 panel, retraditioning the verse, poetry and performance, chaired by Halle Hotemi. And our panelists include, I'll go in order, Zara Houshmand, Hafiz Karbali, Amir Badal Daraon, and our very own Toran Jehya Zarya. So let's give them a welcoming welcome. Many of you are great performers, and so hopefully you're used and pumped to talk about poetry and performance, if you just saw it, some of you have. In this hour, we have about an hour or two minutes. We're going to be sharing, our panelists will be sharing, ways in which, and challenges in incorporating poetry into performance, namely Persian poetry into performance. We have four panelists who'll introduce themselves, and I hope they're not going to be humble or shy. My name is Halle, I am, I have been a poet and a translator of Barsi and Russian. I think the reason I was chosen to do this panel with Bill Moore is because I'm a very nosy person, and I'm always asking people questions, and if any of you have met me for the first time during this conference, we know I am got bombarded with the imposition. And so, I'm going to ask a question. I've asked my panelists three essential questions. Each panel will answer, what is the form that their poetry plus performance takes, and some of them will do some show us out. The second question is, what is the process that brought them there in that incorporation, integration, or adding on how they did it? And finally, what were the challenges that they faced in doing that? And these challenges can vary from issues of translation, or the fact that the performance may have been read in the original version, and the audience may not have understood it. How do you engage in audience in the original language? Another constraint might have been, or evaluation of what is the work of this poetry doing in overall case, and that evaluation and balance. That's another constraint that is a challenge that we face. And so those are the main essential questions, and this last question about challenges, I really would like your participation in this. As Sean San Jose said yesterday, I want to look out and say, what's next, what else? You are experts in your field. We have people in the audience who have big experts doing performance in Persian poetry for a long time, so we will look forward to your contribution in the conversation. We'll speak, speaking for about 10 minutes, so that we have time for a Q&A, it's really important that we can preserve that time. And finally, I just want to say that this is not new. Persian poetry has been performed since day one. So when we talk about doing it in these various new forms, it just sort of speaks to the viability of that material of Persian poetry and the ways we build around it and work through it to create new work. So I hope, and I look forward to hearing what my friends have to say. And we'll start with, I don't want to call you Rumi, but that's your question. You should close, it's Hawke's. So Hawke, if you could just start your talk, and he'll be here. Great, thank you. Thank you very much for attending the Rumi's show today. I don't wish to speak too long about Rumi, but I'd rather have some images from productions that I think will speak for themselves. But essentially, Hale had said that since we've just performed the Rumi, we should talk a little bit about the challenges of performing such a show. And I would say that since we're using more performance in this panel, one of the great challenges of performing poetry of this style is that there is this very mainstream movement since Corman Bach's published all the voluminous variations of Rumi and Dipo Chopra made all those famous DVDs. There's this existing form of recitation which is very new, A.G., and pseudo-reverential. And so the first thing I said to my actors, to our actors, which is an ensemble of clowns, very well-trained clowns from the Club Conservatory, dancers, musicians, and so on, was that we wanted to avoid that performance style, pseudo-reverential style, yeah? Which is why we wanted immediate performance. And it was very important also to have children sitting around the stage as well because I think they are our next hope, our next generation. This morning we talked a lot, and yesterday we talked a lot about these forces in Iran that are menacing artists. Well, I think we won't ever change that whole generation. The next generation here in America would, I think, benefit from learning a lot more about Iranian poetry. And the one overriding message I have for today is I really believe, given on the news, very sad news, 300 airstrikes in Palestine today, 30,000 dead in Syria so far, 75,000 ground troops re-invading Palestine By the way, I say Palestine deliberately. Now, why are we so afraid to say Palestine? Why do we have to always use the euphemism West Bank and Gaza? We put Palestine in the text on the script, if you notice, in the Solomon scene now. What I'm trying to say is that Islam is getting a bad reputation and Islam needs a sense of humor. For God's sake, you know, if some cook in California produces a terrible mediocre video of Muhammad, it doesn't mean that Islam and Muhammad ought to be offended. Let's just laugh it off, or let's not burn down American flags. Islam should have reacted with humor when the caricature came out in Paris about the Pavlovian dog, you know, that showed that Islam responds like a Pavlovian dog to any form of criticism. I think Islam needs to grow up and remember its past. Rumi used to be the most funny, that's repeating so on the taraja stage. There's a strain of humor, there's a strain of spirituality, there's a strain of devotional, there's a strain of performance in Islam, like the world in their wishes, like Tazia, there are body naughty jokes in Islam. I won't tell you them, but yesterday after Rumi Dabashi's lovely presentation, he and I went outside and shared a couple of dirty jokes in far, I told you the English one, I mean my version is translated by A.J. Arbery or Nicholson, Old School Translators, yeah. And he said to me in Farsi, the variation in Ali and the whole gang was whisking with me still, yeah. So if you'd like to hear, we can take you into a corner and tell you these jokes later, yes, yes, yes. They are really worth telling you because, and I also have brought some books with images of Muhammad unveiled seated on the borough, borough, the famous winged horse on his way to the Ascension of the Heavens. There are so many misperceptions about Islam. Just don't know where to begin. My life's work is basically as a member of the Ismaili Muslim community and a follower of the Aga Khan. Half my life I've been in a staging place for the Aga Khan as a quarter detainer basically. So we've done a place for him and his entourage all over the world for state leaders. The other half or a third of my life happens to be now with Toranj and Golden Thread, which I love. There's this labyrinth and golden thread that keeps bringing me back here. We've done so many shows together, Toranj and I, and I absolutely love her. Since 2006, we've done a Islamic fable. We did a three plays. One was about Armenia, the Armenian genocide and Toranj's star Iranian mother was in it. Yousuf's plays, I've done two of Yousuf's plays. By the way, Yousuf and Indi and I went to school together, but we ended up finding each other here. He and I went to Carnegie Mellon and got our NFAs. This is my way of introduction, okay? I'm not telling you my CV, but now you get it, right? And what's important is the other third of my life I think is gonna be forming my own theater company, which is gonna be called Theater K. K is the nickname for the Aga Khan, K. And the idea behind all of these thirds is to pursue really education and enlightenment on behalf of Islam. And for me, I disagree with you gentlemen and ladies who spoke yesterday on this panel very eloquently about religion and drama being separate. Yes, there should perhaps be this thing like that in Paris where it's secular and religion. There are two separate things, but don't forget, please, I ask you not to forget that drama began as a religious ceremony, the Diteran in Greece as songs and odes in praise of the Bakanalian gods, okay? And that when I heard that in high school, that really excited me. So for me, drama is a form of devotion. Doesn't mean it has to be religious righteousness or Christian evangelical. It has to be devotion from a spiritual sense, as you saw tonight, I hope, glimpses of it, with human and intellect. I think I'm ready now to show you some of my work for the Aga Khan. We did a production in 2007 called Ali to Karim, which told the history of the Shia imams. These are not the same Shia as the 12ers. These are the Shia is smiley Muslims. And the first image on the screen is from that play, Ali to Karim. And basically I'm sticking to the theme of the panel. We had literature that I had done research for over seven years for this production. And we had about a year of rehearsal in London with an ensemble of 12 actors. The scene was a text, thank you. The scene was a text from Persia talking about the Aga Khan's reputation. And it was a sort of gossipy text. And it was written by a French diplomat for his headquarters in Paris. So in rehearsal with the actors, we devised the scene. It's another thing I wanted to talk about, Ali asked me to talk about, was how we approach our scenes and staging. So we decided to stage it with this style, which was through improvisation, almost like les liaisons dangereuses, where you have a salon, a French salon, and a feminine man gossiping. And the text was the text in Persia or French about the Aga Khan. Next slide please. This is an example of how we pay tribute to the idea of the book. Today in the room you would have seen that Islam is a haal al-kitab. Everything we do is to do with the book. We have respect for the book. We're not that avant-garde after all. Everything I tend to do is use the motif of the book. Today you so bear reading from the book. Here you had a large book that rotated and the projection of Persian manuscript painting, which is another thing we tend to do, which is share on-stage in performance Islamic art history. And Nasser Kustu, one of the great Iranian poets who has a postage step after him, in Tehran is wonderful actually. There's a street called Nasser Kustu Street. This is a poem staged with Nasser Kustu poetry. This is the poem written in praise of an Imam al-Mahdi when he conquered Tunisia. And the staging reminds me, I guess, we stage it like a Greek chorus. So the point I'm going to make is we stage things according to our being minus east and west. I would suggest that there's not a choice between east or west. It's cross-cultural, it's east and west. So for example, it's a Farsi poem or an Arabic poem, I think in this case. But the staging looks like Iphigenia and Hollis, you know, the Greek tragedy and the Mediterranean sea. Next. This is an example of a manuscript painting of the seven sleepers, the legend of the seven sleepers. And you know how do you remember Stephen Sondam's Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George, Sora and so on? They took the Sunday in the Park with George painting that's in Chicago. They took that painting and brought it to life. Similarly, we took a manuscript painting, which was a scripture from the Quran and there are hundreds of poems on the story and staged it precisely like that, a dance theater piece which was poetry and performance. Next. This is the burning of the library, the Mongols' devastation of Iranian literature. And so these images, I think, whether we're talking about the past or present, we can make links. And this is why I tend to talk about what we've been talking about yesterday and today, the obscurantism, the Taliban destroying the Buddha and so on. And the people who wouldn't allow the Iranian filmmaker to make this film. Finally, two more shots. This is an image of, I think, the two more, I think, no, Drew. Anyway, not meant to be. One of them was from the Contents of God. Yes, but this is from the Contents of the Birds that I recently performed in Vancouver, like in the Instagrams to bring here. It's of a bat, an image of a bat, totally diluted and in the darkness is looking for the sun, you know? And so the text by Athar, Athar was a master before Rumi and he's written wonderful epic tales and poems. We would love to bring them to the stage. Finally, if you have a shot of the previous shot, Drew? Okay, fine. It's a shot of the Contents of the Birds with the Hupo played by a ballerina. And there you had an encounter between East and West, Western forms, which are a valetic form to tell the story of a Persian epic. Okay, I think if I'm over my time, can you tell me? I think I'll have to speak to that team. Okay, great. Thank you. Next to Zahra, who's here. Can you talk about her? I'm going to talk about my work with Bijan Mofi's first. My own background was in English with a chair in a special poetry, but my background in theater comes very much from studying with Bijan Mofi who was probably the greatest Iranian playwright and a very fine director of the 20th century who moved to Los Angeles shortly after the revolution and passed away there in 1984. If you are Iranian and younger, I don't know this work. I suggest you get right on YouTube and look up Shadda to say because this is the source of modern Iranian theater. He is to Iranian theater today, what Neema Gashid was to Iranian poetry and you really have to know this work. It's amazing. I went to the first as a translator and then I produced some of his plays in Los Angeles and his masterpiece, his best known work, which is called Shadda to Say, City of Tales, he insisted that it was untranslatable and so that cannot be represented. But it uses just a wealth of material from popular poetry, from classical poetry, he takes nursery rhymes, book tales, the Rukozi, which is the Iranian version of Komei Hidalate, which is actually much more verbal and physical comedy. And all of these very traditional forms and he blends them into something that is a masterful satire of Iranian culture and politically loaded and spiritually loaded. But like I said, untranslatable. So we didn't even go there. But I did translate to the other of his plays, one which was called in Farsi, Slavabo Aska Central Back, we translated it as Dragonfly and produced it in Los Angeles just before his death in 1984. And it was a story of Slavabo Nostad from the Chalamet. Pijang's father had been a Nagal performing the Chalamet in traditional form and forbidden his son ever to go into theater. That's another story. But he used the Nagal tradition and he told the story of Slavabo Nostad intervaled with modern scenes from Vietnam, Africa. The story repeated in the same way that you have the sense that the father killing the son is something that will happen again for each generation. It was a profoundly anti-war play and it had this, you know, I was using the epic tradition, translating those bits of poetry, weaving the modern scenes in. And the critics didn't get it. It was like, what is this sort of arcane language that's woven in amongst the modern scenes? There was a lack of understanding that this was referencing something in a way that the Iranian audience totally knew where it was coming from. That has been my biggest challenge. Another translation we did of the story of the Moon and the Leopard, a children's play Chahar Khamun the Butterfly. In each case, he's pulling on traditional forms and the lack of reference is the first challenge. There's no way to create that universe without doing a lot of explanation. And so you've got to name it in several ways. You've got to trade-offs and prices to be paid. One thing I found generally speaking in terms of presenting Iran's poetry to modern audiences, and this also comes not only from my work with the General Feast's work, but this is a translation of many, is American poetry, as it stands today, has a fear of the sonic qualities of poetry. You can use assonance, you can use slap rhyme, you can use subtle rhythms, but anything, you know, you want to actually use rhyme? It's like, we don't go there anymore. And that's not what modern American poetry does. I think part of the problem is that American poetry is so emphasized, the lyrical, the inward-looking, they've forgotten the epic tradition. And I think that has a much closer relationship with what's possible in theater and the voice of theater. And again, this is another challenge that needs to be fought. And it's as if you were to say, as a musician, well, I think the major scale is sort of overused, let's just not do that anymore, in the way that they have just dropped all rhyme and any explicit, stronger forms of rhythm. There are exceptions that you have now with yesterday, so. Well, I was gonna bring that up, and say, when I'm directing stuff, you recognize that challenge of using rhyme and you made it your part. In it form, which is taking over poetry, and I'm not sure about it, but it's in that for better or for worse, so. But it remains outside the mainstream, I mean it's recognized, it's outside of the academy. What I did find, in terms of working from the Guillermo-Feedsburg, was there's another level of sound architecture in place that works much as poetry does. And we're used to the idea of sound design will reference a place, you go south of the border and the guitars come out, the monkey goes to India and the sitar, you hear? And we're used to the idea of music as background that gives an emotional force in which we learn from film and adapt to the theater. What Guillermo-Feed did in his work is to carry that much farther. So you have echoes of sound and patterns of sound that work very much like the internal architecture of poetry and it becomes a sound state for the play and it also becomes a moral one state for the play. For example, in the children's play Butterfly shot that film, the butterfly meets a series of different characters and to save her own skin, she with great difficulty brings herself to tell a lie in each situation. And the rest of the characters that are on stage is sort of chorus, just gently starts singing, singing, just in the background. And that's to say, she's telling the truth, she's telling the truth, but of course she's not. And the echoing of that creates its own chorus, its own pattern. Another aspect that was very characteristic of Guillermo-Feed's work was he would create an image of the society that he was describing by having all the characters on stage all the time and they would have their separate areas and they would continue with their small business, their occupation, the carpenter is sewing, the moneylender is counting money and these actions, which represent sort of a character in the bigger picture of the society he was drawing, but also they have the characteristic sounds and those sounds become foreground or background and build their own music and work together as again, like poetry, a sort of a sonic echoing architecture that has its own structure and that very much I think is very transparent. So for example, when you're in the leopard where you have the characters beginning to stone, you need to send her back to the spot and that chanting as the stoning builds up and at the same time you have the perma counting the money that has been paid off in the CIA and it's the backstory for this whole thing. I should have told you the story as of all these points, but I think I might have, I probably might have done it. I just reminded, thank you, reminded everyone that this complex is project art tote. So, you know, the last panel, somebody mentioned if you guys referred us to it, exchange is an oxygen for art and I think cross-genre work and the kind of soundscape you're describing is that kind of what art tote, so the theater does. Thank you. I'm here, out of that. And please tell us who you are. This little one did not. I'm a bias in your program, so please take it away. Hi, I'm here, but I do multi-NBA performance, right? So, I don't know. I think it's such a long room or the other things, but anyways. Yeah, the show just last night, no? Ask Heather to send you all the emails. I still love this. I wanted to, I mean, I'm very much humbled to be on this panel because I'm not a performing artist. Neither have I had training in theater or I think the surgery seems to be very much focused on this kind of project. So, what I do perhaps as a part of the kind of thing I do is maybe called performance art and to draw perhaps some modern origin of this, you can talk about, perhaps Belize, the creationist, installation art, and so forth. So, it's, you know, there's no one in the panel perhaps, but, you know, it's the kind of thing that's very criminal, that's very, it's not there to be sold, perhaps. It's only to be reviewed once. So, it kind of goes against, it's actually an antithesis of here. So, it's funny for me to be here. Get out. So, I wanted to have my first photo. No, the other one, the first one, here it is. Number one. It's not sitting up. Perform a tour. I don't know. I don't know. All right, okay, well, I just wanted to, what was interesting for me, because, you know, I don't necessarily use, if ever I use poetry, which actually happens a lot, I use it in a very truncated way. I, you know, it's never painful due to the full aspect of the genre and the way. So, today I sent them, I said that I was getting at my points. But I wanted to reference, at least the way I understand poetry, and I wanted to just go back and back what this slide was, the definition of poetry on, you know, modern. And very? I said, oh, okay. So, what is, you know, based on what's said, it's like that formula is a concentrated, imaginative awareness of experiencing language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response to really sound and rhythm. And I think it's perhaps the very last part of it, and perhaps it kind of comes to what you were saying, in terms of that sound space, or the sound, yeah, the sound space, in a way that he was using, Moffitt. This is the kind of thing I do. So, I use my body, and this is how I see it. So, I use, I see perhaps body as poetry, and poetry as an extension of bodily movement, that are rhythmical, that have certain sound and certain movement. So, it's in that sense that I would say, I use poetry, so this is how I see myself to be part of this panel. I wanted to, now having said that, one of the biggest challenges that I have as a performance artist is that, currently, what we see in the performance art is a much more stoic interpretation of bodily movement. So, and it correlated, something that correlated with that is the way we see hanging of photography on the wall right now. If you could see the next photo. So, this is how we're used to see gallery exhibitions, right? So, there's one image, a lot of space around space, like this space, there are, actually, this image comes from a place that's called White Cue, which is a very common gallery in London. And this is the way it's set up. And if you go back to the history, you have another way of placing, so people could imagine that too, which is called salon style hanging, which is in the blue, but there are many other places. So, here's the kind of shifts and tensions that have been happening throughout time in the way in which we understand, perhaps, art, moving away from the convoluted, hectic busy to the more stoic way of doing it. And that is also perhaps true in terms of performance art. So, someone like me, who does feel a performance art, and brings about sound, movement, poetry, makes it convoluted, so I don't, so it's going against the movement of the nowadays called performance art. And that's kind of an interesting challenge. So, I'm bringing poetry into it as a way of counterbalancing the way in which the so-called performance art is being utilized right now. So, performance art, and I don't want to generalize, I mean, there are tons of different ways that they're performing, so I think, concurrently, there are tons of them at the same time that are on the work. But, the more canonical words, such as a work of minor development, which you see through her work, how things have changed and shifted. So, things are sterile, so she isolates all the elements of a performance. So, she doesn't talk, she doesn't interact, like physically though, she needs to do that a long time ago. And she, for example, exchanges energy with you, which is a very esoteric way of performing, but at the same time, it's somehow new aging kind of thing at the same time. So, when I was sitting at, when she was sitting at my, are you familiar with my non-relevant performance art with some of you now? Okay, so, when she was at MoMA, and they were paying MoMA for 40 years of work, she said that people would sit across from her and it was supposed to be an interactive, non-verbal, non-physical interaction of exchange of energy between the two. So, here she was claiming to get into a certain spiritual moment in which she gets into a trance and that's where she was able to sit there truthfully for three months, eight hours a day nonstop. And when I infiltrated MoMA and I did a whole, we took 30 people, we got in and we did all kinds of pervasive things, so you can see on my website. And I did this, one of the acts that I played with her was called the Other Trance. So, here she was presenting this moment of trance as stoics that are non-verbal. And for me, in my culture, but at least the way or what I can perceive to be as my culture, going through trance happens in through movement, chanting and being convoluted and noisy and everything that comes with it. So, there was the tension that I was trying to create. I think that comes out in a lot of the performances I do. So, that moment of trance through which I get by bringing about poetry that allows me to get into that. You could play the video number one. Ho wa jami, ho ya ho wa jami, ho wa jami, ho wa jami, ho wa jami, ho wa jami, ho wa jami, ho wa jami. Ho wa jami, ho ya ho wa jami, ho wa jami, ho ya ho wa jami, ho wa jami. In the previous work of her years ago, she concerned her by saying, art is beautiful, therefore, art must be beautiful. And here is, I am using another kind of, Sophie Poetry, that kind of could be situated with a very clear narrative through which the desire for a same-sex body could be seen as beautiful because that person is beautiful, you've got lots of beautiful people and therefore, I'm a lot of beautiful people. So, I mean, it's very convoluted, but precisely that. So, I'm like, in doing that, the way in which poetry comes into contact with my work is making it not only a non-speroidal, non-partisan scene. How much time do I have? A few minutes. A few minutes, fantastic. Can we have the next poetry? Okay, oh, shoot, I can't see that. Okay, so. So, here's what it is. Now, the other difficulty in doing poetry is that I just don't do performance, performance. I use a technology that's called augmented reality and we're not far from Silicon Valley, that's where it comes together. It's a technology very futuristic, a technology, the kind of thing that you see in my work. So, those are the things that I use. You're capable right now of infiltrating spaces. I place, if you want to show me the next slide. Okay, so this was one of the pieces through that technology where I was able to place my own performance in the loof, loof, cannot take it out right now. There's a lot of litigation around it. There's legal jargon, international legal jargon about it and therefore that space is undefined and therefore I'm allowed to be in the loof without loof being able to take it out. So, that is the one of these I use. If you want to go back to the previous one. Now, to do this technology that I use, I use poets around me and this is the kind of poetry that we have. We basically, I was going to read to you the whole poetry and I'm probably going to pass it on to you, but the whole idea is that actually this is coding, this is programming, you know. But for me it's very interesting because that interaction that I have with my poetry writer, with my poet that I call, that technologies that only thinks about the way in which that robustness of the technology would happen. I think there's something metaphysical that happens through the interaction with me and I love to call my coders and programmers my poets. So this is a line of poetry that you see here. To do the kind of thing I did with this. So that's a good part. One moment. I want to do, I want to tell you guys about in line with augmented reality, what I have realized is that it allows, without falling into a very determined and technological determinism, perhaps. I'm capable of, not that I'm capable, but what I'm working for is to look at poetry that I use twice in embodying those movements but also reciting poetry to create some kind of an extension, to think about that poetry as an extension of the soul of technology. And I'm referencing here, for those of you who are familiar with like Futurism and Futurist from 19, earlier than the 20s, 1907 perhaps like the first Futurist Manifesto we have. Here they are perhaps the most deterministic technologies we have at a great time in terms of the art world. And they are sitting, the way they write the Manifesto is by describing how they're sitting on a publishing carpet and they go into these metaphysical moments of interaction with technology and they translate things. So even at that very particular moment of looking at technology as the savior of the world and how things are determined in that way, you see those interactions that happen. But when I use poetry and you're gonna see that perhaps in the next video, if you could play some next video, you're gonna see how I utilize these kind of poetry to center myself in order to play with the type of technology that I play with that leaves usually very little space for Exotericism or Futurism in a way. So. Don't worry. Movement that I played that was for Futurism And here you have this written whole kind of a big technology and just to finalize all of that too, to conclude all of that is, to say how perhaps I see technology and poetry not as two diametrically proposed moments of a continuum, but rather an ongoing kind of shifting space through which both of these things stamp being a technology, or being a technology. I mean, what I was doing there at the end you put it, everybody saw extra stuff by looking through the iPhone through that little stamp that I was making. So it's basically trying to unpack our understanding of these two often seen as diametrically opposed moments of a continuum. Hi, I'm Toran J. Gazzaria. No. I'd like to begin by thanking Golden Threads for inviting me to this panel. I consider myself a director. I try to be a writer. And once in a while, I'm drawn to a piece that I see myself directing. So most of the time those pieces tend to be poetry. And I think mainly it's because I find realism in theater very limiting. And poetry for me, in a way, opens up the doors. And also because the first 10 years of my education was in Iran, I grew up with Persian poetry. And in a way, my sort of visceral, emotional life is still rooted in Persian. So I think I respond very differently to Persian poetry than I do to anything written in English. I've done some work with classical poetry, but the three pieces that I want to talk about, one is I Sell Souls, which is sort of a modern Persian poem by Sigin Bebani, which I directed in 2008 as part of Reorient. And before that, I also directed a play or a monologue by Bebi Shamiyeh called Tamam, she didn't particularly write it as a poem, but I kind of saw it as a poem and I directed it with two actors and a musician. And I think what poetry offers is sort of the freedom to play around with what I think is a lot of the reccessonic quality of poetry allows you the freedom to play around with the layering of sound and layering of emotion that is really interesting. And it kind of opens up the door to exploring and discovering meaning in texts that, for me, it's not as easy in sort of a realistic play. So I think we have a video of I Sell Souls, we can just watch maybe a minute of it, maybe not. Sigin Bebani is currently living still in Iran, she continues to write and work in Iran and she's like, that's not it. She's in her 70s or 80s. Take that. I Sell Souls, Sell Souls, that is my merchandise of all things contemptible, the most fine. In terms of process putting it together, very similar to what happened with stock, it was pretty much driven and inspired by the actors. I had a general idea of I wanted to make a sneeze plant and a layering of poetry and then I remember in the casting process, some of you might have noticed already but with Reorient, casting is pretty challenging because we put together an ensemble of actors so we try to hire actors that have a range and they can perform in multiple short plays and oftentimes directors are fighting over actors like, no, I absolutely need this actor, bring him up and I can't use her in the other play. So what happened with I Sell Souls, I said, just give me the three actors that still need to be double cast or something. So I kind of wanted to be surprised by the actors and I wanted to discover their range of abilities and then let that shape the piece. They're not particularly dancers or physical actors at all and I liked that in the way this poem was staged because I think he gave it, not a roughness but sort of it made it more every day as opposed to sort of staging and also with stock when I first read that poem, how many people saw a stock in the series? So when I first read that poem, what I had imagined was kind of a typical every man, an Arab every man kind of in a fabled style presentation but then when Shoresh and Munaf started sort of fooling around during auditions and Munaf started playing guitar and Shoresh started rapping, I was like, hey, this is really the direction to go and then after that I really focused on how that poem represents kind of a sampled life, kind of this sporadic presence, existence of this person, how the nowhere land that is the border becomes the limited space where we can exist and his constant rejection at every border in a way for me represented also the experience of black Americans in the US and sort of the moops of hip hop and hip hop scene like the right language for that piece. Also as you know, hip hop has been incredibly popular now in the Middle East and particularly in the Arab Spring and the revolutions, the various revolutions and so much music that's come out of the Arab world and that was definitely also a source of inspiration. I will end on that, ahead of my time, just to serve my needs. I have questions that I really do want to throw back to you, so let's have a second question. Anybody? I have a question for you and you and I want to know what kind of theatre you are doing. What kind of theatre? Yeah, much, because I didn't get anything from that standing. As I mentioned at the very beginning, but I wouldn't consider a theatre, it's actually the anti-pieces of the year. So there is usually no narrative place. It tries to be a mineral, it tries to not do the kind of thing that the script of period does. But particularly in that racing, we see very little of it, we saw very little of it. The idea was to utilize a Persian Sufi which is about a fable. The fable is... Can I say? Yeah. The fable is about three Sufi masters coming together. One of them, you know, in Sufi master where he achieved seventh level and became new miracles, if you want to. But the whole idea is not to do that, is to become nothing, to let go. So, but anyway, this guy gets caught into it and starts doing miracles. So puts his praying rod on the water, goes on top of it and starts praying. The second Sufi master gets caught by that tune and says, I can do better. So puts the praying rod in the air and starts praying in the air. The third one, which is Raleigh, our quite famous female Sufi master that we have, stops and censors herself and says, al-abra bi khasi burshi, behawara bi nagesi burshi, then the death start, al-kasi burshi. So even if you're being float on the water, you're nothing but a little bit. If you float in the air, you're nothing but a little fly. And find love or divine love at that moment of spirituality to become or to be. So that whole thing allowed me while using a very novel technology that creates a lot of hiding, a lot of spectacle around it, to center myself. So that whole point of stamping was to create this narrative of if you weren't thinking about ways in which I could get into trance, as I looked at the explaining, which is kind of really central to doing performance art. So it's about these repetitive moments of being able to do that, while chanting that poetry and the Persian language. But yeah, so in terms of really good, meaningless, if you want to say. One of the things that was lack of reference, and I just want to throw that, I mean, I found not so much with stuck, but with I sell souls, there are all these judgments about women in long. And they were oppressed and they had no rights and they were completely locked up in their house, which couldn't be further from the truth. But this particular piece is about emptiness and because the poet is this woman who's also an outspoken critic of Iranian government, I found myself constantly defending, I don't even know what, but I found myself kind of in a reactive mode and I wonder if any of you have experienced that. I've always experienced the translation problem. It's interesting because in his various solutions, and sometimes it's like a radical translation situation, I was thinking there was one production of a fly worthy Shantidei character, who's a storyteller, street theater, you look inside of his machine and you're seeing a lens of images of foreign cities and it's this imaginary world of fantasy and distance. And one of the first American productions, he decided to translate this and the Shantidei, he became a television feature and he had his little TV on a leash and he dragged behind him and he was preaching and that made sense in terms of a translation context. But you're always pushing back against assumptions, expectations, especially about love. I kind of already answered the question sort of, but I'll ask it again. Do any of you on the panel work in... I mean, it seems that a lot of the work you've been doing translating poetry into a theatrical experience has to do with older models, classical models, Rumi, etc. Are there contemporary living poets that you work with now who you are working with who specifically are writing about the current political situation on your model? Or any kind of that matter? Well, as I said, Simin Behdahani is a living poet and she writes... many of the poems have to do... What's her name? Simin Behdahani. She's in her 80s and... No. But she's a Behdahani, so she does. And she's very critical of the Islamic government. I think, you know, for the most part, they leave her alone, but she was arrested a couple of times. When I wanted to direct I Sell Souls, I contacted her and asked her permission to do it. I also ran the translation by her. It's from the published anthology of her poetry. And I had a problem with a couple of the word choices because, as you know, translating poetry is probably one of the most difficult, because there's so many choices that you have to make. Was the anthology created there in Iran? No, the anthology was published in the U.S. So I had the original poem in Persian and I had the translation in English and I had some questions about why certain things were translated, particularly about word choices, basically. And she gave me permission to make some changes. Yeah, and she was very pleased with the work by Central of the DVD. I just want to add two things to sense. I also worked on a translation that was performed. It was performed in Persian and the poet was Kasser Ied, who died in 1996 instead. That is now a classical writer. But it was performed in Persian, a whole kind of online assisting program for the reader's sake. But it was also based on Shafi'a women and modernized. And so it's called the Scarlet Stone, so they were playing with Revolution times, they were playing with Shafi'a women, they were playing with modern composition. It was an interesting experience, but it is something temporary and the person sitting next to you has done a lot of translation. Yeah, also, I mean, Tama wasn't in what given line, I sell souls. I mean, these are a lot of modern moments. So, all those stuff was... I'm going to have some more time, so no questions. A comment really about the stuff. It was so wildly inventive and playful and theatrical. I'm a little surprised. And to hear you say that you were open to what the two actors are doing, was it in auditions or rehearsals? I just want to say, I'm surprised that you say you don't really consider yourself a director because I think all of us should aspire to be both so open to the happy accidents that happen as well as... What are some ideas on what I wanted to do? Yeah, but really bold theatrical ideas and to devise them and execute them so wonderfully playful. I just thought it was really exciting. So, that's not really a question. But that was one of the James Bond projects. Yeah. That was very interesting. It made sense, but I still wonder what process sort of led to that because it made sense, but it was still very unusual and great. Yeah. It's an interesting phenomenon that as refugees we return to the nation that have instigated the tragedy, right? So, where does he go as a refugee? He goes to England. He goes to the US. Those are the countries that he aspires to be a citizen of. And how is that mindset shaped? It's shaped by Hollywood. At least for me it does, right? So, I mean, I don't associate with Elizabeth Taylor or Michelle Pfeiffer. I associate with Davos. He's my hero. So, I want to introduce myself as Bond. James Bond. So, for me it was a very easy, it was like this is the ticket. This is the selling point. And the whole image of him being sucked into that video and then being rejected. That's the promise. Also with the Arab nations, the promise is the wealth in Dubai or the touristy offerings in Syria or the security in Jordan. So, those are the promises, but their reality is the rejection. Fantastic. Thank you. I actually don't know if I've never voiced to ask the question, but since Octavia asked, since you mentioned the translations of the contemporary poets, there are other leading poets that have been performed, specifically the show that you've seen already, the video of that was actually performed in this first stage, which was Icarus Rise, which is a performance that incorporated 10 people, including myself as an area of poetry by living poets that are our age, anywhere between the ages of 32 to, I think about 75 or 76, which I have compiled together for an anthology and some of which I performed here. Those poets are called, and I'll give you the names, but the youngest ones are wonderful ones, they're Ziba Qawwasi and Mariam Hule, who write incredibly personal and yet extremely socially oriented and political poetry that resonates. The other thing I wanted to share is what Zahra was saying about her challenge as well as what Toran was saying about her challenge in terms of coming up against reactions and the work that they do not fall into any neat category. I continue to have the same challenge with contemporizing and performing, translating and performing poetry in that I think it's sort of a new genre in the traditional sense of theatre, so if there is any engagement with theatre companies because it's the dramatization of poetry as vital and dynamic as it might be, it doesn't really fall into any category of theatre. At the same time, it doesn't really fall into the category of poetry reading with very, very, very much more limited resources that outplaces that present poets and poets' poetry readings have to offer. And then the other thing about Hip-Hop Fiddles that since performing poetry is a very ancient and beloved and well-practiced form of expression in Iran, mainly with Navali and other similar forms, I always thought that also Hip-Hop was a great analog for it, but then I also came up with a challenge there as well, is that the Hip-Hop community, the Hip-Hop theme community doesn't really necessarily see that as a root that's shared. So I just wanted to express the sympathy with all of you guys in terms of not being able to fall anywhere because Hip-Hop Fiddles is sort of infiltrate for more established traditions, western traditions here. I think it's a uniquely American problem. I went to school in England and we learned to perform poetry as part of your sort of basic dramatic training. You had Shakespeare. I mean, that was just, you know, that was what you grew up with in the internalized. It's a uniquely American thing that you get up on stage to read a new poem and you do this groaning transverse. Just a thought on that point, in terms of contemporary poetry, my simple contribution of that point, I guess I'm sinful, I've learned nothing but dead poets and there I do. But if you, like in the Rumi, because the actors were so talented, they suggested singing the last poem about Rumi's death and funeral being celebrated as a wedding and they started playing a jazzy tune with Trombone and trumpet and so on. Does that count now as Rumi re-invigorated as a contemporary poem? Most of this is about Napoli. It's interesting. I performed a short piece in a classroom. Can you say what Napoli is? Napoli is, so epic poetry in Persia was often performed by a storyteller, often in coffee shops. And this person would perform all the different parts and, you know, it's kind of a demonstration. No one was telling me to do shows with that, Napoli. And when, in our fairy tale players in Golden Thread, we actually used Napoli initially in most of our performances, where we would begin with a big clap like in that Bollywood and recite the beginning of the Shahnameh. And when I did that in a classroom, I was actually surprised by one of the students saying, wow, that sounds like, you know, hip-hop or, you know. And so I don't know if people necessarily think of it as having common roots, but I think it, you know, it resonates and it's something recognizable and it's something that, you know, is easily shared. So that was exciting. Yeah, we have, thank you. We have two minutes left, but I wanted to just quickly go back to your last point about, and I interpreted it as knowing how hard it was for you to select the poetry in your apology, like those choices and the criticism you get from two or another, I can get a chance to ask you about the choices you made of the poems and the poetry. That's for overcoctails or something else, for two or three choices. We have time for, I think, one more question. My question for each of the panelists was, in each of your mediums, when do you feel like one piece is ready for performance or is ready to be launched? And when do you feel like a piece is finished? The first question, opening night, and the second question, never. Yes, in a way, I agree. All right, I guess to be more specific, what components are present apart from the deadline? But what is it, I guess, I'm curious what each of you, and particularly you, I mean, what is it that you look for that tells you that, you know, especially with living formats, what's present for you, what's there for you in the year in which you're working, that sort of signifies to you, you know, I'm ready to share this or I'm ready to move on from this. Go along with the resume, and I'd say it's never finished, and it's ready when it's actually you don't want it to be ready. At least the kind of work idea, it's unproduced and undone, and that's how it would present itself. It's that desire for lack of, it's the empty pieces of the finished work that I'm interested in. So there's a content, the work is presentable, and then the work is done. The work is never done, I think, but it's present, you get it to a point that it's presentable that you're happy with how far it's come, or with what the public will see, but for example, with Tamam, by Benny Shamia, I directed that piece twice with different actors and musicians, and while there were similarities in how I directed it, again it was really informed by the actors, so it ended up being a very different presentation, and if we had more time, we would have continued to experiment with doing particular moments differently, or maybe making a more complex musical response to the poetry. So deadlines are important together. Speaking of deadlines, my panel, they are so kind and warm and good, and so I think if you have additional questions I encourage you to come talk to them. Did I use that question, or were you just switching? I have a little pain here. I hope it wasn't our problem. I have a pain there. I want to thank all of you. I encourage you to read your bios and stay in touch with us. And I apologize if I was too strict and if I'm a panelist, but you were fine with talking about it. Let's give a round of applause. It's time to join us for the panel from War on Drugs to War on Terror Parallels in Chicano, Latino and Middle Eastern America.