Persepolis: The film . . . and more like Essay 4

This morning we watched the film, Persepolis in the Student Lounge (F-Bldg.). The third essay looking at fiction, this time--The Complete Persepolis, is due Monday, July 18, 2011, for a peer review. Bring the essay electronically. Send to me by Tuesday before class.

For extra credit, students can look at Persepolis the film and compare and contrast it to the novel. The style can be a review for a popular publication, you decide which one. Include this information in the IPS.

We will focus on poetry next week, and the final week, students can choose their own genre to write a literary expose on. We will write the essay in class on Tuesday, July 26, 2011. I will give you the entire session (7:30-10:20 to write it). The planning sheet is due Monday, July 25, 2011 for comment.


Field Trip Details

Class, I plan to attend the play Saturday, July 16, 2011, 8 PM. If you'd like to join me, let me know. I plan to reserve tickets today.

WS

PERSEPOLIS, TEXAS: INFO
About the show, which is one hour long:

How is it that a little girl born to Iranian parents, reared in the suburbs of Texas and schooled to become an architect became an ostentatious drag queen in San Francisco? How can the violence of the suburbs disrupt the dreams immigrants have for themselves and their offspring? Can the children of immigrants use their precarious cultural collateral to forge new identities, or are they mired by the consequences of exoticization? Persepolis, Texas, an evening-length, one-woman show premiering at CounterPULSE in July, lives and breathes in these questions. Using narrative, devised movement, and drag, Maryam Farnaz Rostami will take the audience to the Wild West, an Iranian living room, a suburban public school, and to Persepolis itself to explore how where we're from makes who we are.

Given how recent current events continue to exacerbate the image of Middle Eastern people in the media, Persepolis, Texas is an especially relevant story, one that will impact not only how people see Middle Eastern-Americans, but also how Middle Eastern-Americans see themselves. MFR Productions is excited about presenting the story of a “FOBspring” (child of a FOB, Fresh Off the Boat) who has queered model minority expectations while also occupying a unique position in the queer community by being a cis-gendered woman and also a drag queen.

The stakes are high for Maryam, because she is using my movement experience, writing experience, and her drag chops to develop her first solo show with director and dramaturg Sara Razavi. Maryam’s drag queen alter ego, Mona G. Hawd, will bring a dash of sequined vigilance as well as high artifice to the stage. Maryam counts Monique Jenkinson/Fauxnique as one of her mentors, and is making work that is in many ways inspired by Faux/Real and Luxury Items. To contrast, her work will be focused on hyphenated identities and the construction and manipulation of gender and ethnicity. Maryam has been working on Persepolis, Texas since the Summer of 2010, and she is innovating within a framework of non-linear storytelling. To this end, she will engage members of the communities with whom she is most closely tied: the queer nightlife community, the queer performance art community, the middle eastern performing arts community, as well as the Bay Area community of architects and architectural designers, of which she is also a part.

Persepolis, Texas makes its world premiere at CounterPULSE on July 15-17th 2011. Maryam and MFR Productions are part of the Summer Special Program, which gives “artists and cultural innovators a variety of ways to access the plethora of resources and expertise” that CounterPULSE offers. This is a highly supported environment in which to present work, and MFR Productions is honored to be part of this pilot program.

In Persepolis, Texas, Maryam Farnaz Rostami will represent several character archetypes in telling a semi-autobiographical coming of age story. The Auntie, the Kid, the Unassuming Cowboy, the Pop Star, and the Tour Guide will all make appearances and tell their version of reality through Maryam’s. As such, these characters will invite her to different states of bodily being, and as she takes them on, she will slip into corresponding states that will dictate movement. Having been in two productions necessitating collaborated devised movement (Tell Them That You Saw Me and Total Facts Known), Maryam is excited to use her experience in allowing state-work to tell this strange story. Maryam is devising this piece alongside director and dramaturg Sara Razavi, who is also an Iranian-American with a strong understanding of the American suburbs. For Persepolis, Maryam will engage in a self-flagellation mourning ritual in cowboy regalia, whirl like a dervish at the foot of high school bleachers, do rope tricks at the steps of Persepolis, and will execute the elusive dance that every auntie wants her niece to do at a proper Persian mehmooni (party).



Here is a list of the characters:
The Persian Girl – early 20’s Persian-American girl from Texas
The Texan – early 30’s American man from Texas
Uncle – early 60’s Iranian-American man
Aunt – early 50’s Iranian – American woman
Kid – a little girl, age 9-10
Mona G. Hawd – drag queen
Suburban Mom – early 50’s American suburban housewife from Texas
Preacher/Healer – gender neutral faith healer
Hejabi Woman – an Iranian woman dressed in full chador
Googosh – Iranian pop singer/icon, performing since she was a little girl, now in her 60’s


MORDAB by Googoosh- Translation by Maryam Farnaz Rostami

In the midst of a naked expanse
Under the desert sun
Lies an aging swamp
Captive in the hands of the earth

I am that ancient swamp
Separate from everything on earth
The heat of the sun on my skin,
And the chains of the earth on my feet

I am the one who had hoped
To one day become the ocean
I wanted to become the biggest ocean in the world
I wanted to expand until I reached the ocean
I wanted to set the night on fire until I reached tomorrow

At first, I was a just a mountain spring
Underneath the timeless sky
But because of that dark moment
My path has lead to dry lands

My spring lead to a place beyond those that tall mountain
Instead, the hands of fate carved a void in my path

I am damned to the earth
The land now imprisons me
And the sky didn’t even cry
She chose to look away
Now I’ve become a swamp
A half-living captive
On one hand buried in the land
On the other, reaching for the sky

The sun from above
And the dirt from below
Are evaporating me
My life has come to this
I am a witness to my own death
But this is my fate, I’m a captive to the land

There is nothing real left of me
These are the last drops
The thirsty earth is taking even this with him
I’m drying up, I’m finished
Tomorrow when the sun comes up
The wind will fill this void with the dust of sand.

Show Details:

What: Persepolis, Texas: FOBspring to Drag Queen in One Generation!
World Premiere by Maryam Farnaz Rostami. Evening length solo performance of drag, movement and narrative.

When: Friday July 15th, Saturday July 16th, Sunday July 17th, 2011
Where: CounterPULSE 1310 Mission Street @ 9th, San Francisco
Tickets: General Admission: $20, CounterPULSE Members: $15

Counterpulse.org or 1-800-838-3006
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/177123
Web: http://counterpulse.org/persepolis-texas/
www.maryamrostami.com

About the Artists:

Sara Razavi has a BA in Sociology with a minor in Theatre Studies from UC Davis. In addition to her training at Davis, her theatre training involves a year-long theatre focus at University of Birmingham, in England. She was one of the founding members of elastic future, an experimental multi-disciplinary arts group working in theatre, film / video, and other live performance, with whom she has collaborated on several ensemble generated works. She is currently a regular performer and active Board Member of Golden Thread Production, a theatre company focused on exploring Middle Eastern cultures and identities. She has also been involved with other local theatre companies including Shotgun Theatre, TheatreFIRST, Darvag, and New Conservatory Theatre Company. Like Rostami, Razavi, is also of Iranian decent. She was born in Iran and left with her family when she was 7, after the Iranian Revolution, and during the Iran-Iraq War. She currently lives with her wife, in San Francisco, where in addition to her theatre work, she has worked as a nonprofit executive and is beginning business school at University of San Francisco this fall.


Maryam Farnaz Rostami is a San Francisco based drag queen and contemporary performance artist from Texas. Her work deals with the complexities of the modern condition through the lens of an overachieving child of model minorities. Trained as an architect, Maryam exacerbates and collides her many hats when making performance, and engages audiences on a visual, intellectual and emotional level. She is dedicated to artistic engagement as an invitation for thinking about, looking at and talking to one another differently. Her drag persona, Mona G. Hawd, uses lipsync, movement, narrative and dance and an exaggerated high femme medium to question ownership of images in our culture.

While in architecture school at the University of Texas at Austin, Maryam joined a group of dancers performing Iranian folk dance, and co-choreographed and performed traditional dances with a modern twist on and off campus. During this time, as president of the Iranian Students Academic and Cultural Organization, she presented culturally relevant performing arts including works that challenged status quo perceptions about Iranian-Americans in cabaret-style shows that consistently sold out. Since living in San Francisco, Maryam has collaborated and performed in popular movement-based theater pieces (Total Facts Known, Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory, Fall 2009, Tell Them that You Saw Me, CounterPULSE, Summer 2010), and presented original work in well-attended or sold out venues (This is What I Want 2010 NQAF, WORK HARD). Her piece, Bordi Az Yadam (Taken From My Memory) shown at The Garage last July for This is What I Want re-appropriated the exoticized image of a veiled woman, pushing back on the notion that such a woman is marked by passivity. A dance using just her eyelids gave way to a durational display of auto-eroticism. At TOO MUCH! A Queer Performance Marathon 2010, Maryam choreographed a queered line dance (Right Down the Line) drawing from her Texan upbringing as well as her drag performance influences. Just this past January, at this year’s TOO MUCH!, Maryam and Ryan Crowder performed a durational crochet score in which they created outfits for one another over the course of the festival.

Maryam’s drag persona, Mona G. Hawd is necessarily political in nature. Drawing from exoticized notions of femininity, especially situated in highly oppressed conditions, Mona shoves away at status quo notions of what a proper Middle Eastern lady ought to be. To boot, Mona uses camp as well as high drag to spark imaginations for possibilities toward all sorts of liberation.
Maryam is honored to be supported by the communities in which she participates actively in San Francisco and the East Bay: the queer nightlife community in which she is a drag queen, the queer performance art community in she collaborates with dancers, art makers in movement, costuming and makeup design, the Middle Eastern performing arts community, as well as the Bay Area community of architects and architectural designers, of which Maryam is also a part.

You can listen to an interview with the playwright at: www.wandaspicks.asmnetwork.org (July 13, 2011). It is also available on iTunes.

Also visit:
http://vimeo.com/25007254
(The Persian Girl character as well as the Googoosh character have stayed in the play, while The Kid has morphed and changed into something else.)

maryamrostami.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD4OTbt_DTU