New Iranian Plays - Samini, Nagmeh

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Résumé :
A wide-ranging collection of plays from new and established voices from Iran and the Iranian diaspora, translated into English. Topics range from a jazz tour of Iran in 1963, to the desperate hopes of women in a time of revolution, to the struggle to create a new life abroad where beliefs and attitudes are tested, and in verbatim testimony, we explore the lives of boat people. those migrants fleeing war who have become trapped in a migrant camp on a small island in the Pacific.

These plays newly translated into English reveal the hearts and minds of Iranian people and offer six fascinating, new and original plays to perform. With an overview of Iranian Theatre by Nazanin Sahamizadeh....

Biographie:

Editors:

Aubrey Mellor

Aubrey is a leading Australian Theatre Director. Currently Senior Fellow at LASALLE, in Singapore, he was the first Australian to study Asian writing. Formerly Director of the Australian National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), he is well-known as an acting teacher to a generation of acclaimed Australian actors. He has directed for all major companies, commissioned and premiered plays by Australia's leading playwrights and is a leading proponent of new Australian writing.

Aubrey founded several writing awards for playwrights and is an advisor to arts bodies including the Performing Arts Board of The Australia Council and The Australian National Playwright's Conference. Awards include the OAM in 1992, the Australian Writer's Guild's Dorothy Crawford Award for services to Playwriting and the International Theatre Institute's Uchimura Prize for best production, Tokyo International Festival.

Cheryl Robson

Cheryl has edited several collections of international drama. After studying drama at Bristol University, she worked for the BBC and as a film lecturer. She founded the Virginia Prize for Fiction in 2009 in the UK. She is an award-winning playwright who has received Arts Council UK commission and option awards and had several plays produced. She ran a theatre company for several years in London, developing and producing international plays by women. She has won numerous awards for her filmmaking and was recently named a finalist in the ITV National Diversity awards - Lifetime Achievement.

Nazanin Sahamizadeh is a director and researcher of the play Manus. She set up the Verbatim Theatre group in Tehran and had the idea for the play after hearing about the abuse of detainees in Manus, an offshore detention centre for Australia. The award-winning play has been performed internationally including at the Adelaide Festival in Australia in 2017. It is based on the testimonies of several refugees including Kurdish detainee and journalist Behrouz Boochani,

Mojgan Khaleghi is a writer and director who has been focusing more on directing in recent years, and she recently completed her latest documentary film. She also directed the hit play You Are Busy Dying at The City Theater Complex in Tehran. As an actor she performed in Blind Owl and has worked with famous stage directors and movie makers like Ebrahim Hatami Kia, Mohamad Yaghoubi and Hadi Marzban. In an interview with Iran Theater she said that she will direct the show Dogs and my Mother's Bones at City Theater Complex after the coronavirus pandemic. The theme is about the Balkan Wars in the early 1990s, focusing on women's issues in war and the challenges and abuses they face.

Mohammad Yaghoubi was born in 1967 in Langaroud, a town on the Caspian Sea. While pursuing studies in judicial law, he joined a university theater company in 1988. The following year, he wrote his first play and took his first steps on stage. Less captivated by the limelight than passionate about writing, he nevertheless decided to take training as an actor in the school run by Hamid Samandarian, a veteran of drama in Iran. Convinced that theatrical writing cannot be taught, Mohammad Yaghoubi hopes to expand his writing as a dramatic author by learning the art of the actor. This same desire for training in writing through scenic practice also pushes him to try his hand at directing. After several theatrical experiences in the basements of private houses, his first production was officially presented in 1997 to the public at the City Theater in Tehran. He then began to publish and mount h...

Sommaire:
Torange Yeghiazarian founded Golden Thread in 1996 where she launched such visionary programs as ReOrient Festival & Forum, Middle East America (in partnership with the Lark and Silkroad Rising), Islam 101 (with Hafiz Karmali), New Threads, and the Fairytale Players. Torange's plays include ISFAHAN BLUES, 444 DAYS, THE FIFTH STRING: ZIRYAB'S PASSAGE TO CORDOBA, and CALL ME MEHDI. Awards include the Gerbode-Hewlett Playwright Commission Award (ISFAHAN BLUES) and a commission by the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California (THE FIFTH STRING). Her short play CALL ME MEHDI is published in the anthology Salaam. Peace: An Anthology of Middle Eastern-American Drama, TCG 2009. She adapted the poem, I SELL SOULS by Simin Behbehani to the stage, and directed the premieres of OUR ENEMIES: LIVELY SCENES OF LOVE AND COMBAT and SCENIC ROUTES by Yussef El Guindi, THE MYTH OF CREATION by Sadegh Hedayat, TAMAM by Betty Shamieh, STUCK by Amir Al-Azraki and VOICE ROOM by Reza Soroor, amongst others. Her articles on contemporary theatre in Iran have been published in The Drama Review (2012), American Theatre Magazine (2010), and Theatre Bay Area Magazine (2010), and HowlRound. Torange has contributed to the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures and Cambridge World Encyclopedia of Stage Actors. Born in Iran and of Armenian heritage, Torange holds a Master's degree in Theatre Arts from San Francisco State University. Torange has been recognized by Theatre Bay Area and is one of Theatre Communication Group's Legacy Leaders of Color. She was honored by the Cairo International Theatre Festival (2016) and the Symposium on Equity in the Entertainment Industry (2017)....