Monday, November 23, 2009

Golden Thread 10th anniversary play festival





Whenever I enjoy a politically themed movie or play, I wonder if solidarity with the viewpoint isn’t clouding my judgment of the aesthetics. Is the artist speaking my heart, or is my heart speaking for the artist? Often it is a mix of both, to be honest. But one of the works I watched last Saturday at Golden Thread’s Festival of short Middle East plays shattered the silly question at the outset. Naomi Wallace’s No Such Cold Thing is a spellbinding play that powers its way beyond “friends don’t let friends invade Afghanistan.”


The cast of characters is made up of two young Afghan sisters, an American soldier and three big gunnysacks. They are gathered in a desert near Kabul shortly after the US invasion. We understand why the younger sister wears a burqa, but have no idea why she is also wearing the American soldier’s boots. From this setup and bits of what the characters say to each other, Wallace quickly establishes an eerie sense of “what’s wrong with this picture?” The playwright--who is a winner of the MacArthur Genius Award-- challenges us with seemingly unsolvable riddles, then devastates us emotionally with her imaginative solutions. The chilling outlook of this work persists like theme music across the set of one-act plays that follow.

Betty Shamieh’s Tamam (enough ) shifts the war drama from Afghanistan to Palestine. The play’s cast is a chorus of two actors relating the ordeal of a Palestinian woman who goes to visit her brother in an Israeli prison. There, she is detained and used in a psychology experiment to see how the rape of a sister affects the male Arab mind.

Shamieh’s accusation is so bitter and angry that it makes you wonder if the art of drama is large enough to contain the Palestinian rage. One feels guilty even trying to critique such a raw scream of anguish. This calls for a comparison with another play in this night of one-act plays, Coming Home, by Israeli anti-war playwright Motti Lerner. The two plays are tightly related in theme--they could even be two acts in the same play--yet they emote in radically different universes.

Coming Home aptly brings the American audience home from the bombed and bulldozed living environment of the Palestinians. The setting is a family residence in Israel with familiar characters occupying it. Father likes tennis, and his doctor wife prescribes herself tranquilizers. The son plays guitar and likes to take his girlfriend to the beach. He eats steaks with fries and ketchup. Everything would be the American norm if it weren’t for the Uzi in the dining room and the son stripping himself naked in front of his parents, squirting ketchup all over himself.

The young soldier has had an encounter with and Arab child who was running towards a checkpoint with a suspicious looking school bag over the shoulder. A few seconds wasn’t time enough to ask the question, it was just time enough to pull the trigger. In this play, Lerner brings to light the hidden cost of war to Israeli society. To give a clue as to the magnitude of this cost I will paraphrase Chekhov’s famous insight, “If there’s a gun on the stage, someone better use it.”

Lerner’s Israel and Shamieh’s Palestine exist on the same patch of land, but while the Israeli artist warns his people, the Palestinian artist mourns hers. There are no tennis games, guitars, beaches, and girlfriends on Shamieh’s palette. She has only humiliation, prison, and suicide missions to work with. There are plays that attempt to weave the East and West views of the Middle East conflict into the same story. It doesn’t work! Artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian has been wise to paragraph each part of this single tragedy as separate plays. Otherwise the balancing act would have pulled towards an intellectual debate--as it usually does--instead of tugging at our hearts first one way then the other, the right way to tear something apart.

As a kind gesture to her audience Yeghiazarian has inserted a light-hearted comic relief in between the blood, sweat and tears plays. In the bedroom skit, Call me Mehdi--which Yeghiazarian wrote herself--an Iranian wife sets her American husband straight regarding Rashtis* and Ghazvinis**. Then Yeghiazarian marches us back to Israelis and Palestinians for more bruising, eye-opening, and well-acted theater.


Notes:




* Jokes having to do with infidelity
** Jokes having to do with sodomy



This review just covers series 1 of the festival plays. Series 2 has a different set of plays, including a work starring Iranian film actress Vida Ghahremani.



Here’s where and when to see the festival of plays.

Re-Orient 2009 THE FIRST TEN YEARS

November 19 - December 13
at Thick House (1695 18th Street, San Francisco, CA)


Series 1 – Thursdays & Saturdays at 8:00 PM


Series 2 – Fridays at 8:00 PM & Sundays at 5:00 PM

There is also a related forum with conferences, discussions, dances and music performances. Here’s the information link.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Tehran artists in San Francisco


One day, strolling down the streets of Tehran, I noticed that somethings are near and somethings are far. Big deal, I said to myself. Everybody knows there is a here and a there. But why did this thought feel like a find? Why was I inspired by it as though I had just heard a Hafez verse? For some reason, I felt compelled to give life to the sensation so that it can trot out on its own and share itself with other people?



Fortunately, I am a Hafez of sorts myself. I work in a different medium, photographs that hang in a gallery instead of verses written in a book. The poet inside me said I should grab a camera and take a picture of this…this whatever it is. But an ordinary camera wouldn’t do; it had to be a pinhole camera. Why?




I don’t know if this is what went through the mind of Tehran artist Mehran Mohajer as he created the work that had pinned me in front of it for so long. Just guessing! I moved on, promising to come back to Mohajer later. Attracted by the red paint defacing a set of photographs on another wall, I made my way through the crowd to see what that was all about. Nothing at first. Just pictures of busy Tehran streets, each with a red ribbon painted over it. What was the red paint masking in Mohammad Ghazali’s photo art? Musician Arash Sobhani, had no trouble spotting it. When we ran into each other at the gallery opening, I thought here’s someone who likely connects with Ghazali’s The Red Ribbon. Sobhani’s widely admired social criticism in song leaves little unsaid.



“Damned if we focus on it, and damned if we don’t,” Sobhani reacted in Farsi. He was talking about the large shaheed street-posters that would burden Ghazali’s photos with grief, guilt, anger and deceit if it weren’t for the red paint obscuring them. But forgetting or ignoring what is there, leaves scars as noticeable as the wounds, the artwork seemed to argue. “This is Iran’s paradox,” Sobhani said, voicing the sentence with his signature gentle fury. His hand was clenched as though pressing a chord into a guitar neck. The two artists had understood each other well!



Leaving Sobhani to his new artist friend, I ambled back to revisit Mohajer’s pinhole camera photo. A classic pinhole camera doesn’t have a lens, so there’s nothing to focus. As a result everything, both far and near is in focus (see above photo). If our minds worked like pinhole cameras, Iran would have no paradox of focus. It is all just there! There’s one problem with this device though, things that move show up very blurry. Living things going about their business can’t be imaged properly. So Mohajer’s photos have an empty apocalyptic feeling. Ghosts roam here and there, but there’s no stir of life. The Supreme Leader’s face appears clear enough in the distance, but he stares at us immobile from a poster. Splitting the worlds of near and far with color instead of focus, the outer realm is gray, wintry, and silent, while the inner realm is sunlit and talkative.



Promising again to come back to Mohajer, I was attracted by a double-image black and white video on the opposite wall. The left and right videos seemed identical, and at first I thought this must be one of those contraptions where the image becomes 3D if you stare at it the right way. The game was far subtler, however. Among the crowd entering and leaving a busy Tehran subway station, there was one passenger present in the left video that had been digitally erased in the right one. Finding this person takes patience and a strong will to know. The blurb next to the photo said the absent person represents arrested protesters who have disappeared in the recent uprising. Maybe so, but there was also something personal about Neda Razavipour’s work. Had she recently lost someone close to her? Did her work also reflect the shocking realization that the outside world shrugs obliviously at the emotional hole inside of us when we lose someone dear? Again, a young Iranian artist was contemplating the inner versus the outer. In this case Razavipour had connected the two realms. Her nation too had a part of its heart torn out. On the inside there was emptiness where there used to be love, on the outside the missing chunk was in the shape of freedom.



Working the walls one by one, I found equally relevant, emotional and insightful contemporary art by Saba Alizadeh , Homayoun Askari Sirizi, Abbas Kowsari, and Ghazaleh Hedayaat.. Nima Alizadeh’s works had broken out of the frame and spilled out subtly onto the wall paint. Even on the floor of this small gallery there was a work of art where a traditional medium debated modern design. Turning Green is a laser cut wool carpet by the organizer of the show, Bay Area artist Taraneh Hemami. It is in the shape of Tehran’s street map. To go into more detail would impose too much of this writer’s interpretations. Forget what you have read here and go see the works through your own eyes.



As promised I made one last visit to Mohajer to say goodbye to the show. On the way home I thought it would be nice if there were a pinhole “camera” that worked on Time, bringing the same focus to the future as our minds give to the present. Maybe someone could turn the idea into a piece of writing. Then I wondered if Arash Sobhani was thinking what part of the show he could turn into a piece of music. On the inside art is a feeling, on the outside it is a language.



Here’s where-and-when to see the show:

One Day: A Collective Narrative of Tehran
Wed, Nov 4 - Sat, Jan 23, 2010

Location

Intersection for the Arts
446 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Gallery hours are Wednesdays - Saturdays, noon-5pm, FREE