Fingers. In 2011, Akbari fled to London after Iranian authorities arrested crew members working on her film Women Do Not Have Breasts. Last year, Cousins and Akbari began exchanging “cine-letters” about life, art, and the human body, which comprise their new film, Life May Be.

How did you become acquainted with Iranian cinema, and with Iran?

I saw Abbas Kiarostami's Where is the Friend's House in the late 1980s, and read about the Iranian films that the Locarno film festival was showing. In the early 1990s, when I was director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival,  I wrote to the Iranian government's film agency, asking if they would send me films.  A few months later, a shoebox arrived.  It contained videotapes of about 10 films, gems like Mohammad Ali Talebi's The Boot. The films were revelations, paradocumentaries, human, sincere, uncompromised by commerce. I fell in love.

Life May Be draws its title from Forough Farrokhsad’s poem Another Birth. What role has Farrokhsad’s poetry played in your friendship with Mania Akbari?

I first met Mania in Iran, and we went to Forough's grave together.  I loved Forough's courage, her sass, her beauty.  For me she was like Blondie meets Virginia Woolf.  As a non-Iranian, I didn't understand a lot of things about Forough, but Mania's passion for her has helped me understand more.  She's the third part of our triangle.

Simin Behbahani: National Poet, Nation's Mother

Behbahani at a Glimpse

Image courtesy of Tavaana

by Tavaana

Simin Behbahani, one of Iran’s most prominent poets, was born to a cultured family and raised amongst the literary elite. Behbahani published her first poem when she was only 14 years old, and in the years that followed, she gradually developed her own style of writing as she became a renowned poet. Prior to the 1979 Iranian revolution, Behbahani worked as a songwriter for the Iranian National Radio. She was also a member of the Iranian National Radio and Television Council for Music for some time.

Alongside her career as a poet, Behbahani was always involved in social and civic activism. In her youth, she was a member of the Tudeh Party of Iran’s Youth Organization, and later on, she helped found the Iranian Writers’ Association. In later years, Behbahani became known as a women’s rights activist respected by the young members of the Iranian feminist movement. Even though her poetry mainly touches on personal themes, socio-political concerns, too, played an important part in informing her vision. Social justice, poverty, women’s rights, freedom of speech, and resisting censorship are all central themes in many of her poems.

In recent years, the Iranian government had imposed restrictions on Behbahani’s activism, and the authoritarian voices in the media attacked her character. Nevertheless, Behbahani continued to express herself and chose to address these attacks from a compassionate perspective. She passed away at age 87 in August 2014.

A Poet Raised from Her Mother’s Bosom

Simin Khalili, better known as Simin Behbahani, was born on July 20, 1927 in Tehran.[1] Her father, Abbas Khalili, wrote poetry in both Persian and Arabic. He was the editor-in-chief of Nedaay-e-Islam’ newspaper before starting his own paper, Eghdam.[2] He translated over 1,100 stanzas from Ferdowsi’s mythical epic poem, the Shahnameh (The Book of Kings). Behbahani’s mother, Fakhr-Ozmaa Arghoun, was erudite and progressive: she was born in 1898 in Tehran and had learned Arabic and Persian in elementary school alongside her brothers before continuing her education in French and English at the Joan of Arc French school and the American School.[3]

Poetry of protest gives view into distant worlds

by Maya Weeks, Index on Censorship

A few weeks ago, 13,000 writers swarmed Seattle for the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. In the seaport city known for its ideal reading (and writing) weather — and home to poet Maged Zaher – writers filled hotel rooms and bars. On official panels they debated the state of contemporary literature, and at offsite readings and parties, they celebrated the written word.

The song of the nightingale / Is not up for sale
Ziba Karbassi, Gravequake

On the other side of the hemisphere, Ziba Karbassi doesn’t need to attend a conference to know what contemporary literature looks like. Born in 1974 in Tabriz, Iran, this rising star of Persian poetry, who also writes in her first language of Azeri Turkish, has been living in exile in London since leaving her country in 1989. Karbassi has published eight books of poetry in Persian, and with Stephen Watts, she has translated much of her work into English.

Taken from an incident close to the author’s family in the 1980s, her poem “Death by Stoning” depicts a young pregnant woman taken to prison, tortured, and stoned to death:

I am not a scaffold to be toppled
not a felled tree to be sunk in the flood

I am only a bag of bones and skin
smashed about

The heavy consonants in the nouns and adjectives and the scattered form of the poem demonstrate the mother-to-be’s “anguished, loving, and crazed” state of mind. “Death by Stoning” shows how poetry can give us a view into worlds distant from — but not entirely unlike — our own. Poetry can also play a part in shaping our world.

Rumi’s Norouz Greeting

Text from the facsimile edition of the oldest extant manuscript of the Masnavi, dated 577 AH/ 1278 AD, folio 281A, in the Konya Mavlānā Museum, published by the Turkish Ministry of Culture, 1993. Image courtesy of Alan Williams.

Now leave this, father, New Year’s Day is come,         

the creatures’ mouths are sweetened by our Maker.

Back to our river came the spirit’s water,                     

our King has come back to our neighbourhood.

Fortune parades herself and trails her skirts,                 

and beats the drum to break vows of repentance.

Once more the flood has swept away repentance,      

our chance has come now sleep has got the watchman.

The drinkers quaffed the wine and all got sloshed!    

Tonight we’re going to wager our possessions!

From ruby life-increasing spirit-wine                               

we’re ruby in a ruby in a ruby.

The place has come alive again – delightful!                

Go burn esfand against the evil eye!

I hear the noise of happy revellers!                               

Beloved, we must always be like this!...

Translated by Alan Williams from the Sixth book of Rumi’s Masnavi, ed. R.A. Nicholson vv. 939-946 (ed. M. Este‘lami 944-951).

Alan Williams is British Academy Wolfson Research Professor 2013-2016 and is also Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Manchester, England. 

Poetry as Life, Life as Poetry

Fifty years ago, Forugh Farrokhzad’s 'Another Birth' modernized and scandalized Iranian poetry with its radical feminine voice.

Image via Wikimedia, courtesy Guernica.

by Shaj Mathew, Guernica

“Poetry is my God,” Forugh Farrokhzad once wrote in a letter to her father. “I am happy when my soul is content and poetry satisfies my soul, whereas if I have all these good things that people kill themselves for and am deprived of writing poetry, I will kill myself.” Farrokhzad encapsulates this life-or-death relationship to her art in “Another Birth,” the titular poem of a collection that by turns modernized and scandalized literary Tehran when it was published 50 years ago in the spring of 1964. Its first line—“My whole being is a dark chant”—affirms the Persian littératrice’s artistic credo: poetry as life, life as poetry.

This was a revolutionary stance for a woman living in mid-century Iran. After all, men dominate the entire Middle Eastern literary tradition, so much of which is organized around the tension between the active male lover and the passive female beloved. The paradigmatic example of this is of course the centuries-old story of Leyli and Majnun, a sort of proto-Romeo and Juliet that figures prominently in the history of Middle Eastern and South Asian art and literature. (Briefly: The two are forbidden to marry, leading Majnun, which literally means mad, to go crazy, move to the woods, and write poetry; in the end, Leyli dies, as does Majnun.) Originating in the verse of the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami, this legend of star-crossed lovers still permeates Middle Eastern literature. But many later interpretations of the story dwell on the point-of-view of the moon-struck Majnuns and never the Leylis with whom they are helplessly besotted.

Here’s where Farrokzhad offers a corrective: Another Birth, as well as her three earlier collections, The Captive, The Wall, and The Rebellion, inverts this patriarchal dynamic, privileging Farrokhzad’s own feminine voice above all others.

Many scholars take Farrokhzad to be the speaker of “Another Birth,” which begins by observing how poetry has the power to preserve the people who make a life so meaningful—and painful: “in this chant / I grafted you to the tree, / to the water, to the fire,” she writes, probably alluding to one Ebrahim Golestan, doubtless the “E.G.” to whom the volume is dedicated. That’s at least the interpretation of Michael Hillman, the professor of Persian whose excellent book, A Lonely Woman, is one of the few English-language treatments of Farrokhzad’s life and poetry.

Call to Arms

Only you, O Iranian woman, have remained in bonds of wretchedness, misfortune, and cruelty; if you want these bonds broken, grasp the skirt of obstinacy - Forough Farrokhzad, Call to Arms

Mona Shomali and Haleh Jamali Explore Female Iranian Identity in a Joint Exhibition

by Joobin Bekhrad, REORIENT

Opening February 19^th at Philadelphia’s Asian Arts Initiative is That Person Who is Your Creation, an exhibition of the works of two female Iranian artists, Mona Shomali, and Haleh Jamali. A collaboration between From the Mouth of the Lion, Sara Zia Ebrahimi’s US-based non-profit organisation dedicated to showcasing the works of emerging Iranian artists in the diaspora born on the cusp of the ’79 Islamic Revolution and artclvb, an online platform for contemporary Middle Eastern art, the exhibition will feature five paintings from Shomali’s Naked Folklore series, and two video installations by Jamali.

Taking its title from Call to Arms, a poem by the late Iranian poet (and director) Forough Farrokhzad (1935 – 1967), the exhibition explores the subject of female identity from the perspective of two Iranian women living in the West. Through the medium of painting and film, Shomali, an artist born and raised in the United States, and Scotland-based Jamali, curator of the Edinburgh Iranian Festival, examine what it means to be an Iranian woman, challenging both Eastern and Western perceptions and notions in the process.

Last week, I talked to Mona, Haleh, and Sara about some of the ideas and themes of the exhibition, the works on display, and naturally, the connection with Forough Farrokhzad.

Despite having passed away at an incredibly young age, leaving behind a relatively small body of work, Farrokhzad’s influence and impact on Iranian artists of all mediums – female artists in particular – has been immense. How, nearly 50 years after her death, has Farrokhzad inspired you as artists?

Mona: When I was a teenager, my mom talked quite a bit about how sexuality was different for women in America than it was for her in Iran. For example, she told me that no one ever said ‘vagina’ in front of her when she was younger, and she didn’t really know what the proper word was in Farsi, because it was so often referred to as ‘down there’. She made it seem as if Iranian women between the 50s and 70s were dispossessed of their own bodies. She was the first person to tell me about Farrokhzad. Her description of the poems was special, because she believed they were the first widely-read poems where an Iranian woman was talking about her own sensuality and sensual feelings in a way she saw fit for herself. Her excitement over Farrokhzad’s poetry was palpable, as if it were something rare and exotic, and she saw Farrokhzad as taking a stand and owning her sexuality in a way that hadn’t been done before. I continued to read Farrokhzad’s poetry in college when I took a Farsi class and studied with a Farsi tutor. I gained a deeper appreciation for her when I realised she was not just a pioneer when it came to sensuality, but also that her criticism of Iranian culture was very illuminating and truthful.

Iranian Art That Transcends Politics

Parvis Tanavoli's 'Heech' means nothing, or null in Farsi. He writes the word in the Farsi script and places it in different positions and forms. Image courtesy Al-Monitor

by Roshanak Taghavi

For a mystic like ancient Sufi poet and philosopher Jalal al-din Rumi, the progression toward “nothingness” — known in Persian as “heech”— is spiritual.  No matter what one’s external circumstances may be, self-awareness is an art to be realized personally, deep within oneself.

“Since you are more than tongue can tell, behold how eloquent I am without a tongue,” he wrote almost eight centuries ago. “Like the moon, without legs, I race through nothingness.”

Iranians have, throughout their history, engaged in this pursuit of spiritual progression — both during Iran’s millennia-long institution of monarchy and also after the country’s 1979 Revolution, which brought with it the establishment of an Islamic Republic.

Through it all, they have adapted to the challenges that came with new shifts in rule, infusing the realities of their external circumstances into personal rituals (such as holidays or prayers), and saturating their poetry and art with symbolism. Through the written word, the creation of art and an inherent flexibility, Iranians have always managed to communicate “without a tongue.”

Rumi, whose 800 year-old poems are, coincidentally, the most widely read throughout the United States, remains deeply revered within all strata of Iranian society. His teaching of humanity as Heech, or nothingness, is most prominently conveyed through the work of contemporary Iranian artist and sculptor Parviz Tanavoli.

Tanavoli’s sculpture, Poet Turning into Heech, which depicts the body of a man turning into a poet, is the centerpiece of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection of contemporary Iranian art in New York.

The tortured face of Iran

A banned novel by Iran’s greatest living writer and a collection of poetry from the country and its exiles give voice to the terrible cost of oppression. 


By Arlice Davenport, The Wichita Eagle


This is how the world ends.

An old man, drenched from relentless rain, having just buried his teenage daughter – who was tortured to death for distributing anti-government pamphlets – meditates on the horrid fate of his five children – three dead at the hands of successive, oppressive regimes; one driven mad in prison and now hiding in his father’s basement; one surviving through marriage to a profiteering sycophant, who props up whichever corrupt despot is in power.

At the same time, the old man reviews the shame and humiliation of his mortal sins – murder and military insubordination. He dons his dress uniform, stripped of its insignia, takes down the gleaming saber from his living-room wall – the saber he ran through the heart of his adulterous wife, then eviscerated her with – feels the edge of the blade, runs his thumb across his jugular vein, steps out into the courtyard, crowded by the specters of his past, and takes his own life.

Persian poetry power: Writers are bringing the spirit of Iran's verse to Britain

In Iran, verse moves crowds to tears.

by Christina Patterson, The Independent

Three years ago, in a garden full of cypress trees, I watched men and women kissing a marble tomb. Some of them were smiling. Some were wiping tears away. Nearly all of them where whispering words that sounded like a prayer, or song. But the words they were reciting, in this beautiful garden, in Shiraz, in Iran, weren't the words of the Koran. The words they were reciting were the words of a poet born in Shiraz 700 years ago called Hafez.

If you grow up in a country like England, where poetry is something most people study a bit at school and then forget, it's quite a shock to see poetry have so much power. You know, in theory, that it can. You've heard about the poets who filled football stadiums, in Russia, and Eastern Europe. You may even, like me, have met quite a few of them, and heard them read, and talk about, their poems. But it's still a shock to see men, with moustaches, and women, in chadors, fighting tears, as if the words they're reciting are written on their hearts.

So when I heard there was going to be a tour of Persian poets in this country, I wanted to find out more. It's nearly a decade since I ran an organisation promoting poets and poetry, and since I talked, publicly and often, about poetry's role, and power. I wanted, in an age when we get our entertainment at the click of a mouse, to be reminded that poetry can matter. To see if I still believed it could.

"I think," said the poet Sarah Maguire, at the launch of the Persian poets tour, at an art gallery in Bloomsbury last week, "that what you experienced in Iran you'd also experience in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Somalia or Sudan. Poetry in these countries is of overwhelming importance. Both Arabic and Persian culture have this very old, pre-Islamic tradition of written poetry. In Somali culture, it's oral. The most poetry-obsessed people in the world are Somalis." I knew about the Arabic and Persian obsession with poetry, but I didn't, I told her, know about the Somalis. But Somalia is as near to a failed state as you get, and only an Ayatollah could claim Iran was a successful model of anything much. So what, exactly, is gained?

Maguire was quiet for a moment. "I think," she said, "it's the people's pride. Somalis are the most traduced and stepped-on people on Earth, but they have this sense that their identity is carried by poetry. One of the things I wanted to do in setting up the Poetry Translation Centre was to try and get across to British people that there are these people here who may be at the bottom of the social pile, but have this extraordinary tradition of rich culture, and this dignifies them."

But isn't poetry a bit of a luxury when lots of very poor people are having their meagre incomes cut? Why should we pay to hear work by foreign poets we've never even heard of?

Expressing the Inexpressible

Iranian master Mohammad-Reza Shajarian delivers more than a stunning voice 

by Chris Vitiello, The Independent Weekly‎

Amir Rezvani pauses a moment before he can talk about it. When Mohammad-Reza Shajarian sings "Bird of Dawn," he does this to people.

"At the end of every concert people start to clap and ask him to sing that song," Rezvani, a psychiatry professor at Duke University, finally starts. "And when he sings that song, people sing with him and get emotional and cry."

When Shajarian returns to the stage for his encore Saturday night at the Durham Performing Arts Center, "Bird of Dawn"—or "Morgh-e Sahar," as people shout—will undoubtedly be his choice. Through his power as an activist, and as perhaps the greatest Iranian performer today, the song has become the unofficial Iranian national anthem, representing a persistent hope for liberty in the face of tyranny.

The song isn't about guns and despots. Rather, it's a plea to a caged bird to escape and to summon the sunrise with its song. But the conceit is obvious: Night is any oppressive force, and the bird is the irrepressible spirit within each person. The sunrise is freedom.

Preferring to inspire marches rather than participate in them, Shajarian's politics are expressed through his art. You won't hear this song on state radio in Tehran. To protest the current regime's 2009 crackdown on voter demonstrations, Shajarian no longer allows his music to be played over those official airwaves.

Sonic Solidarity

An interview with Iranian artist Shahrzad Arshadi
by Stefan Christoff, Art Threat

Portrait of artist Shahrzad Arshadi by Thien V (Montreal, March 2012).

It Is Only Sound That Remains is a sound theatre performance by artist Shahrzad Arshadi, meditating on the life and death of Ziba Kazemi, also known as Zahra Kazemi.

The story of Kazemi’s 2003 death in Iran, the ensuing Canada-Iran diplomatic fallout and the ongoing struggle for justice in the case, led by Kazemi’s son Stephan Hachemi, is relatively well known in Canada.

Kazemi was arrested for taking photographs at a student protest outside Evin Prison in Tehran, a major jail for political prisoners in Iran.

Students were protesting for political change in the country, highlighting issues such as freedom of the press, access to education and youth unemployment, and demanding the release of political prisoners. Protesters in Iran were facing serious state repression at the time; many were arrested without charge, often disappearing for days after being apprehended by state security forces.

Remembering the 2003 student protests in Iran is important because of the role they played in creating the political ground work for major protests against the presidential election in 2009, an election that many both inside and outside of Iran, including Amnesty International, criticize as undemocratic.

Rumi’s ‘The Elephant in the Dark’

or

‘Disagreeing over the Description and Shape of the Elephant’

An elephant was in a darkened hall –

            Hindus had brought it as a spectacle.

Into that darkness everybody passed

            to have a look at it, so many people.

Since seeing with the eye was not permitted,

            they felt it in the darkness with their hands.

The hand of one fell on the elephant’s trunk.

            This someone said, ‘This structure’s like a drainpipe’.

The hand of one reached to the creature’s ear –

            It seemed to him as though it were a fan.

When one hand felt its leg the person said,

            ‘To me the elephant’s shape is like a pillar!’

And one who put his hand upon its back

            remarked, ‘This elephant’s just like a sofa!’

Just as each one had touched whatever part,

            so people formed their view from what they’d heard.

Their statements differed as their point of view –

            one man would call it ‘chalk’, another ‘cheese’.

If each had held a candle in his hand,

            the disputes would have vanished from their speech.

The sensual eye is like the hand, that’s all –

            a hand can’t grasp an elephant entirely.

The Ocean’s eye is one thing, spray’s another.

            Give up the spray! Look with the Ocean’s eye.

Spray leaping from the Ocean day and night,

            you see the spray not Ocean – how surprising!

Translated by Alan Williams from the third book of Rumi’s Masnavi, ed. R.A. Nicholson III.1259-1271, (ed. M. Este‘lami III. 1260-1272).

Alan Williams is Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Manchester, England, and the author of Rumi Spiritual Verses: The First Book of the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi, London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2006 and an audiobook, The Spiritual Verses, read by Anton Lesser, translated and abridged by Alan Williams, London: Naxos, 2007.

Poet, Activist Remembers Life in Iran Pre-Revolution

"At that time, nobody paid attention to what girls did when they got together." 

Q&A | by Rasheed Abou-Alsamh in Brasília

Saghi Ghahraman is an Iranian lesbian poet and gay rights activist who lives in Toronto. Born in 1957 in the holy city of Mashhad, she studied classic and contemporary Persian literature at Azarabadegan University in Tabriz. She left Iran in 1982 after attacks on the women's organization she worked at, and was a refugee in Turkey until 1987 when she emigrated to Canada.

She now works with PEN Canada's Exiled Writer program, and is on the editorial board of the literary magazine Descan. She has published three collections of poetry and one collection of short stories. She also serves on the board of the Iranian Queer Organization.

Ghahraman recently spoke about what life was like for her growing up as a lesbian during the Shah's regime and just after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

***

Lesbians in Iran do not get much attention internationally. Is this because the Iranian authorities pay less attention to them than to gay men? Are some of them also arrested and charged with being homosexual?

The gay movement in Iran started right before the Revolution, and then picked up again around 1990, with gay men leading the fight without any lesbian involvement for a very long time. Lesbians appeared very slowly and reluctantly around 2005 or 2006, and without much fuss or pretense in making their presence felt as part of a social movement. So the attention is rightly given to gay men.

Iranian lesbians were heavily oppressed by the Iranian women's movement and its concerns. Lesbians were told to be quiet so as to prevent any labeling of the movement by the regime. They argued that all activities in the women's movement should deal only with Muslim women's requirements, lest the movement [be] attacked by the regime with allegations of Westernization of the movement.

Another Birth

I know that it’s always difficult to convey a performance in words; I know I can never give the true picture of the ideas, concepts, inspiration or Instant Messaging behind a creation; and I know that describing this process is only IM-possible… I know…and yet, I know that I don’t really know…!  

After a spending a butterflish lifetime in the world of Arts, I still wonder how creativity works! Sometimes it feels like there is someone else doing all of this, and it’s not me. I have to be quiet until arriving at the moment that it decides to flood into my being. Where exactly does it have the most effect on: my mind, my body or my soul? I hear the word ‘inspiration’ several times a day – if not from the other people, from an odd being living inside me… Instant Messaging; when IM is about flourishing, I know that I have to sit down, and don’t move at all; then everything I do as an artist is all clear…!

I don’t know how it works for others; whereas for me, being determined, consistent and persistent with myself makes it possible; being devoted, focused and connected not only to time and space but also every insignificant incidence or even to an absent gaze of a passerby that I am exposed to; and following an inner voice who calls me in all the streets of my pure imagination. These make it happen.

There is an alley

which my heart has stolen

from the streets of my childhood.

On 29th of January, I stood for a while in front of the Martin Harris Centre. I gazed at the sliding doors, as it was for the first time that I was stepping into the building. I was thinking of what my theatre practice course is about; when I was woken from daydreaming by hearing my name being called. My enslaved brain followed the order and turned my head to the direction of the voice. It was Sasha- my supervisor and the course convener- with his eternal mystic smile asking me how I was doing!

I wasn’t sure about how or what I was doing at that particular moment. However, what I did afterwards was somehow linked to everything I was surrounded by; to what other people in our group were involved with; to what Anna, Amir and Rodrigo shared with my conscious and unconscious being. As we moved further along the line of time, it felt like a life was growing inside me. I was amazed by their talents, values, ideas, creativity and passion that eventually brought more meaning to my life; I was amazed of how wonderful they are. They’ve had a notable influence on my work by being my audience, taking pictures and generously giving comments and feedbacks in all of our sessions and rehearsals. This has led me into another layer of my discovery towards Drama in practice to include all of life… I was standing in front of a window… I was watching the creation of a universe…!

In a room as big as loneliness

my heart

which is as big as love

looks at the simple pretexts of its happiness

at the beautiful decay of flowers in the vase

at the sapling you planted in our garden

and the song of canaries

which sing to the size of a window.

After the outline of the course was introduced to us, I almost knew what I’m going to do. This was one of my greatest opportunities to experiment some of my IM-possible theories in performing arts. I knew that it had to conduct me in a parallel pathway with my PhD proposal. I needed to test everything, bodily movements, optical illusions, and recognising people in their everyday lives. Moreover, I’ve hoped to go beyond the borders of Eastern and Western cultures, to find new ways of a cross-cultural communication. So I’ve began my exploration in practice based in improvisation and the phylogenetic possibilities and constraints of the moving human body.

I started off my journey by identifying common movements within everyday social interaction; using everyday movements to express commonly understood experiences and forms of human action that exist across all cultures; and even digging it deeper by investigating the association between cross-cultural discourses and forms of artistic practice, production and expression.

No fisherman shall ever find a pearl in a small brook

which empties into a pool.

What do we have in common?!

Our first task was improvisation, so while feeling a true happiness underneath my skin, I began my real performance -- by performing for the real life; by playing in the real life; and by acting and being alive while experiencing: breathing, speaking, waking, sleeping, moving, staying, walking, watching, eating, drinking, working, studying, caring, loving, thriving, surviving, grasping, sitting, standing, falling, developing, shrugging, improving, protecting, hurrying, cuddling, controlling, screaming, fearing, yawning, snoring, reasoning, constructing, logging, hunting, writing, competing, pushing, travelling, shopping, putting, inspecting, posing, clapping, listening, destroying, battering, dreaming, tumbling, getting, hugging, boarding, flirting, reaching, throwing, smelling, laughing, reading, arguing, experimenting, questioning, breaking, making, knocking, shouting, persevering, shaking, touching, kissing, whispering, singing, dancing, running, jumping, washing, cleaning, fighting, gossiping, observing, removing, remembering, moving, resting, bathing, trembling, carrying, following, smiling, and even thinking of more actions and feelings to fashion new actions and feelings… playing…

…We all play in the real life, and I don’t believe if you deny multiplicity of role and character in interrelationships with the outside world; while encountering different people or being surrounded by different environmental conditions. So where is the border of being a performer and an ordinary person? As I was exploring ways of approaching this question, I was astonished by finding my ‘hero’ in Performing Arts in ordinary people and their role in everyday of their lives.

Life is perhaps

a long street through which a woman holding

a basket passes every day

Life is perhaps

a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch

life is perhaps a child returning home from school.

On the second session our task was bringing in a stimulus to be used for an improvisation. I brought in a CD with three tracks which I had listened before. Nevertheless, I tried to improvise my movements in front of our group as my audience for the very first time.

I used the power of improvisation, alongside the connection among body, mind and audience, in order to maintain momentum and create aesthetic movements. I am always influenced by the audience, even all those imaginary ones, or merely being in front of the lens of a camera. Their identity and presence change my being, setting, character, action and reaction.

It's important to mention here that I used this music later on in my final performance. In fact, I moved around a circle; I had begun where I ended and I had ended where I began. In other words, all the way I was connected with the core of the process.

The journey of a form along the line of time

inseminating the line of time with the form

a form conscious of an image

coming back from a feast in a mirror

Something that I really love about this project is our ‘unedited’ online photos usually taken by Anna and Rodrigo. To be honest, I indeed hate the sense of perfection, as it stops me going further in my search for creativity. Sometimes I’m simply in love with my failures; I have to fail… I have to fall… I don’t exist…!

They say that ‘the devil is in the detail’; a creative writer told me once, when he was commenting on my proposal. Apart from what he really meant, this expression has led me to think that god is in the whole... In my opinion, we can find both concepts of god and devil inside: when we are focused, we feel better as we are closer to the core; on the other hand, when we are breaking down things into smaller and smaller parts, might result in becoming unconsciously destructive...!

Right before starting our last session in February, we received our feedback sheets and I found out that I lost mark because of some detailish mistakes! I needed to empty myself from who I was. I needed to explode to fashion new movements and new sense of self; to embrace the whole universe and become the universe itself. I had to have nothing, in order to be part of everything; to disappear and then come to existence...!

Ah

this is my lot

this is my lot

my lot is

a sky which is taken away at the drop of a curtain

my lot is going down a flight of disused stairs

a regain something amid putrefaction and nostalgia

This is all about madness. I admit and even confess that I am not ashamed of being like crazy… You are moving with your naked soul while dancing, so why should I hide it: I have to carry the burden of madness in order to reveal something greater than myself; I have to get along with this naked soul to create another life, another birth… or as Nietzche states: “You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star”.

That day the devil inside was evoked. I went to the class quite late, but I was still restless. I walked around the stage like mad, and felt as if I was merely a shadow. When Sasha asked me if everything is alright with me, IM whispered: go on, here is your starting point. I screamed hard and loud: ‘I don’t exist’; loud enough that made everyone stare at me in a way that encouraged my craziness… …oh, and I just loved playing the role of being totally crazy…!!

Then when I finally managed to sit down, Rodrigo showed a video and his own pictures in relation to Faust. I was exposed to Faust and my unconscious self was more than ready to make a pact with the devil inside in no time. I stood in my imaginary ring of fire to call devil down, and subsequently choked and blindfolded my true self.
 

I know a sad little fairy

who lives in an ocean

and ever so softly

plays her heart into a magic flute

a sad little fairy

who dies with one kiss each night

and is reborn with one kiss each dawn.

The following day the ghost was gone in a glance, as quickly as I witnessed the glory of morning’s first beam. We were supposed to use the rehearsal room that day, to develop initial ideas of our own performances. I was still imperfect; therefore I was able to create!

Anna asked me to listen to a piece of music and perform a dance reacting to it. She wanted to see what my impression is as I had no idea where the music is taken from; as I was listening to it for the first time. I was still confused at the brainstorming level of my own performance and wanted to find out how kinaesthetic dreams can affect our consciousness! So while dancing to the music for Anna, I was developing my own performance too. It chilled my fever and released the slight parts of me from being chewed by Faust… Soon afterwards, I realised that this cold song is called ‘Ice Dance’ from the Edward Scissorhands soundtrack. How could I feel and move in a chilly way without knowing where the music was taken from? Is my body the knower?

If we bear in mind that our body ‘knows’ how to move, we would never spend so much time commanding our body to do things. The body’s natural state is balanced and if given any new environment the body will automatically balance itself. We simply need to practice following our bodies so that we can create the right movement in any environment. Let go of the idea of what has been taught to the body, or what it has to do. Let the body lead as to what is satisfactory and appropriate. If the body desires to move in an asymmetrical way, it will create a greater symmetry to the entire body. Apart from the conscious attempt for our movements, our subconscious always takes over the body. In this way new forms of movements and behaviour -generated from our subconscious- could be created. …and it is in this way that I’m working to create a cross-cultural and cosmopolitan self…!

And it is in this way

that someone dies

and someone lives on.

After performing to the ‘Ice Dance’, I found myself burning on fire in a desert, as I was dancing to ‘Desert Rose’. Life is a paradox itself; however, what is exciting in performing arts to me is the swift shift of time and situation in performer’s imagination. Beautify everything, even destructive, sad, and insignificant ones… being the beauty and becoming the change!

I shall wear

a pair of twin cherries as ear-rings

and I shall put dahlia petals on my finger-nails

and swallows will lay eggs

in the hollow of my ink-stained hands.

We were told to work on 3 tasks for the following week: Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ speech, Lady Macbeth’s ‘out damn spot’ speech, and our own monologues. We were supposed to think of our own interpretation of Shakespeare speeches. The whole weekend I exposed my subconscious to some videos and different plays of the two speeches; yet IM was very quiet. The day we had our class, IM finally woke up and nudged me when I was filtering the context of the speeches. IM nagged in her shrill voice: No… I’m fed up... I have already seen ‘enough’ death! Bring some life to me; bring life to the performance; break this stereotype! It was then that I found my own monologue in a poem.

My whole being is a dark chant

which will carry you

perpetuating you

to the dawn of eternal growths and blossoming

in this chant I sighed you sighed

in this chant

I grafted you to the tree to the water to the fire.

I grafted a merged concept of ‘death’ in both of Shakespeare speeches to the concept of ‘life’ in the poem called ‘Another Birth’.

In our first class in March, I brought in a CD and told everyone that I want to work on bodily expressions of both speeches in one performance. I also added the elements of chairs and table to that. From what Sasha and Anna commented, apparently I had both glimpses of Hamlet’s posture in my body, as well as having some movements like I was trying to wipe blood off of my hands.

Where could I find my lot in life then?

Life is perhaps lighting up a cigarette

in the narcotic repose between two love-makings

or the absent gaze of a passerby

who takes off his hat to another passerby

with a meaningless smile and a good morning .

Life is perhaps that enclosed moment

when my gaze destroys itself in the pupil of your eyes

and it is in the feeling

which I will put into the Moon's impression

and the Night's perception.

I used the translated version of the poem in my piece. ‘Another Birth’ is by the most famous woman in the history of Persian literature; Forough Farrokhzad (1935-1967). Iran has rich literature including mythical stories which have been composed in poetry. Since ancient times, Naghali or a form of story-telling (both for adults and children) was used for narrating the Iranian fables, myths and epics. In this play, one person both narrates and plays all the roles. Naghali is used to convey a story or an event in verse or prose with special tone, feelings and expression. In other words, artist move around the stage and express words through body while using various colour of voice.

I wanted to experiment the possibility of reciting a poem in English combined with Naghali and work further through a cross-cultural perspective.

First, I asked Anna to read it in English as a way of reciting a poem. So many thanks to Anna with her immense talent as I wasn’t able to develop the idea without her very kind help. Then I started to recite the poem by adding Persian movements and intonation. I wanted to see if I can communicate bodily, and interpret words on a moving body. I failed on my first attempt due to the complexity of finding the right form of cross-cultural expression through words.

Then, I was asked to recite the poem in Farsi and having those bodily expressions. I was surprised when they told me that it was more effective. They could understand in a better way even without knowing the language. I didn’t get downhearted, as it just made me to think of finding a way to bypass this barrier. Soon after, I read a simple text taken from my diary without having any particular gesture. It worked quite well; yet it wasn’t what IM wanted me to do.

I asked myself: Is my body the true guide and the knower? Which part of the body can transfer the awareness of self?

my lot is a sad promenade in the garden of memories

and dying in the grief of a voice which tells me

I love

your hands.

I will plant my hands in the garden

I will grow I know I know I know

I bloomed in one day. The following day that we had our rehearsal, I developed the idea. I decided to have both Persian and English versions of the poem in my piece. With the help of Anna and Rodrigo, I found the convincing epiphany that I was looking for it. One part of the poem, ‘I know’ was repeated three times, to which I added the role of hands. However, it was in our latter rehearsals that I expanded the idea towards a cross-cultural notion of life through a combination of the body’s motion and voice’s intonation.

That day I also managed to add the element of scarf to my piece, highlighted the role of hands while punching the floor with open hands, and emphasised on ‘I know’ by colouring my voice. I used the importance of hands as a symbol of having the ability to endure hardship and change the undesirable world.

there is an alley

where the boys who were in love with me

still loiter with the same unkempt hair

thin necks and bony legs

and think of the innocent smiles of a little girl

who was blown away by the wind one night.

During the Easter break I went to America on a research trip; primarily for the purpose of documentation in another project. However while doing research on relation between space and ordinary people's motions in their everyday lives, I came across new ideas for the theatre practice project. Through observation and photo documentation, I attempted to break down daily movements of the human body to rudimentary sense of being a human. This helped me to realise my piece - only few days before our tech rehearsals - by adding slides to my performance and using real moments to create constructed moments. Along with repeating the role of hands, in the slides, I tried to communicate through images related to the context of the poem. To give a fluid structure to still images, I ranked other elements such as: ocean, window, footprints, using high contrasts, etc.

I could eventually finalise my project in three sections: 1) verbally (combined with bodily expressions), 2) visually (combined with music) and 3) kinaesthetically (in relation with the whole process). Each section was merged to the other one and there was no interruption between them.

A day after my arrival in the UK, I had my last rehearsal with Anna. On 7th of April that we had our tech rehearsal and our technical team, Karl and Dan, stepped into our pieces. Talking about my own performance, without their support, assistance and attendance, I would never be able to run it as I expected. Many thanks to both of them for their hard work and fantastic job! We all had our performances on the 8th of April. Although, my busy schedule could kill any sense of satisfaction, I had a very good feeling about the whole process. After all I was at the threshold of giving birth to ‘Another Birth’!

That day, when I came back home, I sent an email to my best friend living far away from me and described my performance:

“Now my whole being is a dark chant, shared with a window at the drop of a curtain that gives me the freedom of imagining my own scenery... Today I had the tech rehearsal of my piece... Its name is ‘Another Birth’ which will carry you, perpetuating you, to the dawn of eternal growths and blossoming... It has three sections: in the first part a brilliant artist who is a friend of mine is helping me with my piece (her name is Anna and we are both doing this course). She is reciting the poem in English and I murmur it Farsi and move around her and express her words as they do while reciting a poem in the Persian culture, and she has the British style of recitation. Then her voice fades in my voice saying the following part of the poem in Farsi. She stands still while I am on my knees on the floor... When it comes to the moment that I say in Farsi “I know, I know, I know”, she starts again by continuing it in English at my second ‘I know’... She continues the poem until I say the last verse in English; while I’m standing still and trying to have kind of British style and movement and she moves around me... When I finished the poem, she repeats the same part in Farsi while moving and expressing in her own way... hmmm, I would call it a cross-cultural exchange!! Then I sit on the floor, and when I die with one kiss each night, she covers my hair with a scarf... She leaves the stage and the lights go off... I am sitting in the darkness, when the second section starts with showing the slides at the background with music.... (Oh I forgot to say that I have a background of a window that opens to an ocean.... both at the first and the third sections) …and at the final part before the slides finish, my dance starts with a white spotlight on where I am sitting on the stage, and soon after I got up from the floor the whole stage is bathed in blue-wash... The whole performance runs for 20 min, and I finish my dance when I am reborn with one kiss each dawn...”

On the 8th of April, it was born. We celebrated afterwards at KRO bar without having Karl and Dan due to other work commitments. Finally it was finished, yet it was merely my beginning steps towards my greater goals.

I think although we all had worked quite differently, we were connected somehow in our pieces. Something happened to all of us: we flourished like spring flowers next together and in each other’s shadow… This was itself another birth!

Theatre Practice project 2008