Personal Spiritual Political
I believe that creative engagement can open spaces that argument alone cannot. When dialogue is crowded out, art can slip through — not to preach or persuade, but to invite presence, reflection, and genuine exchange.
The Banned Monologues A multidisciplinary performance piece instigated by the so-called ‘Muslim Ban’. The complexities of West Asian/ ‘Middle Eastern’ diaspora and nonconformist British-Muslim identities are addressed through songs, openness and humour. Six monologues interweave family history with that of minorities and migration within West Asia, accompanied by folk songs in Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, Farsi and Ladino. Music and monologues juxtapose cultures historically in conflict — a Kurdish song alongside a Turkish one, or Andalusian Sephardic Jewish (Ladino) alongside an Arabic song of the same era. Shared as a work-in-progress with an invited audience in November 2017.
Modules Fragmented A work exploring different parts of the self — parts that seem to repeat in patterns of ways-of-being in the world rather than move forward. If resilience is bouncing back, what needs to happen to move forward? The piece is presented in a series of non-linear modules.
One Module, Sleep Cycles centres on a liminal space of awareness — a sense of what needs to happen, set against the pull of the familiar. Another module, Soup to Stand | From Inertia to Standing juxtaposes a voiceover of a recorded voice message describing how to make Ash-e-reshteh (an Iranian bean soup) with a figure slumped on a chair who gradually comes to presence. The movement draws on the awakening sequence in physical theatre training, rooted in the traditions of Étienne Decroux’s Corporeal Mime and Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theatre.
Sheelan مشوار 