Category: ARTS & THEATER

Nabra Nelson: Salam Alaikum. Welcome to Kunafa and Shay, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. Kunafa and Shay discusses and analyzes contemporary and historical Middle Eastern and North African, or MENA, and SWANA or Southwest Asian, North African theatre from across the region.

Marina Johnson: I am Marina.

Nabra: And I’m Nabra.

Marina: And we’re your hosts.

Nabra: Our name, Kunafa and Shay, invites you into the discussion in the best way we know how with complex and delicious sweets like kunafa and perfectly warm tea or, in Arabic, shay.

Marina: Kunafa and Shay is a place to share experiences, ideas, and sometimes to engage with our differences. In each country in the Arab world, you’ll find kunafa made differently. In that way we also lean into the diversity, complexity, and robust flavors of MENA and SWANA theatre. We bring our own perspectives, research, and special guests in order to start a dialogue and encourage further learning and discussion.

Nabra: In our fourth season, we focus on classical and historical theatre, including discussions of traditional theatre forms and in-depth analysis of some of the oldest and most significant classical plays from 1,300 BC to the twentieth century.

Marina: Yalla, grab your tea, the shay is just right.

Nabra: Audiences typically pack houses to see love stories, especially those about forbidden love. Romeo and Juliet is a famous Western example of this phenomenon, but the trope goes back much further, to a poem that likely inspired, even inadvertently, Shakespeare’s famous play.

In this episode, we look at the timeless tale of Layla and Majnun made famous by Nizami Ganjavi as a poem and later adopted for the stage and the screen countless times.

So I found the play titled Majnun Layla, which translates to “crazy about Layla” or “obsessed with Layla.” And then I found the poem on which it’s based. Like so many others, I immediately became obsessed by it.
 

Marina: I first encountered Layla and Majnun in the first year of my PhD. My world theatre history class had an assignment that each of us was responsible for bringing in one or two plays related to our area of study or something that was just a particular interest to us from anything considered theatre history. By the way, teachers, especially those in higher ed, I loved this as an assignment because it really allowed us to think about what it meant to expand the canon in our own ways.

So I found the play titled Majnun Layla, which translates to “crazy about Layla” or “obsessed with Layla.” And then I found the poem on which it’s based. Like so many others, I immediately became obsessed by it.

Nabra: For those who don’t know, the story of Layla and Majnun is one of the most famous classic love stories to have come out of the Arabian Peninsula. It has roots in Arabian folklore and poetry and has been retold and reinterpreted in various forms over the centuries. The tragic tale of Majnun and Layla has been immortalized in Arabic literature through various poetic works, most notably by the twelfth century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi in his epic poem, Layla and Majnun. But it was known in the Arab world as early as the fifth century and Persia as early as the ninth century.

Two well-known Persian poets, Rudaki and Baba Taher both mentioned the lovers in their works. Wali Ahmadi from UC Berkeley has written that the story of Majnun and Layla, “clearly draws from brief, disjointed oral anecdotes reported in earlier Arabic sources. It was Nizami who superbly worked through the scant materials in his possession, developed a more complex plot, intensified the characterization, and composed a much more multilayered story in the Musnavi rhyming couplet form to be incorporated along with four other long narratives into his monumental quintet.”

Marina: A Majnun Layla fun fact: Eric Clapton read a book of Persian poetry, which included the story of Layla and Majnun. He based his song “Layla” on this story and imagined it as representing his passion for George Harrison’s wife Pattie. Nearly nine years after the release of the album Layla and other Assorted Love Songs, Eric and Pattie were married. So if you’re ever jamming to the song Layla, just know that it is based on Layla and Majnun.

Nabra: Okay, so let’s start with a very basic plot rundown. Our two main characters are seventh century Bedouin poet Qays and his lover Layla. Notice that Qays is actually called Qays, his real name, at the beginning, and we’ll talk about what happens later, and where Majnun comes in.

But Layla and Qays are in love from childhood, but are never allowed to be together. Qays is perceived to be out of his mind in his obsession with Layla. Layla is forced to get married to another man, and Qays lives essentially in exile where he spends his time writing verses about his never-ending love for Layla. Although they make efforts to see each other again, they both die without any real relationship taking place.

Marina: The slightly longer version is that Qays of the Banu Amir tribe falls in love with his classmate Layla. As the two grow older, the intensity of their love increases. Although Layla too is truly smitten by love, it’s Qays who publicly and unreservedly pronounces his obsessive passion and elegiac lyrics, thus earning the epithet Majnun, literally meaning “possessed” or “mad.”

Majnun’s constant poetic praise of Layla’s beauty and his shocking unconventional behavior in public raised concerns for Layla’s parents. Worried about their daughter’s reputation and the honor of their tribe, they ensure that the lovers are separated. When Qays’s father proposes marriage between Qays and Layla, Layla’s family rejects the offer due to Majnun’s scandalous behavior, which though seemingly harsh is not entirely unreasonable.

As Majnun wanders aimlessly in the desert, living an ascetic life and composing verses about his love for Layla, his father tries to cure him of this obsessive love by taking him to the Kaaba, the holiest of Muslim sites. There Majnun prays to Allah to intensify his love for Layla even more. Meanwhile, Layla’s father arranges her marriage to a wealthy but shallow man named Ibn Salam against her will. The marriage remains unconsummated as Layla remains faithful to Majnun until her husband dies of rejection and grief.

Nabra: At times, Majnun is given the opportunity to meet Layla in person, but even when she appears before him through a devoted intermediary, he refuses physical or sexual contact. Majnun sees a perfect selfless love for Layla transcending physical desires.

This aspect of the story has led many to interpret it as a Sufi allegory where Majnun represents the lover seeking union with the divine. When Layla falls ill and dies, Majnun loses his purpose in life. He rushes to her grave site where he embraces her gravestone and breathes his last, finally united with her in death.

Nizami’s tale of Layla and Majnun can be interpreted in various ways, as a mystical allegory or as a conventional love story. Despite its mystical elements the poem also holds profane dimensions that contribute to its rich and captivating narrative.

Marina: And there are different alternate endings. So if you’re familiar with this story but aren’t familiar with the narrative that we just laid out, never fear, what you heard is just one of many different ways that this has been interpreted throughout time.

So sometimes Layla does consummate her marriage with this other man, even though she still loves Majnun or Qays. There are just many different ways that this ends. So you can check them all out. We’ll go into a few of them today, but not that many, because it’s been around for so long. There are just so many different endings.

But I think I became obsessed with this story because I couldn’t believe that there was a really famous love story that was so beautifully written that I hadn’t heard of, and it truly seemed to influence everything around me. The day after I discovered it, I typed “Majnun Layla” into Netflix and found an adaptation there. I saw a dance piece advertised that was taking up the story of Majnun Layla. It was everywhere, and I just didn’t realize it.

In addition to being beautifully written, I’m always interested in stories that take up past existing origin stories, so to speak. This all led me to wonder though, why is Romeo and Juliet the common Western referent when it’s clear that this story predates Romeo and Juliet and probably influenced Shakespeare?

Literary historian Agah Sırrı Levend in his research on Layla and Majnun states that these Eastern love stories may have entered Western literature through the Crusades. He also argues that it’s the source for works like Tristan and Isolde among others. And I have to say as I was doing research for this episode, I kept pulling up articles that were like the “Eastern Romeo and Juliet,” and I was like, that feels so unfair considering how far before Romeo and Juliet it came. But that’s…

Nabra: That’s Orientalism for you.

Marina: Colonization… imperialism…. Hard to pick just one. So Nizami wrote the poem in the twelfth century, and the elements and stories he combined were definitely around before that. So he probably wasn’t the first writer to deal with the subject, but the most famous that we know of for those listening who are like, I forget when Romeo and Juliet was written… It wasn’t written until somewhere between 1594-96.

So it’s exciting and amazing to me that Layla and Majnun have influenced more about our current cultural climate than one might originally think. Apparently, it does have enduring popularity and universal appeal.

Nabra: We wanted to share a few of our favorite excerpts from Nizami’s immortal poem, Layla and Majnun. This prose version has been adapted by Colin Turner and published by Blake in London in 1970. “The future is veiled from our eyes. The threads of each man’s fate extend well beyond the boundaries of the visible world. Where they lead we cannot see. Who can say that today’s key will not be tomorrow’s lock or today’s lock, not tomorrow’s key.”

Marina: “Dearest heart, if I had not given my soul to you, it would’ve been better to give it up for good, to lose it forever. I am burning in love’s fire. I’m drowning in the tears of my sorrow. I am the moth that flies through the night to flutter around the candle flame. Oh, invisible candle of my soul, do not torture me as I encircle you. You’ve bewitched me. You’ve robbed me of my sleep, my reason, my very being.”

Nabra: “Time passes, but true love remains. The life of this world is for the most part nothing but a succession of illusions and deceptions. But true love is real and the flames which fuel it burn forever without beginning or end.”

As famous as Nizami is, Fuzuli, who came a few centuries later, his Leyli and Majnun is a masterpiece of classic Azerbaijani and Turkish literature. Fuzuli, whose full name is Muhammad bin Suleyman, was a prominent Azerbaijani poet and thinker of the sixteenth century. He’s considered one of the greatest contributors to the Dîvân or classic poetry tradition.

This interpretation of the story generated more interest than previous Arabic and Persian versions, which the Turkish literature scholar Iskender Pala attributes to the sincerity and lyricism of the poet’s expression. The poem explores themes of love, devotion, madness, and the longing for union with the beloved. Fuzuli’s rendition of the story is celebrated for its profound emotional depth, lyrical beauty and philosophical musings on the nature of love and the human condition.

In fact, it has been described by the Encyclopaedia Iranica as “the culmination of the Turkic Masnavi tradition in that it raised the personal and human love tragedy to the plane of mystical longing and ethereal aspiration.”

If you’re ever jamming to the song Layla, just know that it is based on Layla and Majnun.

Marina: Like any inspiring story, it has been adapted many, many times. Layla and Majnun is an opera also based on the tragic love story that we’ve talked about composed by a Azerbaijan composer, Uzeyir Hajibeyov. It is considered one of the earliest examples of an opera in the Muslim world.

The libretto was written by Azerbaijani poet and playwright Muhammad Hadi. The opera was first performed in 1908 in Baku, Azerbaijan and is marked as a significant milestone in Azerbaijani and Islamic music history. It combines elements of traditional Azerbaijani music with Western operatic styles, creating a unique and innovative composition.

The opera incorporates traditional Azerbaijani musical instruments such as the tar, kamancheh, and balaban, along with Western orchestration. The music features melodic lines inspired by Azerbaijani Mugham, which is a classical improvisational modal musical tradition.

Nabra: There have been other notable adaptations of the Layla and Majnun story in opera form, including works by composers such as another Azerbaijani composer, Gara Garayev; Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who offers a Russian take on the classic tale; and Vagif Mustafazadeh, who blends jazz with Azerbaijani music.

The last one isn’t a traditional opera, but it is a significant musical work inspired by the story. These adaptations highlight the timeless nature of the story and its ability to resonate with audiences across cultures and generations. It was also adapted by Isaac Brandon in the late eighteenth century and staged as an opera Kais: Or Love In The Deserts: An Opera, in Four Acts at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.

Marina: There are so many movie adaptations. The first three I found are Iranian films from 1937, 1947 and 1959, followed by an Egyptian adaptation in 1975 starring Soad Hosny and Ahmed Mazhar. There are two famous Indian versions of the tale, A 1976 Layla Majnu starring Rishi Kapoor and Ranjeeta Kaur. And then 2018 a remake as well. And sure we’re definitely missing many, many films on this list.

When I asked my friends at a recent Bollywood movie night if they had seen these Indian adaptations, they instead showed me a clip from Aaja Nachle, which features the story of Layla and Majnun. So we’ll get back to that more soon.

Nabra: There was also Laila The Musical. The play begins in modern day Bradford. A young woman called Laila is running away from her family because she’s in love with a man, but her father wants her to marry someone else. There’s a storm raging, and so she takes refuge in a bookshop where she comes across the story of Layla and Majnun and enters a fantasy world. The location of course, then moves from Bradford to ancient Arabia, and her family takes on the characters in the old story. The question facing today’s Laila is stark: will her fate be the same as that of her namesake?

Marina: Y’all, I could not find the answer to this online, so I need to know if you’ve seen this, tell us what the ending is. We could not find the ending online.

Nabra: It seems amazingly melodramatic, as all of these are. Honestly, I think that’s part of the appeal up until today and since ancient times.

The Mark Morris Dance Group also created a version of the classic tale, which was a seventy-minute show featuring two singers and musicians of the Silk Road Ensemble on traditional Asian instruments, combined with Western strings like the violin, etc., and a percussionist on stage with sixteen dancers. From the images and videos available it was a large scale and, at the very least, an incredibly designed production.

Marina: The Bag and Baggage theatre company in Oregon, who I did not know about before doing research for this, did a retelling in 2017. And I love this so much because apparently Scott Palmer wanted to put on a play with these star-cast lovers, and fell in love with the epic poem, but decided that staging the original four-thousand-verse Layla and Majnun would be impractical. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So he was quoted in a local paper talking about the story’s magical animals (“We didn’t have a gazelle budget”) and other supernatural effects. He decided to fuse the two stories of Romeo and Juliet and Majnun and Layla. Apparently he discovered big differences. “Layla is much more modern and feminist, much more headstrong and independent than Juliet,” he said. He invited commentary from every Muslim theatre company in America, he says, and sought advice from scholars at Columbia University and University of Oregon, where Nabra and I have a friend, Michael Malek Najjar, who teaches there. And he apparently served as, I don’t know, at least doing consultations for this show.

He cautioned, no Aladdin, no flying carpets, belly dancers, genie lamps, and none of that appeared in this production. But appropriate to the twelfth century Persian style setting, the high-status Roman women, not the Muslims, are the ones who wore headscarves. I truly wish I could have seen this version. It seems like so much care was put into this adaptation, and it feels like it’s appealing to all audiences in different ways and really doing what I think theatre does well, which is ask questions and find answers out through our practice.

Okay, so this has been a huge overview, some adaptations that are definitely each worthy of their own inquiry. And I wanted to share them because I really feel like it’s fun, for me at least, to go down this rabbit hole of what kinds of stories are we interested in as a group, as humans, and what threads sort of continue throughout different spheres, and then when they’re adapted, which parts or different audiences and different theatres highlight them. Is it the love because we say love is universal? Are there cultural aspects that are really being held onto? And what does that mean? So I think those are the questions that I’m particularly interested in here.

So today we’re going to focus a little bit more on the clip that I told you about from Aaja Nachle and my favorite movie, which is the 2021 Indonesian Majnun Layla.

The poem itself is very performative, and perhaps we could look at it as a performance text.

Nabra: So to return to Aaja Nachle, it’s a Bollywood film released in 2007, directed by Anil Mehta and starring Madhuri Dixit in the lead role. The film’s title translates to “Come, Let’s Dance” in English. The plot revolves around a woman named Dia who returns to her hometown in India from the United States after her dance teacher and mentor Makarand falls ill.

Upon returning Dia learns that her old dance theatre, which was once the heart of the towns, is scheduled to be demolished to make way for a shopping mall. Determined to save the theatre and revive its glory, Dia sets out to reunite her old dance troupe and stage a spectacular performance to raise funds and garner support for their cause.

As Dia reconnects with her past and rallies the community, she faces various challenges including opposition from those who are skeptical about her plans and obstacles in her personal life. Along the way, she finds love and support from individuals who share her passion for dance and her desire to preserve their cultural heritage.

Marina: As you can tell, the movie isn’t about the Majnu and Layla story necessarily, but the Layla Majnu section of the movie is a pivotal part where Dia and her quest to save the theatre decides to stage this production of this classical love story.

In the traditional story of Layla and Majnun generally, there is a strong emotional connection between the two lovers that often leads to the belief that they can feel each other’s pain. While this concept varies depending on the version of the story and cultural interpretations, it’s a recurring theme in many retellings.

Nabra: The idea of Layla and Majnun, of course, feeling each other’s pain typically symbolizes the depth of their love and emotional bond. Despite being physically separated, their souls are said to be intertwined in such a profound way that they can sense each other’s emotional and spiritual states. This notion adds to the tragic and romantic elements of their tale.

In the movie we see this act out in several different ways. So in Aaja Nachle, as a child Majnu writes Layla’s name in his school notebook and gets whacked across the hand with a stick. The same welts that show up on his hands also show up on Layla’s, and this continues throughout the course of their story until finally, when Majnu is killed, Layla dies as well.

If you haven’t seen this twenty-minute segment of the movie, you seriously have to check it out. Also watch the full movie, that’s on my list as well. It’s fast-paced; beautifully produced, dance, and sung; and it’ll really blow you away; and it’s very readily available.

Marina: Shout out to Namrata, my close friend who showed me the clip when I told her about this episode. It’s been such a highlight.

So going back to my original story of the first time that I discovered Majnun and Layla, and I looked on Netflix, and I typed “Majnun Layla” into the search bar, and I found this Indonesian film, and I love it so much. Because it keeps what it feels is the essence of the story without keeping all of the death, which is what Nabra does not like about it.

Nabra: I want the tragedy y’all.

Marina: But the plot of the film was excellent. So a quick rundown, as quick as I can make it. As a young girl, Layla, and her mother see her father—who is a shadow puppeteer—die. Her cruel uncle takes care of them but really make her and her mother live under his thumb. It’s clear that her father’s influence have made her into a storyteller and dreamer, which doesn’t always fit what her uncle wants for her, and what is potentially culturally expected of her as well.

We flashed to when she’s now an adult, and she’s teaching in a classroom in Indonesia. She’s encouraging her class of young women to follow their dreams and not just be content with getting married because it’s prescribed for them. She gets a teaching fellowship in Azerbaijan and then returns to her home to find out that her mother and her uncle have decreed that she gets married.

She initially refuses, saying she doesn’t want to have an arranged marriage. She wants to marry for love. But it soon becomes clear that she’s meant to be this regent’s wife, a guy who she used to go to school with. And maybe it won’t be that bad. Her family wants it. The man has money and will take care of her family. And the man’s father says specifically that he didn’t want to marry anyone else. He just wanted to marry Layla because she’s strong and religious and smart. And he also lets her go to Azerbaijan to teach to follow through on this fellowship essentially that she just got.

So she leaves for Azerbaijan engaged to this regent man, but when she arrives, she quickly falls in love with Samir. Her brother, I can’t tell if it’s her real brother or a close friend that she calls brother, but Ilham introduces them. Samir clearly isn’t rich. He works at the embassy as a cook and is in Layla’s class. His affection for her is clear, and they end up spending several days together as he shows her around the city.

When he seems closer to declaring his love for her, she asks him not to say anything that will ruin their friendship. Ilham encourages her to be with Samir, but Layla is torn. When she talks to the regent man on the phone, she’s clearly unhappy and he is planning their very fancy wedding with two thousand guests, which is coming up soon.

However, she lights up when Samir recites poetry with her, and when they discuss literature and philosophical ideas, Regent man gets so jealous and angry that she isn’t talking to him on the phone that he comes to retrieve her and bring her back to Indonesia. Samir tries to convince her not to marry a man she doesn’t love, but she’s torn. He waits for her in a location. She indicates where they should meet, but she doesn’t show. She’s on a plane back to Indonesia.

Back in Indonesia she is planning for the wedding with regent man, but she’s clearly emotionally exhausted and upset. Samir is too, but he ends up in Indonesia. Long story short, Layla’s uncle tries to lock her up and prevent her from seeing Samir, but her mother helps her escape, knowing she may get the wrath from the uncle for doing this. Layla meets Samir on a bridge and tells him they can be together. Then suddenly regent man, his dad, and six thugs show up. I don’t know what their plan is. Are they going to retrieve Layla? Are they going to kill Samir? Are they going to do a combination of these things? Not clear, but they all show up looking quite threatening.

The cronies push Layla and Samir around for a little bit after Layla won’t go with him willingly. And then when Layla appeals to him and says, “do you really want to marry someone who doesn’t love you?” Regent man says, “Marriage isn’t about love.” And then his dad says, “Okay, this is going very poorly. You’re embarrassing the family by not being able to get your girl back.” And he hands him a gun.

Nabra: Now, the uncle who has clearly brought them here, gets scared and jumps in front of Layla getting shot in the process. He probably dies, but the cameraman quickly moves to another thing, like Layla and Samir starting their getaway, only for the Regent man to order his thugs to tie rocks to their feet and throw them in the water.

We see some really terrifying and beautiful shots of Layla and Samir at the bottom of this body of water looking into each other’s eyes as Samir breathes his last breath. But then we see Layla’s mom jump in, swim to the bottom and cut their ropes. On the shore, Layla, who almost died but didn’t quite die, tries to resuscitate Samir, who we assume is dead, and she thinks is dead. But he comes to, and Ilham and Samir’s cousin show up and bring them all to safety. Our next shots are in Azerbaijan where Samir and Layla are in love and have a child.

Okay, so they don’t die, but the uncle dies, which is fun. But it would’ve just been so beautiful them dying. That scene was very lovely, beautifully shot. But I don’t know why they wouldn’t show Layla dying. It was very weird. She didn’t seem to be perturbed by drowning. She was just of course, upset about Samir. And then I was like, but you were both in the water at the same time. Anyway, Layla, I think, is part mermaid, because she is much less drowned than Samir.

Marina: To Nabra’s point here, you see them both and they’re just parallel under the water, and they’re both struggling to breathe. But then Samir conks out a full, I don’t know, thirty or so seconds before Layla’s mom comes down, and Layla’s just chilling. So maybe she just has the best breath control of anybody you’ve ever met. But I think it’s because there’s something about her love for Samir that will not allow her to give in.

Nabra: Aww, that’s sweet.

Marina: Now, this is where Nabra and I disagree. I was like watch this, you’re going to love it so much. And she said that she liked, but that she wanted all this stuff, like death.

Nabra: I just wanted the death. I think that they could have leaned… The melodrama was so fun, they could have leaned into it and earned it even more. I think they could have gone further, but Marina’s heart, maybe it would’ve burst. I’m just jaded.

Marina: This is definitely true. My heart would’ve burst. But I also love this, because it didn’t have to be as sad as the end of the poem or any other telling. And I think part of the reason, Nabra, is because the people in the movie aren’t familiar with the poem. In the movie she says she’s named Layla after the character Layla from the poem. So it makes sense that she doesn’t meet the same fate as her namesake. There’s some progress for women there perhaps, we’re seeing how this story affects us over time, and that we can still have the same types of love, but that we don’t have to die for them, or that our love can be pure in other ways.

I haven’t done a deep analysis on this film itself. I just really like to watch it. But yeah, if other people have ideas, please leave them in the comments on HowlRound; we would love to chat. But I think this movie is great. It’s predictable in all the right ways. It’s beautifully shot. The intertextual references are great.

I think the puppet show that her and her father are doing at the beginning looks like the Ramayana, where the two lovers are Rama and Sita, which feels like a fitting place to start Majnun and Layla, it’s really beautiful.

Nabra: It’s also just really very lovely to see a lot of traditional cultural elements, like wayang kulit, and get a tour of Azerbaijan, which is really lovely. It’s just very well shot when it comes to showing off a country that I don’t think a lot of people in the US have seen if they’re not Azeris themselves. So yeah, they’re just really nice cultural elements from a lot of different cultures integrated into that.

Marina: Yes, for sure. Okay, so I want to end this episode by putting out something that’s been perplexing me. I found an article a few years ago that talks about a play that in Egypt in the late 1800s called Martyrs of Love, and it literally doesn’t mention much, and it doesn’t mention any of the star-crossed lovers that would’ve occurred in the Arabian Peninsula, the Greater Middle East, whatever we want to call these areas at these earlier times.

And it goes into my thought of a lot of these articles calling this Indonesian movie that we just talked about too, a modern Romeo and Juliet, which is wild. Because the movie is literally called Layla and Majnun, and they’re calling it a modern Romeo and Juliet. So it’s interesting to me that it’s still the reference, and that’s part of why we wanted to make this episode.

Also, a lot of people did grow up hearing this story of Layla and Majnun. I’m not one of those people, so it’s great for me to say like, oh, the next time that I teach theatre history perhaps this is a story that I bring in sooner. And even bring in the poem. The poem itself is very performative, and perhaps we could look at it as a performance text; but looking at these adaptations, I think, does something very important too. So just wanted to highlight some of the existing stories of lovers from the East and look at the ways that their stories have been adapted over time. Thanks, y’all.

Marina:  This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of Kunafa and Shay and other HowlRound podcasts by searching “HowlRound” wherever you find podcasts. If you loved this podcast, please post a rating and write a review on your platform of choice. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content on the howlround.com website.

Nabra:  Have an idea for an exciting podcast, essay, or TV event the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and contribute your ideas to the Commons. Yalla bye.

Nabra and Marina: Yalla, bye!

Nabra Nelson: Salam Alaikum. Welcome to Kunafa and Shay, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. Kunafa and Shay discusses and analyzes contemporary and historical Middle Eastern and North African, or MENA, and SWANA or Southwest Asian, North African theatre from across the region.

Marina Johnson: I am Marina.

Nabra: And I’m Nabra.

Marina: And we’re your hosts.

Nabra: Our name, Kunafa and Shay, invites you into the discussion in the best way we know how with complex and delicious sweets like kunafa and perfectly warm tea or, in Arabic, shay.

Marina: Kunafa and Shay is a place to share experiences, ideas, and sometimes to engage with our differences. In each country in the Arab world, you’ll find kunafa made differently. In that way we also lean into the diversity, complexity, and robust flavors of MENA and SWANA theatre. We bring our own perspectives, research, and special guests in order to start a dialogue and encourage further learning and discussion.

Nabra: In our fourth season, we focus on classical and historical theatre, including discussions of traditional theatre forms and in-depth analysis of some of the oldest and most significant classical plays from 1,300 BC to the twentieth century.

Marina: Yalla, grab your tea, the shay is just right.

Nabra: Audiences typically pack houses to see love stories, especially those about forbidden love. Romeo and Juliet is a famous Western example of this phenomenon, but the trope goes back much further, to a poem that likely inspired, even inadvertently, Shakespeare’s famous play.

In this episode, we look at the timeless tale of Layla and Majnun made famous by Nizami Ganjavi as a poem and later adopted for the stage and the screen countless times.

So I found the play titled Majnun Layla, which translates to “crazy about Layla” or “obsessed with Layla.” And then I found the poem on which it’s based. Like so many others, I immediately became obsessed by it.
 

Marina: I first encountered Layla and Majnun in the first year of my PhD. My world theatre history class had an assignment that each of us was responsible for bringing in one or two plays related to our area of study or something that was just a particular interest to us from anything considered theatre history. By the way, teachers, especially those in higher ed, I loved this as an assignment because it really allowed us to think about what it meant to expand the canon in our own ways.

So I found the play titled Majnun Layla, which translates to “crazy about Layla” or “obsessed with Layla.” And then I found the poem on which it’s based. Like so many others, I immediately became obsessed by it.

Nabra: For those who don’t know, the story of Layla and Majnun is one of the most famous classic love stories to have come out of the Arabian Peninsula. It has roots in Arabian folklore and poetry and has been retold and reinterpreted in various forms over the centuries. The tragic tale of Majnun and Layla has been immortalized in Arabic literature through various poetic works, most notably by the twelfth century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi in his epic poem, Layla and Majnun. But it was known in the Arab world as early as the fifth century and Persia as early as the ninth century.

Two well-known Persian poets, Rudaki and Baba Taher both mentioned the lovers in their works. Wali Ahmadi from UC Berkeley has written that the story of Majnun and Layla, “clearly draws from brief, disjointed oral anecdotes reported in earlier Arabic sources. It was Nizami who superbly worked through the scant materials in his possession, developed a more complex plot, intensified the characterization, and composed a much more multilayered story in the Musnavi rhyming couplet form to be incorporated along with four other long narratives into his monumental quintet.”

Marina: A Majnun Layla fun fact: Eric Clapton read a book of Persian poetry, which included the story of Layla and Majnun. He based his song “Layla” on this story and imagined it as representing his passion for George Harrison’s wife Pattie. Nearly nine years after the release of the album Layla and other Assorted Love Songs, Eric and Pattie were married. So if you’re ever jamming to the song Layla, just know that it is based on Layla and Majnun.

Nabra: Okay, so let’s start with a very basic plot rundown. Our two main characters are seventh century Bedouin poet Qays and his lover Layla. Notice that Qays is actually called Qays, his real name, at the beginning, and we’ll talk about what happens later, and where Majnun comes in.

But Layla and Qays are in love from childhood, but are never allowed to be together. Qays is perceived to be out of his mind in his obsession with Layla. Layla is forced to get married to another man, and Qays lives essentially in exile where he spends his time writing verses about his never-ending love for Layla. Although they make efforts to see each other again, they both die without any real relationship taking place.

Marina: The slightly longer version is that Qays of the Banu Amir tribe falls in love with his classmate Layla. As the two grow older, the intensity of their love increases. Although Layla too is truly smitten by love, it’s Qays who publicly and unreservedly pronounces his obsessive passion and elegiac lyrics, thus earning the epithet Majnun, literally meaning “possessed” or “mad.”

Majnun’s constant poetic praise of Layla’s beauty and his shocking unconventional behavior in public raised concerns for Layla’s parents. Worried about their daughter’s reputation and the honor of their tribe, they ensure that the lovers are separated. When Qays’s father proposes marriage between Qays and Layla, Layla’s family rejects the offer due to Majnun’s scandalous behavior, which though seemingly harsh is not entirely unreasonable.

As Majnun wanders aimlessly in the desert, living an ascetic life and composing verses about his love for Layla, his father tries to cure him of this obsessive love by taking him to the Kaaba, the holiest of Muslim sites. There Majnun prays to Allah to intensify his love for Layla even more. Meanwhile, Layla’s father arranges her marriage to a wealthy but shallow man named Ibn Salam against her will. The marriage remains unconsummated as Layla remains faithful to Majnun until her husband dies of rejection and grief.

Nabra: At times, Majnun is given the opportunity to meet Layla in person, but even when she appears before him through a devoted intermediary, he refuses physical or sexual contact. Majnun sees a perfect selfless love for Layla transcending physical desires.

This aspect of the story has led many to interpret it as a Sufi allegory where Majnun represents the lover seeking union with the divine. When Layla falls ill and dies, Majnun loses his purpose in life. He rushes to her grave site where he embraces her gravestone and breathes his last, finally united with her in death.

Nizami’s tale of Layla and Majnun can be interpreted in various ways, as a mystical allegory or as a conventional love story. Despite its mystical elements the poem also holds profane dimensions that contribute to its rich and captivating narrative.

Marina: And there are different alternate endings. So if you’re familiar with this story but aren’t familiar with the narrative that we just laid out, never fear, what you heard is just one of many different ways that this has been interpreted throughout time.

So sometimes Layla does consummate her marriage with this other man, even though she still loves Majnun or Qays. There are just many different ways that this ends. So you can check them all out. We’ll go into a few of them today, but not that many, because it’s been around for so long. There are just so many different endings.

But I think I became obsessed with this story because I couldn’t believe that there was a really famous love story that was so beautifully written that I hadn’t heard of, and it truly seemed to influence everything around me. The day after I discovered it, I typed “Majnun Layla” into Netflix and found an adaptation there. I saw a dance piece advertised that was taking up the story of Majnun Layla. It was everywhere, and I just didn’t realize it.

In addition to being beautifully written, I’m always interested in stories that take up past existing origin stories, so to speak. This all led me to wonder though, why is Romeo and Juliet the common Western referent when it’s clear that this story predates Romeo and Juliet and probably influenced Shakespeare?

Literary historian Agah Sırrı Levend in his research on Layla and Majnun states that these Eastern love stories may have entered Western literature through the Crusades. He also argues that it’s the source for works like Tristan and Isolde among others. And I have to say as I was doing research for this episode, I kept pulling up articles that were like the “Eastern Romeo and Juliet,” and I was like, that feels so unfair considering how far before Romeo and Juliet it came. But that’s…

Nabra: That’s Orientalism for you.

Marina: Colonization… imperialism…. Hard to pick just one. So Nizami wrote the poem in the twelfth century, and the elements and stories he combined were definitely around before that. So he probably wasn’t the first writer to deal with the subject, but the most famous that we know of for those listening who are like, I forget when Romeo and Juliet was written… It wasn’t written until somewhere between 1594-96.

So it’s exciting and amazing to me that Layla and Majnun have influenced more about our current cultural climate than one might originally think. Apparently, it does have enduring popularity and universal appeal.

Nabra: We wanted to share a few of our favorite excerpts from Nizami’s immortal poem, Layla and Majnun. This prose version has been adapted by Colin Turner and published by Blake in London in 1970. “The future is veiled from our eyes. The threads of each man’s fate extend well beyond the boundaries of the visible world. Where they lead we cannot see. Who can say that today’s key will not be tomorrow’s lock or today’s lock, not tomorrow’s key.”

Marina: “Dearest heart, if I had not given my soul to you, it would’ve been better to give it up for good, to lose it forever. I am burning in love’s fire. I’m drowning in the tears of my sorrow. I am the moth that flies through the night to flutter around the candle flame. Oh, invisible candle of my soul, do not torture me as I encircle you. You’ve bewitched me. You’ve robbed me of my sleep, my reason, my very being.”

Nabra: “Time passes, but true love remains. The life of this world is for the most part nothing but a succession of illusions and deceptions. But true love is real and the flames which fuel it burn forever without beginning or end.”

As famous as Nizami is, Fuzuli, who came a few centuries later, his Leyli and Majnun is a masterpiece of classic Azerbaijani and Turkish literature. Fuzuli, whose full name is Muhammad bin Suleyman, was a prominent Azerbaijani poet and thinker of the sixteenth century. He’s considered one of the greatest contributors to the Dîvân or classic poetry tradition.

This interpretation of the story generated more interest than previous Arabic and Persian versions, which the Turkish literature scholar Iskender Pala attributes to the sincerity and lyricism of the poet’s expression. The poem explores themes of love, devotion, madness, and the longing for union with the beloved. Fuzuli’s rendition of the story is celebrated for its profound emotional depth, lyrical beauty and philosophical musings on the nature of love and the human condition.

In fact, it has been described by the Encyclopaedia Iranica as “the culmination of the Turkic Masnavi tradition in that it raised the personal and human love tragedy to the plane of mystical longing and ethereal aspiration.”

If you’re ever jamming to the song Layla, just know that it is based on Layla and Majnun.

Marina: Like any inspiring story, it has been adapted many, many times. Layla and Majnun is an opera also based on the tragic love story that we’ve talked about composed by a Azerbaijan composer, Uzeyir Hajibeyov. It is considered one of the earliest examples of an opera in the Muslim world.

The libretto was written by Azerbaijani poet and playwright Muhammad Hadi. The opera was first performed in 1908 in Baku, Azerbaijan and is marked as a significant milestone in Azerbaijani and Islamic music history. It combines elements of traditional Azerbaijani music with Western operatic styles, creating a unique and innovative composition.

The opera incorporates traditional Azerbaijani musical instruments such as the tar, kamancheh, and balaban, along with Western orchestration. The music features melodic lines inspired by Azerbaijani Mugham, which is a classical improvisational modal musical tradition.

Nabra: There have been other notable adaptations of the Layla and Majnun story in opera form, including works by composers such as another Azerbaijani composer, Gara Garayev; Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who offers a Russian take on the classic tale; and Vagif Mustafazadeh, who blends jazz with Azerbaijani music.

The last one isn’t a traditional opera, but it is a significant musical work inspired by the story. These adaptations highlight the timeless nature of the story and its ability to resonate with audiences across cultures and generations. It was also adapted by Isaac Brandon in the late eighteenth century and staged as an opera Kais: Or Love In The Deserts: An Opera, in Four Acts at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.

Marina: There are so many movie adaptations. The first three I found are Iranian films from 1937, 1947 and 1959, followed by an Egyptian adaptation in 1975 starring Soad Hosny and Ahmed Mazhar. There are two famous Indian versions of the tale, A 1976 Layla Majnu starring Rishi Kapoor and Ranjeeta Kaur. And then 2018 a remake as well. And sure we’re definitely missing many, many films on this list.

When I asked my friends at a recent Bollywood movie night if they had seen these Indian adaptations, they instead showed me a clip from Aaja Nachle, which features the story of Layla and Majnun. So we’ll get back to that more soon.

Nabra: There was also Laila The Musical. The play begins in modern day Bradford. A young woman called Laila is running away from her family because she’s in love with a man, but her father wants her to marry someone else. There’s a storm raging, and so she takes refuge in a bookshop where she comes across the story of Layla and Majnun and enters a fantasy world. The location of course, then moves from Bradford to ancient Arabia, and her family takes on the characters in the old story. The question facing today’s Laila is stark: will her fate be the same as that of her namesake?

Marina: Y’all, I could not find the answer to this online, so I need to know if you’ve seen this, tell us what the ending is. We could not find the ending online.

Nabra: It seems amazingly melodramatic, as all of these are. Honestly, I think that’s part of the appeal up until today and since ancient times.

The Mark Morris Dance Group also created a version of the classic tale, which was a seventy-minute show featuring two singers and musicians of the Silk Road Ensemble on traditional Asian instruments, combined with Western strings like the violin, etc., and a percussionist on stage with sixteen dancers. From the images and videos available it was a large scale and, at the very least, an incredibly designed production.

Marina: The Bag and Baggage theatre company in Oregon, who I did not know about before doing research for this, did a retelling in 2017. And I love this so much because apparently Scott Palmer wanted to put on a play with these star-cast lovers, and fell in love with the epic poem, but decided that staging the original four-thousand-verse Layla and Majnun would be impractical. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So he was quoted in a local paper talking about the story’s magical animals (“We didn’t have a gazelle budget”) and other supernatural effects. He decided to fuse the two stories of Romeo and Juliet and Majnun and Layla. Apparently he discovered big differences. “Layla is much more modern and feminist, much more headstrong and independent than Juliet,” he said. He invited commentary from every Muslim theatre company in America, he says, and sought advice from scholars at Columbia University and University of Oregon, where Nabra and I have a friend, Michael Malek Najjar, who teaches there. And he apparently served as, I don’t know, at least doing consultations for this show.

He cautioned, no Aladdin, no flying carpets, belly dancers, genie lamps, and none of that appeared in this production. But appropriate to the twelfth century Persian style setting, the high-status Roman women, not the Muslims, are the ones who wore headscarves. I truly wish I could have seen this version. It seems like so much care was put into this adaptation, and it feels like it’s appealing to all audiences in different ways and really doing what I think theatre does well, which is ask questions and find answers out through our practice.

Okay, so this has been a huge overview, some adaptations that are definitely each worthy of their own inquiry. And I wanted to share them because I really feel like it’s fun, for me at least, to go down this rabbit hole of what kinds of stories are we interested in as a group, as humans, and what threads sort of continue throughout different spheres, and then when they’re adapted, which parts or different audiences and different theatres highlight them. Is it the love because we say love is universal? Are there cultural aspects that are really being held onto? And what does that mean? So I think those are the questions that I’m particularly interested in here.

So today we’re going to focus a little bit more on the clip that I told you about from Aaja Nachle and my favorite movie, which is the 2021 Indonesian Majnun Layla.

The poem itself is very performative, and perhaps we could look at it as a performance text.

Nabra: So to return to Aaja Nachle, it’s a Bollywood film released in 2007, directed by Anil Mehta and starring Madhuri Dixit in the lead role. The film’s title translates to “Come, Let’s Dance” in English. The plot revolves around a woman named Dia who returns to her hometown in India from the United States after her dance teacher and mentor Makarand falls ill.

Upon returning Dia learns that her old dance theatre, which was once the heart of the towns, is scheduled to be demolished to make way for a shopping mall. Determined to save the theatre and revive its glory, Dia sets out to reunite her old dance troupe and stage a spectacular performance to raise funds and garner support for their cause.

As Dia reconnects with her past and rallies the community, she faces various challenges including opposition from those who are skeptical about her plans and obstacles in her personal life. Along the way, she finds love and support from individuals who share her passion for dance and her desire to preserve their cultural heritage.

Marina: As you can tell, the movie isn’t about the Majnu and Layla story necessarily, but the Layla Majnu section of the movie is a pivotal part where Dia and her quest to save the theatre decides to stage this production of this classical love story.

In the traditional story of Layla and Majnun generally, there is a strong emotional connection between the two lovers that often leads to the belief that they can feel each other’s pain. While this concept varies depending on the version of the story and cultural interpretations, it’s a recurring theme in many retellings.

Nabra: The idea of Layla and Majnun, of course, feeling each other’s pain typically symbolizes the depth of their love and emotional bond. Despite being physically separated, their souls are said to be intertwined in such a profound way that they can sense each other’s emotional and spiritual states. This notion adds to the tragic and romantic elements of their tale.

In the movie we see this act out in several different ways. So in Aaja Nachle, as a child Majnu writes Layla’s name in his school notebook and gets whacked across the hand with a stick. The same welts that show up on his hands also show up on Layla’s, and this continues throughout the course of their story until finally, when Majnu is killed, Layla dies as well.

If you haven’t seen this twenty-minute segment of the movie, you seriously have to check it out. Also watch the full movie, that’s on my list as well. It’s fast-paced; beautifully produced, dance, and sung; and it’ll really blow you away; and it’s very readily available.

Marina: Shout out to Namrata, my close friend who showed me the clip when I told her about this episode. It’s been such a highlight.

So going back to my original story of the first time that I discovered Majnun and Layla, and I looked on Netflix, and I typed “Majnun Layla” into the search bar, and I found this Indonesian film, and I love it so much. Because it keeps what it feels is the essence of the story without keeping all of the death, which is what Nabra does not like about it.

Nabra: I want the tragedy y’all.

Marina: But the plot of the film was excellent. So a quick rundown, as quick as I can make it. As a young girl, Layla, and her mother see her father—who is a shadow puppeteer—die. Her cruel uncle takes care of them but really make her and her mother live under his thumb. It’s clear that her father’s influence have made her into a storyteller and dreamer, which doesn’t always fit what her uncle wants for her, and what is potentially culturally expected of her as well.

We flashed to when she’s now an adult, and she’s teaching in a classroom in Indonesia. She’s encouraging her class of young women to follow their dreams and not just be content with getting married because it’s prescribed for them. She gets a teaching fellowship in Azerbaijan and then returns to her home to find out that her mother and her uncle have decreed that she gets married.

She initially refuses, saying she doesn’t want to have an arranged marriage. She wants to marry for love. But it soon becomes clear that she’s meant to be this regent’s wife, a guy who she used to go to school with. And maybe it won’t be that bad. Her family wants it. The man has money and will take care of her family. And the man’s father says specifically that he didn’t want to marry anyone else. He just wanted to marry Layla because she’s strong and religious and smart. And he also lets her go to Azerbaijan to teach to follow through on this fellowship essentially that she just got.

So she leaves for Azerbaijan engaged to this regent man, but when she arrives, she quickly falls in love with Samir. Her brother, I can’t tell if it’s her real brother or a close friend that she calls brother, but Ilham introduces them. Samir clearly isn’t rich. He works at the embassy as a cook and is in Layla’s class. His affection for her is clear, and they end up spending several days together as he shows her around the city.

When he seems closer to declaring his love for her, she asks him not to say anything that will ruin their friendship. Ilham encourages her to be with Samir, but Layla is torn. When she talks to the regent man on the phone, she’s clearly unhappy and he is planning their very fancy wedding with two thousand guests, which is coming up soon.

However, she lights up when Samir recites poetry with her, and when they discuss literature and philosophical ideas, Regent man gets so jealous and angry that she isn’t talking to him on the phone that he comes to retrieve her and bring her back to Indonesia. Samir tries to convince her not to marry a man she doesn’t love, but she’s torn. He waits for her in a location. She indicates where they should meet, but she doesn’t show. She’s on a plane back to Indonesia.

Back in Indonesia she is planning for the wedding with regent man, but she’s clearly emotionally exhausted and upset. Samir is too, but he ends up in Indonesia. Long story short, Layla’s uncle tries to lock her up and prevent her from seeing Samir, but her mother helps her escape, knowing she may get the wrath from the uncle for doing this. Layla meets Samir on a bridge and tells him they can be together. Then suddenly regent man, his dad, and six thugs show up. I don’t know what their plan is. Are they going to retrieve Layla? Are they going to kill Samir? Are they going to do a combination of these things? Not clear, but they all show up looking quite threatening.

The cronies push Layla and Samir around for a little bit after Layla won’t go with him willingly. And then when Layla appeals to him and says, “do you really want to marry someone who doesn’t love you?” Regent man says, “Marriage isn’t about love.” And then his dad says, “Okay, this is going very poorly. You’re embarrassing the family by not being able to get your girl back.” And he hands him a gun.

Nabra: Now, the uncle who has clearly brought them here, gets scared and jumps in front of Layla getting shot in the process. He probably dies, but the cameraman quickly moves to another thing, like Layla and Samir starting their getaway, only for the Regent man to order his thugs to tie rocks to their feet and throw them in the water.

We see some really terrifying and beautiful shots of Layla and Samir at the bottom of this body of water looking into each other’s eyes as Samir breathes his last breath. But then we see Layla’s mom jump in, swim to the bottom and cut their ropes. On the shore, Layla, who almost died but didn’t quite die, tries to resuscitate Samir, who we assume is dead, and she thinks is dead. But he comes to, and Ilham and Samir’s cousin show up and bring them all to safety. Our next shots are in Azerbaijan where Samir and Layla are in love and have a child.

Okay, so they don’t die, but the uncle dies, which is fun. But it would’ve just been so beautiful them dying. That scene was very lovely, beautifully shot. But I don’t know why they wouldn’t show Layla dying. It was very weird. She didn’t seem to be perturbed by drowning. She was just of course, upset about Samir. And then I was like, but you were both in the water at the same time. Anyway, Layla, I think, is part mermaid, because she is much less drowned than Samir.

Marina: To Nabra’s point here, you see them both and they’re just parallel under the water, and they’re both struggling to breathe. But then Samir conks out a full, I don’t know, thirty or so seconds before Layla’s mom comes down, and Layla’s just chilling. So maybe she just has the best breath control of anybody you’ve ever met. But I think it’s because there’s something about her love for Samir that will not allow her to give in.

Nabra: Aww, that’s sweet.

Marina: Now, this is where Nabra and I disagree. I was like watch this, you’re going to love it so much. And she said that she liked, but that she wanted all this stuff, like death.

Nabra: I just wanted the death. I think that they could have leaned… The melodrama was so fun, they could have leaned into it and earned it even more. I think they could have gone further, but Marina’s heart, maybe it would’ve burst. I’m just jaded.

Marina: This is definitely true. My heart would’ve burst. But I also love this, because it didn’t have to be as sad as the end of the poem or any other telling. And I think part of the reason, Nabra, is because the people in the movie aren’t familiar with the poem. In the movie she says she’s named Layla after the character Layla from the poem. So it makes sense that she doesn’t meet the same fate as her namesake. There’s some progress for women there perhaps, we’re seeing how this story affects us over time, and that we can still have the same types of love, but that we don’t have to die for them, or that our love can be pure in other ways.

I haven’t done a deep analysis on this film itself. I just really like to watch it. But yeah, if other people have ideas, please leave them in the comments on HowlRound; we would love to chat. But I think this movie is great. It’s predictable in all the right ways. It’s beautifully shot. The intertextual references are great.

I think the puppet show that her and her father are doing at the beginning looks like the Ramayana, where the two lovers are Rama and Sita, which feels like a fitting place to start Majnun and Layla, it’s really beautiful.

Nabra: It’s also just really very lovely to see a lot of traditional cultural elements, like wayang kulit, and get a tour of Azerbaijan, which is really lovely. It’s just very well shot when it comes to showing off a country that I don’t think a lot of people in the US have seen if they’re not Azeris themselves. So yeah, they’re just really nice cultural elements from a lot of different cultures integrated into that.

Marina: Yes, for sure. Okay, so I want to end this episode by putting out something that’s been perplexing me. I found an article a few years ago that talks about a play that in Egypt in the late 1800s called Martyrs of Love, and it literally doesn’t mention much, and it doesn’t mention any of the star-crossed lovers that would’ve occurred in the Arabian Peninsula, the Greater Middle East, whatever we want to call these areas at these earlier times.

And it goes into my thought of a lot of these articles calling this Indonesian movie that we just talked about too, a modern Romeo and Juliet, which is wild. Because the movie is literally called Layla and Majnun, and they’re calling it a modern Romeo and Juliet. So it’s interesting to me that it’s still the reference, and that’s part of why we wanted to make this episode.

Also, a lot of people did grow up hearing this story of Layla and Majnun. I’m not one of those people, so it’s great for me to say like, oh, the next time that I teach theatre history perhaps this is a story that I bring in sooner. And even bring in the poem. The poem itself is very performative, and perhaps we could look at it as a performance text; but looking at these adaptations, I think, does something very important too. So just wanted to highlight some of the existing stories of lovers from the East and look at the ways that their stories have been adapted over time. Thanks, y’all.

Marina:  This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of Kunafa and Shay and other HowlRound podcasts by searching “HowlRound” wherever you find podcasts. If you loved this podcast, please post a rating and write a review on your platform of choice. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content on the howlround.com website.

Nabra:  Have an idea for an exciting podcast, essay, or TV event the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and contribute your ideas to the Commons. Yalla bye.

Nabra and Marina: Yalla, bye!

In chatting with Mustatea, she shared that ielele is traditionally understood as a female forest creature in Balkan folklore whose eerie voices led men astray. This immediately made me think of my closeted high school obsession with ancient Greek mythology and, specifically, the siren—similarly understood as a “female” deceptive demon lurer of men. Both Balkan and Greek hypertextual mythology’s portrayal of this character dubbed “female” lends itself to the power dynamics of gender. Traditionally thought of to be female and, therefore, negative, ielele shines light onto a contemporary culture where patriarchy and the violence of the gender binary thrives, where female is object, the other, and male is subject, the “I” voice. This is especially important to note in looking at the ielele in a modern context, in which the fluidity of gender is often discussed in mainstream culture, both celebratorily and resentfully. 

Mustatea’s ielele is a series of live sound and movement narrative portraits that incorporate both human and computational vocalizations to sound out “lost” histories and voices. This is explored technically through the BodyMouth, a unique instrument Mustatea developed that synthesizes speech in real-time from the movements of performers. Her work focuses on mythical female East European figures. As stated previously, in Balkan folklore, forest creatures are presented as “female.” However, ielele is not a name of any sort; linguistically, it can be best interpreted as a they/them pronoun. Similar to many non-English languages, in Balkan, the “they” is feminine. In fact, Balkan forest creatures have no discernible gender. I would go as far to say that many creatures and monsters who are portrayed as villains in art are genderless, if not queer-coded—a reason many overlapping queer and transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people, like myself, feel seen and understood by them. A few examples of this include Dracula and Frankenstein—bodies that are grotesque and othered; bodies that are monstrosities and alienated.  

Despite the genderless-ness of the ielele, because they appear to be strange, weird, and unappetizing, they have been contextualized and named “women”—women who have been exiled to forests and rivers. The lesbian commune dream! The origin of the siren is not the adorable mermaid girlies that I had a crush on from watching Disney’s 1953 Peter Pan. Instead, sirens were more astutely creature-like—having the body of a bird or fish and often a beard. To some, having a beard might read “not female.” But to me, it reads like a bearded queen, similar to Blackberri in the underground series Dragula, a fear-factor meets “spooky queen” competition show that uplifts the infinity of gender drag can embody. (And no, it is not a coincidence that naming a half-fish creature as female and calling someone high-femme in drag “fish” are similar.) To me, femme with a beard reads: Bearded Lady—Freaks! A freak in the circus—a place to flaunt the queer-dos, the disabled, the crips, the weirds, the undesirables, the creatures. 

In the extended queer and TGNC community, the infinite, ever-flowing journey of gender exploration, and not being able to be pinpointed as “man” or woman”…is freeing, sought after, and often life-saving.

As ielele expands and focuses on character development, Mustatea is specifically interested in the genderless-ness of the creatures. Mustatea explicitly explores this in a contemporary context where the fluidity of gender is often feared and discriminated against, similar to how the voices of the ielele are often not meant for a civilized society. Sonically, the sounds being explored in ielele emulate sounds that are harmonically Eastern European, scales the Western ear might not be familiar with. In the full piece, Mustatea explores a character who represents “Fog.” Traditionally, fog is viewed as problematic, something you cannot pinpoint or capture. Kat fights against this problematization. In the extended queer and TGNC community, the infinite, ever-flowing journey of gender exploration, and not being able to be pinpointed as “man” or woman” (i.e. not adhering to the gender binary) is freeing, sought after, and often life-saving.

Murielle Borst Tarrant: So one of the frustrating things is it’s easier for a non-Native person to direct Native people. Right? No one questions it. No one questions it. I’m talking about white directors to direct Native plays. Someone like me, my mother, other directors who’ve been in this industry for a very long time, if we’re asked to direct anything outside of doing Native plays, we get major pushback.

Why is that? Why isn’t there equal equity for us? I think that’s really important to talk about. If they’re going to talk land acknowledgments then we need to seriously start talking about, what are you doing beyond land acknowledgments, right? I hate to bring it up, but what happens is a lot of these theatres think it’s okay to do land acknowledgments and then they don’t do programming in the season. They don’t do community outreach. They do a Native play and then no one’s there and they go by the regular audiences.

We’re not involved in the EDI. We’re not involved in it sometimes. When someone goes to EDI when there’s a problem in a production, what happens is the EDI person says, “Well, I don’t know how to help you.” You’re supposed to be able to help us when a non-Native director says something racist. Why aren’t we in these rooms, right? So those are the very frustrating parts of all of this. I don’t think that we’re isolated. I think a lot of BIPOC people feel this.

Yura Sapi: You’re listening to Building Our Own Tables, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. I’m your host, Yura Sapi and I’m the founder of various organizations and projects including a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, a six-hectare farm and food sovereignty project, an LGBTQ+ healing and art space. And I’ve helped numerous creatives, leaders, and other founders unleash their excellence into the world through my programs, workshops, and coaching services.

In this podcast I’m showcasing the high-vibration solutions for you as a visionary leader to implement into your own practice and thrive. Stay tuned this season to hear from other founders who have built their own tables for their communities and for the world in this evolutionary time on earth. You are here for a reason and I am so honored and grateful to support you on your journey. So stay tuned and enjoy.

Do you ever feel lost in your cultural equity work? Maybe as an artist yourself, feeling the effects of different marginalizations and wanting to overcome these types of limitations and blocks or frustrations around being in the industry or maybe you are at a predominantly white institution, a space that is in this mainstream, feeling the blocks of wanting to get moving forward and not really seeing this change. This is the episode for you.

Murielle Borst Tarrant shares her incredible wisdom. Being an intergenerational Native theatremaker from New York, she’s the founder of Safe Harbors NYC which is an arts initiative that focuses on the development and production of Indigenous performing arts in New York City. Safe Harbors is building this understanding of Native American methodologies in performance that become this cultural liaison to non-Native theatre artists in the city proving how we’re really stronger when we include more Native voices, combat these stereotypes, and support Native communities.

Murielle and Safe Harbors are really active in policymaking conversations and approaches to cultural and socioeconomic issues. I’m so excited for you to dive into this episode and see yourself reflected, see maybe some of the problems that you’ve voiced or have never been able to voice, and also open the gateway to the solutions for overcoming these challenges, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of what is coming for us, what is already here, all supported by the past and our ancestors and the history five thousand years ago of what was on this land.

So enjoy this wonderful episode and it’s been such a pleasure to be with you on this season four of the Building Our Own Tables podcast. Before we get into this episode, go ahead and hit subscribe on this podcast. This is the best way to stay updated on new episodes and it helps build a thriving planet where all beings experience joy and harmony with each other and Mother Earth. So go ahead and hit subscribe and keep this good energy flowing. Welcome, Murielle to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

Murielle: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Yura: I’m really looking forward to getting to know you more and your journey and sharing with listeners who might feel like a previous version of ourselves in this journey of building our own tables. I’m starting off this season asking everyone if you were a superhero, what would your origin story be? What is that pivotal moment that really led you to forge your own path and build your own table?

Murielle: I think my origin story really is when I graduated from college and I went on tour with my family from Spiderwoman Theater, my aunt and my mother were talking to me and they asked, “did I know what this play was?” “Did I know what that play was?” This is separately. This is before I went on tour with them after graduation and they said, “Oh, you are in need of a real education on theatre.”

That really opened my mind like, “You should know who this is. You should know who …” This was beyond getting an education. It was learning on your feet on how you do this type of work. How do you write and how do you reference? If someone references you as a person of color in this industry that you should know those references.

You don’t have to go by those references. You are making your own work, your own way. This was what was told to me, “You’re making your own work your own way in your own style, so you do not have to go by the mainstream western theatre paradigm. What you can go by is, ‘This is my work. This is a story I’m telling,’ and stand by it.” So that would be my origin story.

Yura: Yeah. Can you take us through to Safe Harbors NYC and how that ended up being where you are now and building this?

Murielle: Okay. That is a real origin story of a fantasy novel. I wrote a fantasy novel and a few of them in my spare time. I wrote four of them. One of them was about this place. It was a reaction, writing fantasy, was a reaction to what was out there. So you would see these non-Native writers writing about our stories or they’d be on this land and there was no one here. So vampires were able to take over and no one cared, and shapeshifters were … I used to say to myself, “Boy, aren’t Native vampires and Native shapeshifters, we would be really upset if European colonizers, shapeshifters, and werewolves and vampires came here. Wouldn’t we fight?”

This is the origin story of Safe Harbors. It just came to me writing this story. So what if all of the Native shapeshifters met this special place for them and European shapeshifters weren’t allowed in there? They met in this underground tunnel that’s a club and it goes through centuries. But one of the things that they say when they need help is Safe Harbors, and they yell that to the main dude and then they can give them Safe Harbors for the night and everything.

So that’s the origin story of Safe Harbors because I still am very interested in, what is a safe place for Native Peoples as artists? We don’t always, but we try to have safe places emotionally, spiritually, and sometimes for abuse we try to have that. But in theatre, a lot of times what happens is there’s not a safe place to create. There’s not a safe place to be wrong. There’s not a safe place just to try something out. That was the initial idea with me and my late husband, Kevin Tarrant, was how do we make a safe place?

Now Manhattan to us has always been a safe place. If you go back five hundred years, stories have been told, or five thousand years. Let’s even go further than that, then, back than that. The story I was told by Oren Lyons was like, “Manhattan has always been a gathering and a safe and trading place. Sometimes different tribes or nations who did not get along, they would leave that outside of Manhattan on the island and there would be all these different fires of different encampments and everybody would meet here and to talk in one council fire.”

I love that idea. No one has a time machine. No one can go back four thousand years. But if you would go by traditional storytelling then we say, “Yes, there’s an element of that.” So I’ve always thought if we go another level, Manhattan would be a safe place for people to, sometimes in times of struggle could be able, a place to talk and do those things and economic trade for sustainability.”

So that was the whole idea between Safe Harbors. If you see our logo, you see the skyline of New York City, but then you see a canoe with two people in it and you don’t know if it’s female or male, but they’re coming into and there’s a story behind it, right? The interpretation is you take that story.

So Safe Harbors New York City comes from that element. Creatively, when we get together or when an artist says they would really like to try something, I take it upon myself saying, “Okay, let’s try it.” I’m not going to say it’s right or wrong. I’m going to say, “Okay, this is what we can do to make it different.” I love to expand in that. Even if someone wants to read something and wants it to go to Broadway, that’s cool with me. Let’s sit here, let’s talk about it. Let me invite the people, read it, but there’s a safe place there. Right?

If someone wants to read something and they don’t want anybody there, they just want five people for a screenplay, okay, let’s read it. We’ll invite them. It’s safe. You won’t be attacked in this harbor that I have created. That is why I believe in making your own table as you put it, because you have to build on that, and you have to build from how you’re taught, not the way someone puts on you.

Yura: Wow, what a beautiful story and just so much intentionality in the space you’ve created. I feel like that really makes it easier to know, why is it that you’re doing what you’re doing? What are the values around it? Just so much clarity on if someone comes to you with something that is fitting exactly what you’re offering, it seems really helpful to have that grounding, that understanding of what it is that you’re doing and why.

I definitely feel that energy of Manhattan in spaces and pockets that we’ve created. This past weekend was at a gathering with the Indigenous Journalist Association, and we got to connect with different Indigenous people representing their communities, some from around the world. It definitely felt like this safe place where we could all share our story and also share information and strategies around how we can keep building.

So I think that was so beautiful what you shared and that, yeah, it’s still here and that energy of the ancestors are still pulsing through our veins in that way of being able to find these spaces of safety and of coming together to really have these conversations and share wisdom and knowledge and resources in that way.

Murielle: And safety comes in different ways, right? There has to be an artistic safety that we have. We are dictated so much by the western world on how theatre should look, feel for us. If we combat that with, “This is what we want to say, how we want to say it and build it,” that’s the whole idea. How do we do Natives, Indigenous, Tribal Nations’ approach to even decision-making of running a company, especially a nonprofit when there’s all these different things that happen and hierarchies and you see a patriarchy? But how do you do it your way and how do you use your traditional methodologies for it to work?

Yura: Yeah. Yeah. For me when it comes to hierarchy, I’ve really tapped into nature and the wisdom of the different systems we feel and see on the planet, and also looking at the universe and in our body. Just really seeing how there are all kinds of systems and structures that have already existed for so long and that we can actually tap into that wisdom.

So for me, our organizational structure is a tree. So looking at the board of directors and myself as the founder and the CEO, part of the root system and the top root, the strongest root there, moving up into the tree and into the trunk as the people who are really holding it up, doing a lot of the work internally and externally-facing on the bark. And the branches are people, kind of consultants and advisors and coaches. The leaves are our audience and clients and the fruits are the artists. So the really exciting fruit of everything that comes with the work we do in the art.

Murielle: Also, think of it too is when you have consensus and people don’t understand this, traditional collective consensus is that everyone has a say. Everyone has a say. It’s a long process. I, as the head of the organization or as a director, I take in what everybody has to say. Sometimes I can be wrong, but you have to convince me that I’m wrong.

I say, “Okay, I wasn’t seeing it this way,” but I have to remember also when I am working on a piece and everyone has a collective consensus on where they think this thing should go it’s my job to figure out, “How do we stay on the river if we were all in one canoe? And if we take it from that.”

I see sometimes rapids ahead. Not everyone else does, but that is the idea. “Okay, sometimes you have to make some of the hard decisions,” and that is the lesson. I hate to use hierarchy because it’s such a Western European word, right? It’s so hard to say that because you don’t want to say we live in hierarchies, but we’re not speaking in our own language, right?

So that’s probably the best interpretation of how we do things, on how leadership works, on how when you are an elected person within your group, to make these decisions. I can, like I said earlier, I can only go by the way I was taught, and I was taught by traditional leadership and I bring that into everything that I do, including when I’m directing.

Yura: That’s so powerful. Definitely able to include feedback from everyone. Sometimes it can be difficult because not everyone maybe feels that they can give that feedback, especially having been in other spaces where that isn’t the case.

I think for me too, it’s something that I’m getting better at is really being able to feel completely comfortable with saying that I’m wrong or that I don’t know. Really the power that comes with that because when we don’t know or when we are wrong, we are able to acknowledge it, but then it’s like when we do know and when we are right, it is really right.

Murielle: It’s really right. You’re all trying, especially in a play, right? You’re all trying to get this going. You’re trying to get it sometimes on its feet, it’s being directed. You’re trying to get it into production and there’s all these different variables. But at one point and I think that’s what people don’t understand, there’s no discussion at one point.

At one point, we made this decision, I’m going for it, we’re going. When there’s questions asked, then you explain. You do that three times and say, “Look, I told you this three times. This is the decision we have made collectively so this is where we’re going.”

Sometimes you have … That’s what I think what happens is that when we talk about this way of doing things, because it looks so easy people think it’s a free-for-all, and there’s a lot of discipline on being a Native person with our religion and the way we think of things, how we do things. That takes a lot of discipline and the western minds sometimes don’t see it that way. They think we’re just out there doing this stuff and we’re making it up as we go along.

No, this took a lot of decision-making. This took a lot of planning. This took … It’s like a harvest where you have the seeds, you plant the seeds, you have it the right season, you put it in, it grows. You have to take it out. Then you got to have people come in and take it away. What are you going to do? You give some of that to your community. You have to do some of these for economic growth.

I think that’s how Western society doesn’t understand that, right? We are very good at this because this is what we do.

Yura: Let’s get into that a little more, speaking specifically about some of these aspects of the western theatre industry, the dominant, the current, the mainstream, the power-held theatre industry of the current moment. What aspects of this theatre industry frustrate you the most and how do you envision overcoming these challenges?

Murielle: I think a lot of it is our sovereignty. We are talking sovereignty on, we have a right to tell the stories the way we need to tell them, right? But what happens is when you look at some percentages, you look at the percentage account that is with the Dramatists Guild and I saw those percentages.

Now they didn’t name us, but it was women of color. If you look at a pie, it was like one little slate, the tiniest slate. It was very disappointing because included in that slate was African American, Asians, and Native people. So then if you break that down after that, we are like a 1 percent or 2 percent of things that are being produced on Broadway, things that are being produced in general. We’re talking about regional theatres, we’re talking about universities, we’re talking about casting. Those things are not coming.

Yes, we have some successes in television. Yes, we’ve had some great successes. Reservation Dogs, Rutherford Falls. There’s probably going to be some other show. And we see that, right? But what more can we do? We saw Lily Gladstone be nominated for an Academy Award. We saw Killers of a Flower Moon being nominated for everything, but the powers that be at times doesn’t want to recognize our work.

So one of the frustrating things is it’s easier for a non-Native person to direct Native people, right? No one questions it. No one questions it. I’m talking about white directors to direct Native plays. So someone like me, my mother, other directors who’ve been in this industry for a very long time, if we’re asked to direct anything outside of doing Native plays, we get major pushback.

Why is that? Why isn’t there equal equity for us? I think that’s really important to talk about. We see this all the time. They talk about every other marginalized group. Maybe if we’re lucky we see an Indigenous/Native person, woman maybe. So those are very frustrating things, right?

I think it’s important that what we need to start seeing is if they’re going to talk land acknowledgments then we need to seriously start talking about what are you doing beyond land acknowledgments, right?

I hate to bring it up, but that is really because what happens is a lot of these theatres think it’s okay to do land acknowledgments and then they don’t do programming in the season. They don’t do community outreach. They do a Native play and then no one’s there and they go by the regular audiences. We’re not involved in the EDI. We’re not involved in it sometimes. And when someone goes to EDI when there’s a problem in a production, what happens is the EDI person says, “Well, I don’t know how to help you.”

You’re supposed to be able to help us when a non-Native director says something racist. Why aren’t we in these rooms, right? So those are the very frustrating parts of all of this. I don’t think that we’re isolated. I think a lot of BIPOC people feel this. I think that even the word BIPOC at times ghettoizes us in this way. Why can’t you say Black/Native Indigenous peoples of color? You know what I mean? Why don’t you just say queer, transgender, gay? Why can’t you just say all those things? Why does it have to be in this language?

So that has been a fight, a lot. So because you’re fighting so much to even get your voice in the room, sometimes as a Native artist you are spending so much time fighting that you don’t get to do the work that you need to do, your personal work as an artist, right?

So those are extremely frustrating things. What’s also very frustrating is the constant battle of us being included with the equal equity of pay. No one’s talking about that, but we need to talk about that, especially in New York City.

Now, most artists in New York City live beyond the poverty level, but so do Native people. So if those are white artists who are living beyond the poverty level, what are Native artists, how are they living? So that is the frustrations, right? But sometimes you can’t fix the whole world of theatre and you have to understand that if you want to do your work. You have something to say and you want it to get out there.

So there’s always this constant battle for me. I can’t speak for all Native people. I can only speak for myself and my organization and how I see things out there because I am in these rooms and I hear the conversations and I see what is happening and how you have to always insert your voice into these conversations and sometimes it’s a very lonely place.

If you don’t have a seat at the table then you are most likely on the menu.

My suggestion sometimes to a lot of theatres, western theatres and a lot of organizations, mostly theatres that I deal with is that you should have more than one Native board member to avoid tokenism. You should have more than one Native person on staff. If you’re going to ask for consultancy, pay them. These are people who are very important within our communities. We’re talking about chiefs and clan monitors and leadership. Don’t call them a week before and say, “Hey, can you do an opening,” if you don’t have a personal relationship with them. This should happen a month in advance, like you would a council person. That needs to really be acknowledged.

Someone told me this, “If you don’t have a seat at the table then you are most likely on the menu.” You have to really think about to mobilize people to sit at these tables other than one person, right? You need two to three Native people sometimes on a board. You have too many Native people on a board, but meanwhile on a white board there’s nothing but white people. How is that equal equity? So those are some of the frustrations.

Yura: That’s great advice. I think anybody listening who wants more advice especially in these organizations, definitely go ahead and check out Murielle’s consulting services as well because they’re really helpful. Yes, pay first. Pay for this, but thank you for that information for us because I think too, for a lot of us who are maybe at that point already of saying, “Yeah, we’re fed up with the way the system works and we are going to just go ahead and build our own tables so that we aren’t on the menu.”

So it sounds like, yeah, there’s this awareness of just knowing all of these factors at play, all of these things that could be things to watch out for and things to know that are happening. Then being able to have that space to just release it in a way to say, “Okay, I’m not going to get overwhelmed by all of this advocacy work, basically that is being asked of me because I am in this position where I am the only one in certain rooms or maybe even not feeling that I’m being selected to be in rooms. Not letting it overcome me. Not letting it be the downfall for why I am making art and why I’m doing this important profession and kind of calling around storytelling. Representing the world outwardly through art making.”

Are there any other tips or advice you might give to people like that?

My advice to everybody is know your craft because it’s hard to build a table if you don’t know how to hold a hammer or you don’t know how to put in a nail, right?

Murielle: For theatremakers is that there’s no one way, but also to know your craft, whatever that is. Know your craft at directing, know it in acting, you know it in playwriting, stagecraft, costumes, there’s lighting, there is stage management, there’s producers. Not everybody has to be on stage in the creative process, but within the theatre realm, my advice to everybody is know your craft because it’s hard to build a table if you don’t know how to hold a hammer or you don’t know how to put in a nail, right?

Know your craft is really important if you’re going to build your own table and understand that craft and love that craft. I love acting. I love directing. I love writing. Because of that I consume my life with that and understanding that craft, but understanding other people’s craft too, other people’s methodologies and techniques. It might not be yours, but you can appreciate it and look at it and maybe take a little bit of theirs and say, “Is this compared to what I’m doing?”

So there’s not just this one way of doing things. There are some things that are standard. How do you approach a play? How do you go about it? But there doesn’t have to be this one European way of fitting rounds into squares all the time.

Back to my frustrations too is that the dictation of what white society wants to hear from us sometimes is frustrating, right? They want to hear a nice Indian story and everything’s solved and reconciled. No, we’re not always singing and dancing. Sometimes they don’t want us to be funny and sometimes we are very funny. What does it mean to be a New York City Indian to live in New York? What does that mean in trying to maintain culture? How do we talk about that? How do we talk about the Native doctors?

Yura: Wow, it definitely sounds like it feels almost like a simple shift, really. It’s actually not that hard in a way. It’s not this very complex math problem that we’ll have an answer for. It seems like there are answers. All you have to do is just start inviting us and having us more present. And then also we can look at critics. So making sure we have Native critics in the room and everything.

It’s exciting for me because especially the other advice you gave around really know your craft because there’s this aspect of almost just keep going, keep doing what you’re doing and eventually people are starting to realize that actually this is the solution. There’s this fear around the theatre industry not being relevant anymore, the financial implications of that. But like you said with television, they’re already starting to realize.

So it seems like almost just it’s going to be, and it already is just the shift of being able to see, “Oh, actually this is the way to go. This is the stories that we want to be sharing that are different, and that is exactly what we need right now.” So it sounds like there’s this beautiful opportunity to go ahead and keep doing what you’re doing and then be ready for that opportunity to come through.

Are you ready to step into who you were born to be? As a certified soul purpose or Dharma and spiritual life coach I am so ready to guide you in this powerful transformation of your life. As a successful social entrepreneur, social innovator, I am so excited to support others along this journey because ultimately, when we all thrive in our respective communities, our impact really multiplies exponentially. And it brings me so much joy to help creators and leaders like you unleash your incredible talents, skills, and destiny of who you’re meant to be for our planet in this time.

I get to bring together all of my training in the business and arts management world, as well as the climate justice sector and the healing and shamanic energy work initiations and certifications to really bring you into alignment and into full force and movement for what you’re meant to be doing.

In my three-month coaching program we’ll take a journey through your deepest desires and visions for the world to really harness in that future vision of what you’re bringing forth and call that into your understanding. You are such a powerful leader and I’m so excited to support you. So go ahead and check out my coaching services at liberarteinc.org and you can find the link in the show notes as well. Talk to you soon.

Death is really transformation. I think there’s definitely this fear of this idea of death, but really it does. It brings a new birth, it brings a new beginning. Like you said that there is something that is dying, and that’s just part of the change. That’s just part of what’s coming next.

Murielle: Yeah. To think about it, to belong to the Native theatre movement, what does that mean, right? What does that mean? Our stories being in the room, right? How do we avoid … I was some place and it was like, it’s very hard to avoid tokenism and I don’t think it’s that hard to avoid tokenism. I really don’t.

I think that if you have more than one opinion, if these organizations, whatever they are want us on there then there should be more than one opinion and especially when it comes to Native issues. I think also that we have to remember, especially I speak about New York City more because I’m from here and this is where my home is. When we have people voicing their expertise who are not from these lands here or any lands, that is a problem too, right?

Someone who just moved to New York four or five years ago, do they have the same voice as someone who grew up here, right?

Yura: Yeah.

Murielle: Should they be involved in the decision-making of what the community is doing? I think that’s important, that too. It’s not just New York, it’s everywhere.

Yura: That’s really powerful to make sure that you have someone representing the different experiences of what it means to be in a specific place. Yeah, you get so much more out of it in the end. Ultimately, we have to remember too, this relationship building it is not just for a one-show thing or a one-event thing. We know this, relationships can last a lifetime and it’s really about the development of this kind of exchange and flow, and it’s just so beautiful to keep building upon this type of new entity that comes when we are in a relationship with someone.

Murielle: Yes, yes.

Yura: So my final question for you is reflecting on your journey, what has been the most rewarding aspect of carving your own path and building your own table?

Murielle: Well, training people is really wonderful because when they get it, whether that’s actors, directors, writers, stage managers, allies, building that table so they understand where you’re going and support you for where you need to go. Supporting a play where it needs to go, supporting the work. Building my own table was really understanding this. Someone told me this and I didn’t understand it until now, and it was, “We don’t want to be invited to the party. We want to be the party.”

Yura: That’s powerful. What’s next for you? What do you have going on at Safe Harbors and with your own work?

Murielle: Right now at Safe Harbors, we’re working on a piece called Feasts of Ghosts and that’s in New York City and it should be taken on a national tour for 2025. It’s being produced by La MaMa Theatre and New York Theatre Workshop and Safe Harbors. It’s an outdoor piece. It is a piece about how we deal with death, dying, and spirits that are here.

I’m a very recent widow. This year is my four-year anniversary of my husband’s passing. That’s a powerful time in our culture. What does that mean for those other spirits that don’t rest and have to do things over and over again? The reason why it’s called Feast of Ghosts because it was something my husband said was that, “We need to explain to people why we feed. No one’s understanding why we feed our spirits. Let’s show it to them.”

It’s all these different vignettes of these different spirits doing something over and over and over again from the land. The audience has a piece of candy, some water, popcorn, and they give it to … They want different things and the guy tells them, and then they tell the story. So it’s five or six stories. I am the main director, but most of the people I mentored are directing some pieces.

Then I go back and then we talk about if they need help and I come. These are people who’ve shadowed me for a long time. It’s also training at the same time of what Safe Harbors does. So a lot of our ensemble work is what we’re really good at, and on our feet writing, and there’s a lot of writers. It’s really co-created. We have the acting ensemble, but it’s really co-created by the three writers.

My one husband who’s passed, who is Kevin Tarrant, my daughter Josephine Tarrant, and Nicholas Billey, and we are the conceptual creators, and then we bring it to other people, and then we write it down and we figure out how to mold this. That is the work we’re doing.

The following project, I have a one-woman show called Tipi Tales from the Stoop and it’s about my life growing up in Brooklyn and being the only Indian, the only Native person on the block in all-Italian neighborhood. So those are the two main projects I’m working on right now.

Yura: Wow. Incredible. I can’t wait to see them, especially the first one on Feasts of Ghosts. Just sending you so much love and support and really happy that Kevin Tarrant gets to be still with us in this way. I’m really excited to see that show and experience everything that you’re offering because it feels like this combination of theatre and storytelling, but also ritual and culture and this healing too that we almost get to bring for audiences and people who experience that.

The fact that it’s going on tour so it just seems like this whole tour of healing support and reconnecting with the spirit world and ancestors that are supporting us in everything we’re doing right now. So thank you so much for all of your wonderful work. How can we follow, support Safe Harbors NYC?

Murielle: Okay. So we have a website called Safe Harbors NYC. And also, you can get a hold of us on Facebook and that’s where we post in our Instagram, and that’s when you’ll find out more about Feasts of Ghosts, which will be in October for Indigenous Peoples’ Day where we can talk. Then November we’re talking about Tipi Tales, Native American Heritage Month, and trying to put that all in there. Thank you.

Yura: Thank you. Yes. Signing up for your email list, following to get notified on everything. Thank you so much, Murielle. This was such a joy and pleasure.

Murielle: Yes, it was. Thank you.

Yura: This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and other HowlRound shows wherever you find podcasts. Be sure to search with the keyword HowlRound and subscribe to receive new episodes.

If you love this podcast, post a rating and write a review on those platforms. You can also find a transcript for this episode along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content on howlround.com. Have an idea for an exciting podcast, essay or TV event the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and submit your idea to this digital commons.

Pillsbury House and Theatre (PH+T) is thrilled to present panels from the Theatrical Jazz Concert at The University of Minnesota that celebrates and extends the legacy of groundbreaking artists Laurie Carlos, Sekou Sundiata, Ntozake Shange, and numerous others who revolutionized the American theater by invoking elements of classic jazz—such as call-and-response, polyphony, syncopation, and improvisation—as theatrical language. The Theatrical Jazz Conference has opportunities to be hands on in a workshop environment, to participate in conversation through dialogue, to witness and experience artistic presentations and performance, and to collaborate and engage with other people as well as contribute to the archiving process for the field. Our amazing lineup of presenters includes Sharon Bridgforth, Ananya Chatterjea, Douglas Ewart, Ebony Noelle Golden, Vicki Grise, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Zell Miller III, Sonja Parks, Sage Ni’Ja Whitson, Talvin Wilks, and many more. The conference culminates with a captivating Blue Note Address by award-winning artist/scholar Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, whose words promise to resonate and inspire long after the event.

Dramaturg’s Roundtable 
9:15 a.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 11:15 a.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 12:15 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
Panelists: Talvin Wilks + Megan Monaghan Rivas + Alexis Pauline Gumbs 
Moderator: Priscilla Maria Page

Director’s Roundtable
1:45 p.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 3:45 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 4:45 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
Panelists:  Signe V. Harriday + Regina Victor + Ebony Noelle Golden 
Moderator:  Awotunde Judyie Al-bilali

Bios

Talvin Wilks is a playwright, director and dramaturg based in Minneapolis and New York City. His plays include Tod, the boy, Tod, The Trial of Uncle S&M, Bread of Heaven, An American Triptych, Jimmy and Lorraine: A Musing, and As I Remember It with Carmen de Lavallade. He is a co-writer/co-director for Ping Chong’s ongoing series of Undesirable Elements and Collidescope: Adventures in Pre- and Post-Racial America, and a member of the Ping Chong + Co. Artistic Leadership Team. Directing Credits: The White Card, This Bitter Earth, Benevolence, The Ballad of Emmett Till (Penumbra Theatre), The Peculiar Patriot (National Black Theatre/Woolly Mammoth), Parks (History Theatre), Cannabis: A Viper Vaudeville (HERE Arts/La Mama), Locomotion (Children’s Theatre Company) and The Till Trilogy (Mosaic Theatre). Dramaturgy Credits: for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enough (2022 Broadway Revival), Dreaming Zenzile (New York Theatre Workshop/National Black Theatre), An American Tail (Children’s Theatre Company), Between the World and Me (The Apollo), Scat!, Walkin’ with ‘Trane, Haint Blu  (Urban Bush Women), ink, Black Girl: Linguistic Play, Mr. TOL E. RanCE (Camille A. Brown and Dancers), In a Rhythm, A History, Necessary Beauty, Landing-Place, Verge (Bebe Miller Company), Radicals in Miniature, Relics and Their Humans (Ain Gordon/Pick Up Performance Co.). He is an associate professor in the Theatre Arts and Dance Department, University of Minnesota/Twin Cities and is a 2020 McKnight Theater Artist Fellow and a 2022 McKnight Presidential Fellow. He was a researcher/co-curator/dramaturg for the Sekou Sundiata Retrospective, Blink Your Eyes, the Aunt Ester Cycle at the August Wilson Center, and continues research on the ongoing book project, Testament: 40 Years of Black Theatre History in the Making, 1964-2004.

Megan Monaghan Rivas joined the University of Connecticut as artistic director of Connecticut Repertory Theatre and department head of Dramatic Arts in 2021 after serving as interim head of the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University, where she served on the faculty starting in 2013. In prior years she served as literary manager of South Coast Repertory Theatre, and as literary director of the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta and Frontera @ Hyde Park Theatre in Austin, TX. She oversaw the artistic programming for playwrights at the Lark Play Development Center in New York City and The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. She has freelanced with the New Harmony Project, the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, the Geffen Playhouse, Quantum Theatre, Aurora Theatre, the Salt Lake Acting Company, TheatreSquared, Actors Express Theatre, and Horizon Theatre. She is the author of an original gender-bending adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers, and a separate original play riffing on Dumas’ characters set among women workers in the French Resistance, entitled Three Musketeers: 1941. Megan has been honored with the Elliott Hayes Prize in Dramaturgy.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is cherished by a wide range of communities as an oracle and a vessel of love. Drawing on over 25 years of experience as a writer and facilitator, her inclusive practice finds us and brings us into the ceremonies we have always needed. Her books include: Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press 2020), Dub: Finding Ceremony (Duke Press, 2020), M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke Press 2018), Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Duke Press, 2016) and Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016). Alexis was honored to be the dramaturg for the world premiere of Sharon Bridgforth’s Dat Black Mermaid Man Lady, directed by Ebony Noelle Golden in 2018 and for the world premiere of Bull Jean and Dem/dey back, directed by Daniel Alexander Jones in 2023. Alexis recently won the 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry. In 2022 Alexis was honored with a Whiting Award in non-fiction and was lauded for creating “modern fables that offer new methods of feeling,” and was also a 2022 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. In 2020-2021 Alexis was awarded a National Humanities Center Fellowship. Alexis and her partner Sangodare have received many honors, including an Advocate 40 under 40 feature for their decade of work to create an intergenerational living library of Black LGBTQ brilliance called Mobile Homecoming. Alexis lives in Durham, North Carolina where she nurtures and is nurtured by a visionary creative community while scheming towards her dream of being your favorite cousin. Her new biography Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde arrives from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux on August 20th of this year!

Priscilla Maria Page, PhD is a writer, performer, dramaturg, and faculty member in the Department of Theater at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also directs the Multicultural Theater Certificate. Her research includes Latinx Theater and Contemporary Native American Performance. She is currently writing about Latinx theater history in Chicago. Her publications include “Crafting Latinx Culture on Chicago’s Stages” in the Routledge Companion to Latine Theater and Performance (2024); “Contextualizing ­Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights and Hamilton Within ­Hip-Hop Theater History” in Hamilton, History, and Hip Hop: Essays on An American Musical (MacFarland, 2024); and “Collidescope 2.0: Performing the alien gaze” in Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative, edited by Claire Syler and Daniel Banks (Routledge, 2019). She co-edited and contributed to Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play and A Circle of Responses with Joy Harjo, (Wesleyan Press, 2019). Her short essay titled “Our Dad is in Atlantis: Border Crossings as Latinx Theater Practice” appears on www.latinxtalk.org (March 2020). And her essay “My World Made Real” appears as the afterword in El Grito de Bronx and Other Plays by Migdalia Cruz (No Passport Press, 2010).

Signe V. Harriday is a fierce visionary and powerful storyteller who crafts theatre that awakens our individual and collective humanity. As a director, multidisciplinary artist, activist, and facilitator, she uses theatre as a catalyst to ask questions about who we are and who we are in relation to each other. Senior Artistic Producing Director of Pillsbury House Theatre. Co-founder of Million Artist Movement, a collective of artists committed to Black liberation. Co-founder of the award-winning synchronized swimming team, The Subversive Sirens.  Founder of Rootsprings Coop, a retreat center for BIPOC artists/activists/healers. Co-founder of MaMa mOsAiC, a women of color theater company whose mission is to evoke positive social change through female centered work. Core team member of REP Community Partners an abolition project.  She earned her MFA in Acting at the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard and Moscow Art Theatre and is a Hermitage Fellow. Recent theatre projects: Director of Bridgforth’s bull-jean stories, Harris’ What to Send Up When it Goes Down, Co-Director of Chen’s PASSAGE, and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower Opera by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johson Reagon, Choreography for Love of Silver Water, Playwright for Dysmorphia. Other directing credits: Dining with the Ancestors, Fannie Lou Hammer Speak On It, Hidden Heroes, Cardboard Piano, Agitators, and various workshops. Website.

Regina Victor (they/pharaoh) is a nomadic multidisciplinary artist from Oakland, CA, based in Chicago IL. Using the divinatory tools of tarot, storytelling, and the framework of theatrical jazz, they employ the blk and trans radical imagination to transmute the past, reflect the present, and co-create possible futures. Theatre is their dominant practice, working most frequently as a director, dramaturg, and actor. Victor is a producer for the Bombay Beach Biennale, a non-traditional, radical hospitality interdisciplinary arts festival in California. pharaoh has developed new plays at The Playwrights Center, Long Wharf Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and more, and trained under prolific directors such as Daniel Alexander Jones, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, and Phylicia Rashad. Victor founded their arts criticism outlet, Rescripted.org, in 2017, and was placed in the ‘23 and ‘24 New City Magazine Hall of Fame for their work. As a freelance critic, Victor has written for The Chicago Reader, American Theatre Magazine, Playbill, Howlround, and more. Pharaoh has piloted several cultural initiatives, including McCarter Theatre’s Bard at the Gate, UChicago’s Arts & Public Life Critics’ Table, the Howlround Theatre Commons’ National Advisory Council, and the Artistic Caucus. Regina’s website. Rescripted’s website.

Ebony Noelle Golden is a theatrical ceremonialist, culture strategist, entrepreneur, and public scholar. In 2009, Ebony founded Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, a culture consultancy that devises systems, strategies, and social justice solutions nationally. In 2020, she founded Jupiter Performance Studio, a space to study and practice Black diasporic performance traditions. Winner of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Transformational Practice Award, Golden works to incite and ignite the creative capacity of everyday folks in service of liberation and collective wellbeing. Her practice is rooted in community-design, ritual performance, and leadership development through a womanist and Black feminist praxis. Invoking messy, magical, and medicinal processes, Ebony and her collaborators, work to conjure a better world. Website.

Awotunde Judyie Ella Al-Bilali is a theater artist, writer and arts educator. She has performed and directed off-Broadway, at regional theaters, and is the Artistic Godmother of Re/Emergence Collective based in New England. Currently Professor of Theater for Social Transformation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she has taught internationally, notably as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa where she founded an Applied Theater company, Brown Paper Studio. While travelling around the world on a ship to eleven countries in the Caribbean, South America, Africa and Asia, she taught her innovative process as Semester at Sea faculty. A trademarked methodology, Brown Paper Studio is part of UMass Theater’s curriculum. Her work is featured in the award-winning publication Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Judyie is the author of For the Feeling: Love & Transformation from New York to Cape Town, a self-published memoir and Halcyon Days, a book of haiku poetry published by Indian Hill Press. Her newest book and performance project, Between Tattoos: A Biomythography charts the journey of a Black woman theater artist though the years 2019 to 2021, the pivot point towards Earth’s positive future she comes from the future to herald. Judyie’s plays, The Death of Black & White, Ice House and Savior’s Day have been produced at community and college theaters. She lives on the island of Nôepe also known as Martha’s Vineyard, located in Wôpanâak territory.  She acknowledges Nôepe’s lands, waters, plants and animals as a source of inspiration and expresses her gratitude to the Wôpanâak people for their continuous role as the traditional stewards of their ancestral home. Website.

Sincere thanks to our generous contributors…
University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study Department of Theatre Arts + Dance Department of Gender, Women + Sexuality Studies School of Music George Mason University College of Visual + Performing Arts School of Theater University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts Faculty Research Fund Department of Theater Pillsbury House + Theatre, Minneapolis Rhythm Visions Production Company, DC Minnesota Transform Jerome Foundation

Pillsbury House and Theatre (PH+T) is thrilled to present panels from the Theatrical Jazz Concert at The University of Minnesota that celebrates and extends the legacy of groundbreaking artists Laurie Carlos, Sekou Sundiata, Ntozake Shange, and numerous others who revolutionized the American theater by invoking elements of classic jazz—such as call-and-response, polyphony, syncopation, and improvisation—as theatrical language. The Theatrical Jazz Conference has opportunities to be hands on in a workshop environment, to participate in conversation through dialogue, to witness and experience artistic presentations and performance, and to collaborate and engage with other people as well as contribute to the archiving process for the field. Our amazing lineup of presenters includes Sharon Bridgforth, Ananya Chatterjea, Douglas Ewart, Ebony Noelle Golden, Vicki Grise, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Zell Miller III, Sonja Parks, Sage Ni’Ja Whitson, Talvin Wilks, and many more. The conference culminates with a captivating Blue Note Address by award-winning artist/scholar Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, whose words promise to resonate and inspire long after the event.

Dramaturg’s Roundtable 
9:15 a.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 11:15 a.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 12:15 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
Panelists: Talvin Wilks + Megan Monaghan Rivas + Alexis Pauline Gumbs 
Moderator: Priscilla Maria Page

Director’s Roundtable
1:45 p.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 3:45 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 4:45 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
Panelists:  Signe V. Harriday + Regina Victor + Ebony Noelle Golden 
Moderator:  Awotunde Judyie Al-bilali

Bios

Talvin Wilks is a playwright, director and dramaturg based in Minneapolis and New York City. His plays include Tod, the boy, Tod, The Trial of Uncle S&M, Bread of Heaven, An American Triptych, Jimmy and Lorraine: A Musing, and As I Remember It with Carmen de Lavallade. He is a co-writer/co-director for Ping Chong’s ongoing series of Undesirable Elements and Collidescope: Adventures in Pre- and Post-Racial America, and a member of the Ping Chong + Co. Artistic Leadership Team. Directing Credits: The White Card, This Bitter Earth, Benevolence, The Ballad of Emmett Till (Penumbra Theatre), The Peculiar Patriot (National Black Theatre/Woolly Mammoth), Parks (History Theatre), Cannabis: A Viper Vaudeville (HERE Arts/La Mama), Locomotion (Children’s Theatre Company) and The Till Trilogy (Mosaic Theatre). Dramaturgy Credits: for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enough (2022 Broadway Revival), Dreaming Zenzile (New York Theatre Workshop/National Black Theatre), An American Tail (Children’s Theatre Company), Between the World and Me (The Apollo), Scat!, Walkin’ with ‘Trane, Haint Blu  (Urban Bush Women), ink, Black Girl: Linguistic Play, Mr. TOL E. RanCE (Camille A. Brown and Dancers), In a Rhythm, A History, Necessary Beauty, Landing-Place, Verge (Bebe Miller Company), Radicals in Miniature, Relics and Their Humans (Ain Gordon/Pick Up Performance Co.). He is an associate professor in the Theatre Arts and Dance Department, University of Minnesota/Twin Cities and is a 2020 McKnight Theater Artist Fellow and a 2022 McKnight Presidential Fellow. He was a researcher/co-curator/dramaturg for the Sekou Sundiata Retrospective, Blink Your Eyes, the Aunt Ester Cycle at the August Wilson Center, and continues research on the ongoing book project, Testament: 40 Years of Black Theatre History in the Making, 1964-2004.

Megan Monaghan Rivas joined the University of Connecticut as artistic director of Connecticut Repertory Theatre and department head of Dramatic Arts in 2021 after serving as interim head of the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University, where she served on the faculty starting in 2013. In prior years she served as literary manager of South Coast Repertory Theatre, and as literary director of the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta and Frontera @ Hyde Park Theatre in Austin, TX. She oversaw the artistic programming for playwrights at the Lark Play Development Center in New York City and The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. She has freelanced with the New Harmony Project, the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, the Geffen Playhouse, Quantum Theatre, Aurora Theatre, the Salt Lake Acting Company, TheatreSquared, Actors Express Theatre, and Horizon Theatre. She is the author of an original gender-bending adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers, and a separate original play riffing on Dumas’ characters set among women workers in the French Resistance, entitled Three Musketeers: 1941. Megan has been honored with the Elliott Hayes Prize in Dramaturgy.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is cherished by a wide range of communities as an oracle and a vessel of love. Drawing on over 25 years of experience as a writer and facilitator, her inclusive practice finds us and brings us into the ceremonies we have always needed. Her books include: Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press 2020), Dub: Finding Ceremony (Duke Press, 2020), M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke Press 2018), Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Duke Press, 2016) and Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016). Alexis was honored to be the dramaturg for the world premiere of Sharon Bridgforth’s Dat Black Mermaid Man Lady, directed by Ebony Noelle Golden in 2018 and for the world premiere of Bull Jean and Dem/dey back, directed by Daniel Alexander Jones in 2023. Alexis recently won the 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry. In 2022 Alexis was honored with a Whiting Award in non-fiction and was lauded for creating “modern fables that offer new methods of feeling,” and was also a 2022 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. In 2020-2021 Alexis was awarded a National Humanities Center Fellowship. Alexis and her partner Sangodare have received many honors, including an Advocate 40 under 40 feature for their decade of work to create an intergenerational living library of Black LGBTQ brilliance called Mobile Homecoming. Alexis lives in Durham, North Carolina where she nurtures and is nurtured by a visionary creative community while scheming towards her dream of being your favorite cousin. Her new biography Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde arrives from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux on August 20th of this year!

Priscilla Maria Page, PhD is a writer, performer, dramaturg, and faculty member in the Department of Theater at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also directs the Multicultural Theater Certificate. Her research includes Latinx Theater and Contemporary Native American Performance. She is currently writing about Latinx theater history in Chicago. Her publications include “Crafting Latinx Culture on Chicago’s Stages” in the Routledge Companion to Latine Theater and Performance (2024); “Contextualizing ­Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights and Hamilton Within ­Hip-Hop Theater History” in Hamilton, History, and Hip Hop: Essays on An American Musical (MacFarland, 2024); and “Collidescope 2.0: Performing the alien gaze” in Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative, edited by Claire Syler and Daniel Banks (Routledge, 2019). She co-edited and contributed to Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play and A Circle of Responses with Joy Harjo, (Wesleyan Press, 2019). Her short essay titled “Our Dad is in Atlantis: Border Crossings as Latinx Theater Practice” appears on www.latinxtalk.org (March 2020). And her essay “My World Made Real” appears as the afterword in El Grito de Bronx and Other Plays by Migdalia Cruz (No Passport Press, 2010).

Signe V. Harriday is a fierce visionary and powerful storyteller who crafts theatre that awakens our individual and collective humanity. As a director, multidisciplinary artist, activist, and facilitator, she uses theatre as a catalyst to ask questions about who we are and who we are in relation to each other. Senior Artistic Producing Director of Pillsbury House Theatre. Co-founder of Million Artist Movement, a collective of artists committed to Black liberation. Co-founder of the award-winning synchronized swimming team, The Subversive Sirens.  Founder of Rootsprings Coop, a retreat center for BIPOC artists/activists/healers. Co-founder of MaMa mOsAiC, a women of color theater company whose mission is to evoke positive social change through female centered work. Core team member of REP Community Partners an abolition project.  She earned her MFA in Acting at the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard and Moscow Art Theatre and is a Hermitage Fellow. Recent theatre projects: Director of Bridgforth’s bull-jean stories, Harris’ What to Send Up When it Goes Down, Co-Director of Chen’s PASSAGE, and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower Opera by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johson Reagon, Choreography for Love of Silver Water, Playwright for Dysmorphia. Other directing credits: Dining with the Ancestors, Fannie Lou Hammer Speak On It, Hidden Heroes, Cardboard Piano, Agitators, and various workshops. Website.

Regina Victor (they/pharaoh) is a nomadic multidisciplinary artist from Oakland, CA, based in Chicago IL. Using the divinatory tools of tarot, storytelling, and the framework of theatrical jazz, they employ the blk and trans radical imagination to transmute the past, reflect the present, and co-create possible futures. Theatre is their dominant practice, working most frequently as a director, dramaturg, and actor. Victor is a producer for the Bombay Beach Biennale, a non-traditional, radical hospitality interdisciplinary arts festival in California. pharaoh has developed new plays at The Playwrights Center, Long Wharf Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and more, and trained under prolific directors such as Daniel Alexander Jones, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, and Phylicia Rashad. Victor founded their arts criticism outlet, Rescripted.org, in 2017, and was placed in the ‘23 and ‘24 New City Magazine Hall of Fame for their work. As a freelance critic, Victor has written for The Chicago Reader, American Theatre Magazine, Playbill, Howlround, and more. Pharaoh has piloted several cultural initiatives, including McCarter Theatre’s Bard at the Gate, UChicago’s Arts & Public Life Critics’ Table, the Howlround Theatre Commons’ National Advisory Council, and the Artistic Caucus. Regina’s website. Rescripted’s website.

Ebony Noelle Golden is a theatrical ceremonialist, culture strategist, entrepreneur, and public scholar. In 2009, Ebony founded Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, a culture consultancy that devises systems, strategies, and social justice solutions nationally. In 2020, she founded Jupiter Performance Studio, a space to study and practice Black diasporic performance traditions. Winner of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Transformational Practice Award, Golden works to incite and ignite the creative capacity of everyday folks in service of liberation and collective wellbeing. Her practice is rooted in community-design, ritual performance, and leadership development through a womanist and Black feminist praxis. Invoking messy, magical, and medicinal processes, Ebony and her collaborators, work to conjure a better world. Website.

Awotunde Judyie Ella Al-Bilali is a theater artist, writer and arts educator. She has performed and directed off-Broadway, at regional theaters, and is the Artistic Godmother of Re/Emergence Collective based in New England. Currently Professor of Theater for Social Transformation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she has taught internationally, notably as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa where she founded an Applied Theater company, Brown Paper Studio. While travelling around the world on a ship to eleven countries in the Caribbean, South America, Africa and Asia, she taught her innovative process as Semester at Sea faculty. A trademarked methodology, Brown Paper Studio is part of UMass Theater’s curriculum. Her work is featured in the award-winning publication Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Judyie is the author of For the Feeling: Love & Transformation from New York to Cape Town, a self-published memoir and Halcyon Days, a book of haiku poetry published by Indian Hill Press. Her newest book and performance project, Between Tattoos: A Biomythography charts the journey of a Black woman theater artist though the years 2019 to 2021, the pivot point towards Earth’s positive future she comes from the future to herald. Judyie’s plays, The Death of Black & White, Ice House and Savior’s Day have been produced at community and college theaters. She lives on the island of Nôepe also known as Martha’s Vineyard, located in Wôpanâak territory.  She acknowledges Nôepe’s lands, waters, plants and animals as a source of inspiration and expresses her gratitude to the Wôpanâak people for their continuous role as the traditional stewards of their ancestral home. Website.

Sincere thanks to our generous contributors…
University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study Department of Theatre Arts + Dance Department of Gender, Women + Sexuality Studies School of Music George Mason University College of Visual + Performing Arts School of Theater University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts Faculty Research Fund Department of Theater Pillsbury House + Theatre, Minneapolis Rhythm Visions Production Company, DC Minnesota Transform Jerome Foundation

Working with the youngsters and teachers of Anwai Primary School was both tasking and interesting as we guided the children in creating a stage performance. The first part of the process was to decipher how to effectively and efficiently communicate this all-important message while still maintaining the entertainment value of in the performance. We settled on creating a play that had trees as some of the characters, although humans played the roles. The trees advocated for their own survival from the encroachment of humans, a choice that highlighted their immense contribution to the ecosystem of the Earth and its preservation.

The performance, titled Tree Talk, is a short dance drama that tells the story of how the trees, which have been at the receiving end of humans’ deforestation drive in the name of industrialization and civilization, decided to revolt against humans in order to save both themselves and the planet. The revolt, however, was quickly squashed by the superior human technology of the bulldozer. This caused a huge flood that wiped out a whole community of humans.

The project was a collaborative creative process that involved both the teachers and students chipping in with their own ideas on the plot of the play and how the performance should be. The students responded impressively to the opportunity to be part of the creative process, contributing great ideas that shaped the overall concept of the performance. Making them part of the creative process helped bring out the latent ingenuity in them and heightened their enthusiasm towards the objectives of the performance.

The creative process for Tree Talk involved an extensive teaching process about climate change for the students who previously had no idea about what climate change is and how it affects them.

Creating and staging the intersection of dance and acting brought to the fore the critical role trees play on our planet. Trees function as indispensable allies in the fight against climate change by regulating the climate, preserving biodiversity, and providing valuable ecosystem services like carbon sequestration, that is, absorbing carbon dioxide, storing carbon in their biomass to help mitigate climate change. Trees also reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, regulate local and global temperatures, moderate extreme weather events, enhance the resilience of ecosystems to climate change impacts, and support carbon cycling and storage in soil. Trees play a critical role in maintaining the health and stability of the planet. Protecting and restoring forests, as well as promoting sustainable land management practices, are essential strategies for mitigating climate change and building a more resilient and sustainable future for all.

The creative process for Tree Talk involved an extensive teaching process about climate change for the students who previously had no idea about what climate change is and how it affects them. Also, they were taught how to use the performing arts to communicate social and environmental issues. The rehearsal sessions were an interesting collaborative process between members of the team of Shanty  Theatre, the students, and the teachers of Anwai Primary School. The students were not only talented but were willing learners, which made the process quite easy for us, especially the choreography.

Being in a school setting helped the teaching and rehearsal process. One of the classrooms in the school was turned into our rehearsal room. The teachers, who we had given different topics on climate change to research, took turns teaching the students what they’ve learned. These topics included what climate change is, the causes of climate change, the effect of climate change on the Earth, how it affects us directly and indirectly, and what we should do to turn the tide on climate change and help save our planet.

It was an opportunity to use the medium of the theatre to communicate, educate, and recruit climate activists, who, having understood the imminent danger the world is in through the performance the students put up, would take bold steps to become advocates
 

After the teaching sessions, which were quite engaging, with the students asking a lot of questions, we dived into the rehearsal proper. Teaching them basic impersonation skills was quite easy, as they were naturals. We, however, added our professional touch to their acting skills, teaching them dance movements, stage movements, interpersonal stage relationships, non-verbal communication skills, and character interpretation. This set the tone for us to rehearse the dance drama performance.

The energy and synergy displayed during the rehearsal was carried into the performance proper, as the students displayed a near flawless understanding of their roles, showcasing their acting and dance skill to communicate the central theme of the dangers of climate change and deforestation to both the environment and people living in it. The stage performance, which took place at the Nuel Ojei Hall, Dennis Osadebey University, Anwai, Asaba, was attended by students of the university and members of different faculties in the university. The performance was both humorous and poignant, eliciting cheers of approval from the audience who enjoyed the performance and embraced the lessons it communicated to them. It was an opportunity to use the medium of the theatre to communicate, educate, and recruit climate activists, who, having understood the imminent danger the world is in through the performance the students put up, would take bold steps to become advocates of environmental friendly policies and investment from both government and private organizations around the world.

The head teacher of Anwai Primary School, Mrs. Somtochukwu Adigwu, was elated to watch her students as they performed. After the performance, she was full of praise about what the students were able to achieve and the worthiness of being part of the very important and urgent drive to raise awareness about climate change and how it affects us as humans. She remarked that the students are now climate champions, and she will do all she can to help them sustain the drive as young environmental activists.

They’ve also found out that their voices cannot be ignored, irrespective of how young they are, when they use theatrical performance to communicate.
 

The teachers of the school, who were also pleasantly surprised at how adept their students were during the performance, also praised them for putting up such a show that is both educative and entertaining. They commented on their relative lack of knowledge of the effect of climate change and were thrilled to have been educated extensively as part of the performance process that has shown light into the dangers ahead if the right steps are not taken to combat climate change.

The last lap of our collaboration with Anwai Primary School was to establish a dramatic and literary club that would help the students have a platform to hone their skills in theatrical performance and increase their interest in literary art. This club would be headed by the English Language teacher, Ms. Sophia Awele. This dramatic and literary club was important for the children who had realized the immense power of the arts to speak about important issues that affect them, to raise awareness, and to call for the amelioration of these issues. They’ve also found out that their voices cannot be ignored, irrespective of how young they are, when they use theatrical performance to communicate.

The Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA) is produced by Spiderwebshow Performance.

Mission: Empowering the global community with boundary-pushing live digital artistry that transcends barriers and inspires profound connections.

Vision: To lead a revolution in live digital art, shaping a future defined by creativity and connection.

Brand Purpose: Through empowering live digital art experiences, we unite, provoke, and inspire.

Values

Creativity: Cultivating innovation in every aspect.
Inclusivity: Celebrating diversity and fostering accessibility.
Exploration: Pushing the boundaries of artistic possibility.
Leadership: Adapting and thriving in a dynamic world.
Fun: Balancing the hard work of making art with joy and lightness

Schedule

Thursday 13 June

PLAY by Dr. Jenn Stephenson and Mariah (Mo) Horner
2 p.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 4 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 5 p.m. EDT (Toronto, UTC -4)

Join us for the launch of PLAY: Dramaturgies of Participation by Dr. Jenn Stephenson and Mariah (Mo) Horner, published by Playwrights Canada Press! The book is comprised of standalone mini-essays that collect, describe, and analyze live performances in which the audience become participants in the piece itself.
After a short interactive interview with SpiderWebShow Performance Artistic Director and FOLDA Co-Curator, Adrienne Wong, Jenn and Mo will read excerpts from their book.

Friday 14 June

AI in Creative Performance by bluemouth inc, Cole Lewis, and David Rokeby
11 a.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 1 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 2 p.m. EDT (Toronto, UTC -4)

Meet with the artists from bluemouth inc behind LUCY AI, co-artistic director of Guilty by Association Cole Lewis, and David Rokeby, director of The BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies, and AI.
Talk about real examples of artificial intelligence in creative performance practice. Through real-life case studies, we’ll uncover how this technology is applied to create performances right now.

Saturday 15 June

Windrush by Marcel Stewart and Oonya Kempadoo
9 a.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 11 a.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 12 p.m. EDT (Toronto, UTC -4)

Windrush journeys through three generations, exploring identity, belonging, and legacy amidst the backdrop of the Windrush era. From Jamaica to England and Canada, it captures the vibrant experiences of migrants seeking opportunities. Through monologues, cultural references, and ancestral presence, it delves into family, resilience, and the quest for home. Celebrating heritage and sacrifices, the show promises an immersive experience with binaural sound and projections.

Nabra Nelson: Salam Alaikum. Welcome to Kunafa and Shay, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. Kunafa and Shay discusses and analyzes contemporary and historical Middle Eastern and North African, or MENA, and SWANA, or Southwest Asian/North African, theatre from across the region.

Marina Johnson: I am Marina.

Nabra: I’m Nabra.

Marina: We’re your hosts.

Nabra: Our name, Kunafa and Shay, invites you into the discussion in the best way we know how: with complex and delicious sweets like kunafa and perfectly warm tea or, in Arabic, shay.

Marina: Kunafa and Shay is a place to share experiences, ideas, and sometimes to engage with our differences. In each country in Arab world, you’ll find kunafa made differently. In that way, we also lean into the diversity, complexity, and robust flavors of MENA and SWANA theatre. We bring our own perspectives, research, and special guests in order to start a dialogue and encourage further learning and discussion.

Nabra: In our fourth season, we focus on classical and historical theatre, including discussions of traditional theatre forms and in-depth analysis of some of the oldest and most significant classical plays from 1300 BC to the twentieth century.

Marina: Grab your tea. The shay is just right. In this episode, we’ll be talking about the oldest surviving full play, which, of course, is from Egypt. It’s called The Triumph of Horus, and we’ll be telling you all about it and sharing a bit about theatre in ancient Egypt more generally.

Nabra: First, let’s talk about the play. I read it with absolutely no context and actually understood a lot of it, including gathering some of the subtext from the basic info I know about ancient Egyptian culture and customs. The plot is very simple. It tells the story of the god Horus defeating a hippopotamus, which I thought was just a regular hippo, which made a lot of it seem very silly, but turns out the hippo is actually the god Seth who killed Horus’s father, Osiris.

So, the play tells the story of Horus slaying the hippo and becoming king, which in this context means that the god Horus essentially merges with the existing king to make that king the embodiment of Horus on earth, AKA Pharaoh. Without the background info, it would just be the story of a guy who kills a hippo and then becomes king, but of course, audiences would all know the context that makes the play highly symbolic and politically significant. We will get into all of that, but let’s give you a more full rundown of the happenings in the play first.

Marina: Most of what we’ll be quoting today is from The Triumph of Horus: An Ancient Egyptian Sacred Drama, which was published in 1974, and the contextual information from the translator and editor H. W. Fairman, who’s a professor of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool.

So, here is a scene-by-scene synopsis of the play. The play starts with a brief prologue. As H. W. Fairman summarizes very succinctly, “The prologue has as its main object praise of the king and the happy days of the festival and triumph and the anticipatory declaration of the results of the whole play, the defeat of Seth and the triumph of Horus and the king.”

It’s worth noting you all that Set, which was how we’re saying this person’s name, is written “Seth,” which does change things and makes it funny if you are reading it differently. So, Nabra and I have had fun with that on our own. Anyway, at the end of the prologue, the reader, who is very similar to the chorus but seems to essentially be in charge of introducing characters, says, “Here begins the bringing to pass of the triumph of Horus over his enemies when he hastened to slay the foes after the sallying forth to battle.” In the accompanying relief, the reader is depicted reading from a papyrus scroll. So, he seems to take on the role of the primary narrator.

Nabra: So back to Fairman: “The five scenes of act one embody somewhat formally and in a combination of mime and drama, the ancient harpoon ritual. In each scene, two forms of Horus representing Lower and Upper Egypt each thrust a harpoon into the body of a hippopotamus, which represents the Seth, the enemy of Horus.” So at this point, I’m thinking, “I guess this could just be a regular hippo that represents Seth or it could be Seth himself.” I’m still unsure. The thing that made me really think he was a regular hippo is when Horus gives a lot of measurements relating to the battle for some reason, and he says, “I cast at the cows of the hippopotami in water of eight cubits.” That just seems to be referring to regular hippos in regular water.

Regardless, it would’ve been understood to be symbolic of Seth either way. There’s a moment after the hippo is defeated when Isis refers to the hippo “standing with feet on dry land,” which seems to imply that it is not really dead or that the corpse has some type of mystical property, but then they dismember the corpse and the gods eat it. So, it’s definitely dead in some way. Still unclear as to whether this is the god Seth or a normal hippo at this point, but again, it doesn’t seem to matter that much at this point in the play from a modern reader’s perspective.

“Scene 4 in this Act is interrupted by a brief interlude in which another ancient ritual—the killing of multi-coloured snakes (sabet-snakes, probably cobras) in Letopolis—is mimed: in dumb show the snakes are killed, their flesh eaten and their blood swallowed, the whole representing the destruction of the enemy,” also from Fairman. This part seems very random in the script but must have been very cool staged. Act I ends with much rejoicing again. From my notes while reading it: “They describe the ten harpoons stuck in the hippo and are just really excited about the whole thing.”

Marina: I love being privy to your notes, Nabra. Something to note is that in each scene, it ends with the chorus going, “Hold fast, Horus, hold fast.” This seems to be very similar at the time to “Long live the king,” but it takes on different meanings at different times. Like when Horus is fighting the hippo, it’s like, “Keep going,” and then when he’s transporting the hippo, it’s like, “You’re almost at the finish line,” and then at the coronation later, it’s very much “Long live the king.”

Nabra: On to Act II, which is entitled the “Rejoicing Over the Victory.” From Fairman, “In scene one, Isis still apparently carried away by excitement, though Seth is already defeated, continues to incite her son’s supporters and recites a very fine poem to the war gallery of Horus.” This description helps understand the scene since it was quite confusing when a group of characters called the young harpooners show up and Isis keeps telling them to “vanquish the foe” and yet it is quite obvious that the foe was vanquished in the previous act. I like the idea of Isis just getting carried away and being like, “Kill him, everyone. Kill him!” This is one of those moments that almost seem tailor-made to confuse modern audiences.

“In scene two, Horus having first mimed on land, the killing of the hippopotamus, embarks on his ceremonial bark, is invested with the insignia of kingship and crowned as king of Upper and Lower Egypt and a double chorus representing the women of Upper and Lower Egypt sing antiphonically a hymn of rejoicing over the victory.”

Marina: Most of this last scene of act two is the coronation, and it is a very specifically a pharaoh coronation. Up until this point, there has been a character called the King who played quite a minor part and just commented on the happenings sometimes like many of the other characters. There were also two Horus characters, Horus Lord of Mesen and Horus the Behdetite, who represent Lower and Upper Egypt respectively. At this coronation, all three of these characters merge into one, the Pharaoh.

In the caption about the relief that accompanies this scene, it says, “The King is not depicted, nor is any speaking part assigned to him. This is because the King is now the living Horus on earth. The triumph of Horus is his coronation.” That is the difference between a pharaoh and most kings is that he is considered the living embodiment of a god on Earth.

Act III, the final act is entitled the “Celebration of the Victory,” which mostly involves dismembering the hippo. In the first scene, the flesh of the hippo is divided among different gods to eat. “This did not merely demonstrate that the enemy was defeated and dead. It ensured by eating the flesh, the absorption of his peculiar powers.”

In Act III, Scene Two labeled “An Interlude,” there’s another what they call “dumb show” in which Horus thrusts the harpoon into the back of a small model of a hippopotamus. Simultaneously, the King who is facing Horus, harpoons the buttocks of a somewhat larger figure of a bound human captive, and the chorus, Isis, and the King all rejoice. Then, in the final scene, there is a second dismemberment of Seth. This is because “every ritual concerned with kingship, every right or episode, because of the symbolism of the two lands, had to be performed twice, first for Lower Egypt, then for Upper Egypt.”

In the scene, a model of a hippo made of cake is brought out and cut up by the butcher. As the butcher dismembers the cake hippo, the reader recites from a papyrus, which basically just states how very annihilated Seth is. He’s like, “Thou shalt not exist and thy soul shall not exist. Thou shalt not exist and thy body shall not exist,” et cetera.

Nabra: This seems to serve as a final banishment ritual and also seems to serve as a reenactment of the real dismemberment of Seth where the people of the city get to be there instead of the gods. It feels like the people’s time to celebrate, and it is thought that there would be a hippo cake that would be distributed to audience members during this part of the play. There is much rejoicing, especially through call-and-response between the reader and the chorus, like “Triumphant over his enemies is Horus the Behdetite, great god, lord of the sky!” Then this is repeated by the chorus. This is my favorite exchange, which is between the reader and the chorus, and so that we will reenact. Marina is going to be the reader and I’ll be the chorus.

Marina: Oh, my goodness. Okay.

Mayest thou perish. May thy name perish. Fall upon thy face. Be felled!

Nabra: Felled!

Marina: Be crushed!

Nabra: Crushed!

Marina: Be annihilated!

Nabra: Annihilated!

Marina: Be cut to pieces!

Nabra: To pieces!

Marina: Be cut up!

Nabra: Cut up!

The end. That’s not the actual end of the play, but the play ends with an epilogue in which the reader “formally declares that Horus, certain divinities and places, and lastly the King himself are triumphant over their enemies.” The reader is insistent how on how very overthrown Horus enemies are and much very long naming of Horus ensues for a couple of pages, the end.

So, let’s talk about some of my impressions while reading it. I was surprised at how much I understood of the plot and even ritual details. There’s enough in there to understand it as a modern audience with little context. It also has some resonances with how other ancient texts are written, especially reminding me of the Bible.

For instance, there are long descriptions of who people are, with what their lineage is and what they’ve done, and just a lot of titles. One of the many instances of that is one of the times the reader introduces Horus by saying, “Horus Lord of Mesen, preeminent in Pe and Mesen. Great God, preeminent in Wetjeset-Hor. The Lion preeminent in Khant-labet, who drives Seth into the wilderness. Goodly Warden of the Two Lands and the Riverbanks. Protector who protects Egypt.”

Part of it would be performed on boats in the water and part of it on land. So, that’s very cool to imagine. It shares lots of info about the gods Horus, Isis, and Osiris and mentions others, especially Ra, the sun God.

Marina: It should be noted however that many of the long titles in the script that we read were not in the original carvings. They were added by the translators or interpreters from other reliefs about those figures, since it is thought that those titles would likely be included to introduce the characters in the performance of the play, but that there was not enough space on the temple wall to repeat them in the play text. There’s a lot that went into translating the text from the wall of the temple on which it was carved to a modern script format in English, including drawing from other texts and sources and making informed assumptions about certain details.

So, we chose to take the script mostly as is and trust that what we read was as close as Egyptologists could get us to experience of the play as it was performed in that time.

Nabra: Another archaic-feeling element of this play is that they give very strange specifics like the amount of cubits in the water that he speared and the length of his weapons. Horus says, “I have cast at the lower Egyptian bull in water of twenty cubits, a harpoon blade of four cubits, a rope of six cubits,” et cetera. Overall, there is a lot of tell-don’t-show, which seemed to be the meta for classical plays for quite a while, but there would’ve been parts that were mimed on top of these descriptions, especially the harpoonings and the dismemberments. Then there are the dumb shows which are very cool with lots of action. There would’ve also been music at times throughout the production and possibly even to underscore climactic moments.

It’s pretty fun to read and short compared to many contemporary plays. The descriptions of the battle with the hippo are action-packed, and there’s a lot of epic language. From my notes: “The demon just says epic shit and Isis is clearly a boss bitch,” which brings me to a quick tangent about the demon because he is such a fun character, but I have no idea why he is there. This character just says hardcore stuff about how vicious he is in battle and what he will do to his enemies. He seems to be the bodyguard of Horus describing himself as the “first demon of thy crew,” but Horus does not seem to need a bodyguard. The demon declares titles for himself, and they are pretty amusing, especially since they’re written as one long hyphenated word.

My favorite are: “I am his-speech-is-fire,” “I am he-loves-solitude,” “I am death-in-his-face-loud-screamer.” Epic. I can imagine this play being highly entertaining to audiences at the time and also religiously educational. It almost feels like literature in the way it’s written, also since the vast majority of people were illiterate at the time. It’s also very positive and celebratory. So, it would be a real mood booster for folks. Part of it would be performed on boats in the water and part of it on land. So, that’s very cool to imagine. It shares lots of info about the gods Horus, Isis, and Osiris and mentions others, especially Ra, the sun God, who is also the great-great-great-grandfather of Horus. It also depicts how pharaohs are the living embodiment of the royal god Horus

Mythology and the great annual rituals and festivals of kingship provided priests with ideal tools in their political nationalistic propaganda.

Marina: Amazing. So, before we get to the next section, Nabra, I do want to mention something that I think because you’re Egyptian that you have been… not glossing over necessarily, but that maybe is not obvious to everybody because it was not obvious to me. When I went to Egypt, Nabra and her family were going to be there. I was like, “Yes, I’m going to go and hang out before, and then I’ll go see Nabra’s family.” But when I was there, people would talk about Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. I’m so used to thinking about upper being on a map like North, but Upper Egypt actually refers to the Southern parts of Egypt because it’s where the Nile is flowing. Nabra, can you just say more about that? Because “the two lands” is continually referenced in this play.

Nabra: Yes, that’s because the Nile flows North. Upper Egypt is closer to the source. So, a lot of times those were two kingdoms, and then many pharaohs would unify the two kingdoms and become both the kings, the pharaohs of Upper and Lower Egypt. So, in this play, they are talking about one of the pharaohs who was the king of both Upper and Lower Egypt. They’re very proud of that and hence why they have to do things for both the rituals for both Upper and Lower Egypt and do them twice.

Marina: That makes sense, and I love that the ritual that we ended with is like the cake ritual that feels like I would like to be from the place that gets the cake ritual.

Nabra: Yes, we should have our own hippo cake ritual to celebrate one of these seasons. Will you make me a hippo cake?

Marina: I’d make you hippo basbousa using your grandma’s recipe.

Nabra: Hippo kunafa.

Marina: Yeah, I feel like that would be very hard to shape the cheese, but okay, back to The Triumph of Horus. So, a little bit about the history of the play. The Triumph of Horus is Myth C in the five texts of Edfu, which is the myth of Horus. So, these texts are all carved into the Temple of Edfu in hieroglyphs, and each scene of The Triumph of Horus has a corresponding relief depicting the events. It should definitely be noted that each of the placement of each of the scenes was calculated and significant, but the lack of wall space in the temple suggests that the version of the play depicted on the walls may be abridged from what would’ve typically been performed at the time.

The play was performed at the temple to a public audience as part of the annual Festival of Victory, which commemorated the wars between Horus and Seth and the coronation of a king of a unified Egypt and was celebrated at the new year. The actors would’ve been members of the temple priesthood. This carving is thought to be completed in approximately 110 BC during the reign of Ptolemy IX, but it is certain that the play was not composed at that time. It’s just not clear exactly when the play would’ve first appeared, but there is strong evidence to suggest that it was compiled at the latest in the late New Kingdom or around 1300 to 1200 BCE.

Nabra: There is significance, however, to its performance during the Ptolemaic period or when the Greeks ruled over Egypt and when the existing carving was created. Symbolically Seth was seen as a god of evil and symbolic of foreign lands, especially enemies of Egypt, and Horus as the royal god was highly symbolic of Egypt itself. So, performing this during the Ptolemaic reign would certainly be understood by native Egyptians as nationalist political propaganda, and the Ptolemaic rulers wouldn’t understand the symbolism or really the play as a whole since they didn’t understand the Egyptian language with the exception of Queen Cleopatra VI—yes, that Cleopatra—who was basically a genius and knew a bunch of languages, including Egyptian.

Remember she was ethnically Greek, not Egyptian. So, most Greeks, most Ptolemaic rulers did not know the Egyptian language. She is really the exception. For the powerful Egyptian priests, “Inwardly, very many of them must have resented foreign domination. There’s abundant evidence that the native temples were in reality centers of nationalism, and that one of the main tasks of the priesthood was to preserve and to fan the spirit of national pride of nationalism until the day came when once more the true Horus would sit on the throne. Mythology and the great annual rituals and festivals of kingship provided priests with ideal tools in their political nationalistic propaganda. Every Egyptian knew that in reality, Ptolemy was a foreigner, an enemy.” So the play would have been a political act that was fully understood by the Egyptian audience. That was a pretty epic quote, honestly, from Fairman, in my opinion. What’s further awesome is that there would have been very intentional audience participation that engaged the Egyptians in this political protest essentially. The call-and-response and the eating of the hippo cake, they were all big middle fingers to the colonizing rulers.

Marina: We imagined that the audience would’ve been incredibly invested in general because this play was staged as part of what was essentially the huge New Year’s Festival. So, there would be all types of festival activities occurring for five days. When the play came around, people were pumped. “All knew the story, all understood its significance, all were intensely excited and evolved. Hence, the greater audience of townsfolk did not simply watch and listen. They did not merely join and supplement the chorus. They were completely uninhibited and spontaneous.”

Everyone would’ve been drunk and feasting. They would be cheering on Horus and cursing Seth. Can I go to more plays with that vibe? So to stage this play today, “It’s essential that some attempt should be made to create the feeling that the audience and actors are one, that all are actors and participants, that all are deeply involved for only in this way can something of the atmosphere of the original play be recaptured.”

Nabra: As a practitioner of Theatre of the Oppressed and a playwright who’s really intentional about audience interaction and breaking the fourth wall and a director whose focus is community engagement, this whole concept really resonates with me. Interestingly, the language of the play was Middle Egyptian, which would have been archaic to audiences of the time, except for the elite priest actors, of course. It would’ve been even more foreign to them than Middle English is to us. For comparison, take for example, the first two line of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in as best as I can approximate, the original Middle English. “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, the droghte of March hath perced to the roote.”

We can understand the gist, but many of the words and pronunciations are too far from modern English to understand, but this would not be a problem for audiences since the story was so familiar to them. Today, The Triumph of Horus is significant because it’s a full play and because it’s an example of theatre being developed beyond liturgical or purely ritual drama, which is what we see for most other examples of ancient Egyptian drama.

Marina: I’m still impressed that she managed to work Middle English into this podcast today.

Nabra: That’s the extent of my Middle English. I don’t even know why I know those first two ones, but I try.

Marina: That was beautiful. Yeah, no, thank you. I mean, I don’t even really have a context for what Egyptian sounds like, let alone Middle Egyptian. So, it is just helpful to be able to think in our own ways about this.

Nabra: Apparently, the pronunciations in The Mummy movies are pretty accurate. They really consulted with an Egyptologist, fun fact.

Marina: What? That’s a wild fact. I have not yet seen The Mummy movies, because by the time that I would’ve seen them, I understood enough about orientalism to not want to.

Nabra: But they’re so fun though. They’re so fun.

Marina: From an Egyptian. You heard it here first.

Nabra: They’re so bad, but they’re so fun.

Marina: Amazing. I will check them out only to hear the Middle Egyptian in them, or just regular Egyptian.

Nabra: I don’t know what moment in Egyptian dialectical history it is, but it’s apparently pretty good.

All I’m saying is Horus and Osiris is the Christmas Carol of ancient Egypt, and I think that’s a pretty good parallel.  I stand by it

Marina: So while we have focused on one particular play up to this point, we now want to zoom out and give you an idea of ancient Egyptian theatre more broadly. Theatre in ancient Egypt was very different from what theatre looks like today. To begin with, there is nothing that an archeologist would identify as a theatre venue found in ancient Egypt. There are accounts of Egyptian ceremonial theatre, especially having to do with Osiris, recounted by classical authors. Herodotus, a Greek historian from the fifth century BCE, described a ceremony he observed thusly:

When the sun is getting low, a few only of the priests continues occupied about the image of the God, while the greater number armed with wooden clubs take their station at the portal of the temple. Opposite to them is drawn up a body of men in number above a thousand armed like the others with clubs. Consisting of persons engaged in the performance of their vows, the image of the god, which is kept in a small wooden shrine covered with plates of gold, is conveyed from the temple into a second sacred building the day before the festival begins. The few priests still in attendance upon the image place it together with the shrine containing it on a four-wheeled car and begin to drag it along. The others stationed at the gateway of the temple oppose its admission. Then the votaries come forward to espouse the quarrel of the God and set upon the opponents who are sure to offer resistance. A sharp fight with clubs ensues in which heads are commonly broken on both sides.

Apparently, no one would die in this ritualistic theatrical fight, although the “heads commonly broken on both sides” does give me pause, but it’s fascinating to hear a firsthand account of an example of ceremonial theatre in ancient Egypt.

Nabra: As with that example, there’s much debate about what in ancient Egypt was theatre versus ceremony versus ritual and when and if these distinctions are useful. From Fairman, “It has also been claimed that there must have been drama in ancient Egypt because so many rituals, festivals, and even the daily temple ritual itself incorporated so many dramatic elements. But there is nowhere any hint that these daily services were themselves conceived, planned, or acted as dramas. They were dramatizations of the episodes of daily life, but in no way were they plays.” Of course, this brings up the question more generally, what is theatre or drama or a play? We won’t get too far into that here, but I think you can certainly take these ceremonies to be drama in some form.

Fairman, in an attempt to describe one of the most ancient Egyptian dramatic texts discovered called the [Dramatic] Ramesseum Papyrus, which is more arguably not a play than The Triumph of Horus is, says, “It may possibly be better and cautiously defined as a politico-mythological compilation, incorporating certain dramatic elements which may perhaps have been derived from a drama now lost, or perhaps merely employing dialogue to reinforce the main argument.” If that is not the most academia-inspired definition you have ever heard, I don’t know what is. I’m sure it’s accurate. It just sounds ridiculous.

Marina: Nabra takes on the academy in one sentence.

So, how do we know what is a play in hieroglyphs? Well, there is simply some conjecture. In the Memphite theology, AKA the Shabaka Stone from the 700 BCE, arrows below names are thought to indicate dialogue between characters. So, for instance, there’s an arrow above the name Geb pointing to the right and an arrow above the name Horus pointing to the left, indicating that Geb said to Horus. This is a small tangent, but the Shabaka Stone is also political propaganda “in favor of Ptah of Memphis in opposition to the rising power and influence of Ra and the priesthood of Heliopolis.” So that gives you an idea of what political dramas were like back in the day.

Nabra: In some cases, we know it is a play because vertical lines and columns break up the text. In the Ramesseum Dramatic Papyrus from the Middle Kingdom, the whole text is written in 138 vertical columns, and there are thirty-one vignettes below the text. The Ramesseum Dramatic Papyrus, which we keep mentioning, is a ritual play for the jubilee of Senusret I. This text also mentions Osiris and Horus. That story is the most popular of ancient Egyptian myths and was told over and over again. I was trying to think of an equivalency today. Since I was writing the first draft of this episode on Christmas Eve and I had just been reading Christopher Durang’s play Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, the first example that came to mind was A Christmas Carol.

Marina: What a sentence, Nabra. Really putting disparate things in conversation here.

Nabra: All I’m saying is Horus and Osiris is the Christmas Carol of ancient Egypt, and I think that’s a pretty good parallel. I stand by it.

Marina: I love that.

So, other ancient Egyptian texts that could be considered as dramas are the Ritual of the Opening of the Mouth, which is a ritual drama with seventy-five scenes accompanied by relief vignettes.

Nabra: The Unas Ritual, a part of the pyramid texts found in the pyramid of King Unas of the Fifth Dynasty at Saqqara. This is a single ritual which can be described as a ritual drama carried out in the pyramid at night with only six officiants. It basically depicts the burial of the king and then his soul ascending to the sky.

Marina: The Abydos passion play was written on the Ikhernofret Stela, which is a stone carving written by the priest with the same name and was another ritual play, but this time depicting the slaying of Osiris by Seth and Osiris’s resurrection. It is from the nineteenth century BCE. and would’ve been staged at the Great Temple of Abydos during the annual festival associated with Osiris, which marked the time to plant new crops. I have to say, this play is taught at Stanford in one of the world theatre history classes as the oldest play that exists.

Nabra: In Étienne Drioton’s book, Le Théâtre dans l’Ancienne Egypte, he claims a series of other texts are fragments of dramas. He also made his own criteria for identifying dramatic works, saying, “The placing of the name of a speaker at the head of a speech, the presence of stage directions in the midst of dialogue, the general nature of the text, grammar, dialogue, and in general, a non-narrative style.” It seems reasonable to me and pretty well in line with contemporary drama, but of course this criteria is heavily argued by scholars, and there are examples of exceptions of course.

Marina: I mean, I personally like to think of performance capaciously. So, I think that we can really think of all of these things in different styles. But again, neither Nabra or I are Egyptologists, so we’re really also relying on different sources here for ourselves. So, here are some of the names of fragments of popular dramatic texts that were found, and there are some very clearly popular characters that you’ll notice here.

The Misfortunes of a Messenger of Horus, The Defeat of Apopis, Isis and The Seven Scorpions—Horus is bitten by a scorpion, which there are two of those—The Return of Seth, The Flight between Tut and Apopis, earlier versions of The Triumph of Horus, Horus Burning in the Desert, A Nightmare of Horus. So, all of those are possible dramas are in some way religious. This resonates with much ancient Greek theatre where gods were present in some way in those dramas as well.

Nabra: The nature of ancient Egyptian theatre certainly expands and questions modern concepts of what theatre is. There’s clearly much debate in the world of Egyptology as to what is or is not a play. Even The Triumph of Horus is debated. Although Fairman outlines a very robust argument as to why it is a play. He says, “First, in many places, the names of actors are placed before the words they have to speak. Second, the whole text is a series of speeches and songs without any narrative. Third, the presence of indubitable stage directions, which in grammatical form and in content differ from the rest of the text.” He even refers to competing hypotheses about the play as “brilliant and ingenious examples of mental gymnastics.” So, I think we can all just go ahead and consider The Triumph of Horus as theatre, although that is not the point of this podcast episode.

It’s been produced more than once. You can look up production images and information about the few modern productions, but a modern production will never capture the ritualistic aspects, the religious significance, or the important political undertones that the play had in its time. It’s a fascinating play that still entertains and educates today, and I recommend you give it a read or at least look into the reliefs that are incorporated into the script now that you have an idea of the plot and context of the piece.

I’m proud that Egyptians, who pioneered almost everything to be honest, were also pioneers of the theatre form, using it for entertainment, for community engagement, and for subversive political commentary.

Marina: This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of Kunafa and Shay and other HowlRound podcasts by searching HowlRound, or wherever you find podcasts. If you loved this podcast, please post a rating and write a review on your platform of choice. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content on the howlround.com website. Have an idea for an exciting podcast, essay, or TV event the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and contribute your ideas to the Commons.

Nabra Nelson and Marina: Yalla, bye!

 

The German theatre system has a lot of structural problems: it is defined by the demand for unlimited availability of all artists and employees by their theatre directors. The “theatre director” (Intendant) is by far the most powerful person in the German public theatre. As the artistic director and CEO in personal union, he is responsible for all major decisions in the theatre. He is an arbiter of fees and contracts, and an enabler of artistic development on and behind the stage; he serves several essential functions in one. Most directors are not specifically trained to fulfill the requirements of this function and also resist the temptations of power.

Most theatre directors no longer receive training. Any qualifications they may have received earlier in their careers have not equipped them for the multitude of complex and significant cultural shifts that have occurred.

Theatres are big employers and in smaller, especially East German cities, quite often on top of all local enterprises. There are between one hundred and one thousand employees working depending on the size of the theatre and the public funds given.

The absolute power of the director leads to a hierarchical theatre organization. Currently, everybody in the 140 public theatre companies works for the director, who excessively aims at developing his artistic profile and brand. The typical aim of a theatre director is to preserve and augment his power and, after a contractual period of about five years, to become elected to the next level in the hierarchy of theatres. The bigger the cities, the bigger the theatres, and Berlin is at the very top with eight state-run and dozens of smaller free and private theatre companies.

The abuse of power manifests in verbal discrimination, physical abuse, and a high gender pay gap of 34 percent in the artistic theatre professions. It also manifests in the glass ceiling that makes it difficult for women and people of color to get a position in top management. The number of women advancing into executive positions in theatres is still much too small. Taking into consideration the last fifty years, only 10 percent of all theatre productions invited to the renowned German Theater Meeting (Theatertreffen) were helmed by female directors.

The devaluation of women and people of color in the theatres is a structural problem in the German theatre industries. Numbers are not lying, they show that the slogans of inclusion and diversity are just marketing—the rest is pretending.

76 percent of all CEOs on top of the theatres are male and white, 24 percent are women. Only one out of 140 theater directors is a person of color. This low share is shameful for a country that has been open to immigration for more than seventy years and with a share of 28.7 percent of immigrants living and working in Germany in the second and third generation. This says a lot about a male power system in which women, and people of color can only reach top positions if they have sufficient connections to high-ranking members of the so-called Stage Association or other influential networks.

9.4 percent of women were affected by sexual assault, which was often disguised as offers of “help accelerating the artistic future” by offering a good role in an interesting production, where the artists could be seen by international casters, producers, and directors. In 37 percent of cases, the artists rejected this offer and suffered severe consequences: they were no longer cast, and when they wanted to leave the theatre for another company, the mostly male artistic directors called their male colleagues in other theatres and made sure that this “disobeying” artist could no longer get a job in the theatre business. This could be the end of the career.

At the very heart of every theatre there is a vast, dark tomb where all the dreams of its artists are buried. And the gravediggers were mostly the theatre directors.

82 percent of all mentioned cases of abuse and discrimination took place in full responsibility of male theatre directors, who were neither democratically selected for their position nor acting in the interests of their organization and employees. They have no code of ethics and/or do not work from a “good governance” perspective. Even though the abuse of power has led to the dismissal of five German theatre directors so far in the last three years, the problem is not solved. Most directors who committed discrimination and abuse of power will never be accused because the affected colleagues are afraid of losing their jobs.

There is another saying that at the very heart of every theatre there is a vast, dark tomb where all the dreams of its artists are buried. And the gravediggers were mostly the theatre directors.

I spoke personally with more than one hundred actresses, opera singers, and dancers who had to end their career, and even the best lawyers could not restore the lost reputation of these artists. You are “in or out”—forever.

The problem can’t be solved by dismissing an abusive director, because often the next male director, who was probably his assistant or colleague on a lower hierarchical level, has learnt to copy the “classical,” unethical behavior of their predecessors who are his role models.

The average theatre director is starting his career as an assistant, a scenic director, or dramaturg and is working his way through the institution. After about twenty-one years of service in the theatre landscape, one in thirty is reaching his goal and becoming elected as a director of one of the public theatres. On average, they are starting at the age of fifty-four as a theatre director in one of the thirty smaller and middle regional theaters. After one or two successful terms of about five years each, they usually become promoted to the next level, the so-called city theatre (“Stadttheater”), where they stay about another one to two terms of five years.

Theatre directors of city theatres are responsible for about three hundred to five hundred employees, and for a budget of about 30 million USD. Finally, the directors with the most outstanding artistic oeuvre are becoming rewarded with a post at one of the highly respected and outstanding metropolitan theatres.

My recommendations to address these issues are structural in nature. First and foremost is the democratization of the selection processes of new theatre directors, which includes a necessary psychological review with the question: are they humble and empathetic enough to lead people who dedicate their lives to the service of art? This kind of assessment exists only in Zurich, Switzerland. I would suggest codes of conduct to introduce ethical and fair, as well as diverse and inclusive, thinking and acting into theatres. Transparency between all levels and spheres should ensure that all important information and decision-making bases are available to everyone. And finally, participation should guarantee greater involvement of artists on the employee level in key decisions and in supervisory boards. In Ethical Theater, I propose transformation processes in the organization of the theatre, including breaking down its classical architectural barriers, making it more inviting for the public—theatre must be an open and inviting place. Finally, I suggest that employees and artists should also have voting power in board and management meetings and establish Ethics Councils that have the power to veto toxic decisions of the management and propose immediate measures for improvement. This would include great solidarity and collaboration between all artists in a theatre. I believe that these structural changes could significantly address the problems of abuse and discrimination within German theatre and open up a path to a kind of “theatre of the future.”