There are so many cool Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) performance artists out there! Since this performance art season only had ten episodes to talk to artists directly, this last episode wraps up the season and goes through a whole bunch of other contemporary artists that hosts Marina Johnson and Nabra Nelson are excited about.
Audiences pack houses to see stories about forbidden love. Romeo and Juliet is a famous Western example of this phenomenon, but the trope goes back much further, to a poem that likely inspired even inadvertently Shakespeare's famous play. In this episode, we look at the timeless tale of Layla and Majnun made famous by Nizami Ganjavi as a poem and later adopted for the stage and the screen countless times.
To Create and to Oppose: People Will Not Listen to Politicians, but They Will Listen to Artists
Friday 4 February 2022
Norway
Safe Havens Freedom Talks presented a conversation on The Power of Art livestreaming on the global, commons-based, peer produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Friday 4 February 2022 at 8:30 a.m. EST (New York, UTC -5) / 14:30 CET (Oslo, UTC +1).
Performances of The 40th Man or the 28th Woman (Iran), Killing Time (Uganda), and panel discussion on artist-centered networks
Wednesday 15 December to Friday 17 December 2021
Kampala, Uganda
The Kampala International Theatre Festival (KITF) is an annual 5-day festival. KITF was launched in November 2014 as a platform to develop professionalism among East African theatre practitioners, connect the East African theatremaking communities with one another and their counterparts from elsewhere. Select performances and a panel discussion livestreaming on the global, commons-based HowlRound TV network Wednesday 15 December to Friday 17 December 2021.
Verity Healey sits down with Javaad Alipoor to discuss themes that preoccupy Alipoor as a theatremaker and political person: racism, history, Brexit, international communities, politics, and how these things come into his work and collaborations with other artists.
In this episode of Building Our Own Tables, host Yura Sapi discusses Seda Iranian Theatre Ensemble, the first Iranian theatre company in Seattle, with co-founder Parmida Ziaei.
Hesam Sharifian reflects on how the blackface mask of the Hāji Firuz and Siāh-Bāzi clowns in Iran is reminiscent of an ugly past and should not be used in performance today.
For the last few years, professor Catherine Coray has been helping create collaboration opportunities for theatre artists in Arab countries and the Americas. Arab Voices: Stories of Palestine is the most recent iteration, and has taken place in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Beirut.
