MARIA MELCHIORRE
Staff Writer
Students, faculty and community members gathered in a Fenton lecture hall on the cold, dark, windy night of Nov. 14. Everyone was speaking in hushed tones of the uncertainty and confusion over what was currently unfolding an ocean away from that room. People were obsessively checking Twitter and Reddit feeds on their phones, waiting for updates.
Enter Mahmood Karimi-Hakak, wearing the universal artist-intellectual’s uniform of a black turtleneck and black pants. He took the stage and the din of confusion and concern quieted as focus was directed towards him. Karimi-Hakak was giving a speech, as a part of the Convocation series, titled “Peacebuilding through the Arts: Shakespeare in Iran and the U.S.”
“Humanity is living in one of its darkest periods in history,” said Karimi-Hakak. “This darkness is more apparent than ever, from beheadings by ISIS, to bombing Iraq, to what we’re hearing about just tonight in Paris as well as the racial tensions we are seeing in Missouri,” he continued, “because there are no longer any borders.”
Does this vast expanse of borderless communication make us more vulnerable or responsible? Peacebuilding requires cultural understanding, and the arts are really the best way to achieve cultural understanding. Karimi-Hakak advocates that artists use their work as a means of cultural communication to peacebuilding. However, quoting the Persian aphorism that such a venture is impossible, like carrying water in a sieve, he stated that it is the artist’s job to struggle, to challenge the impossible.
“During the Shah’s time (in Iran in the late ‘90s), our job as artists was the fight the tyranny of a dictator — we learned about peacebuilding, we learned about agitating the public,” said Karimi-Hakak. “After the revolution, one dictator was replaced by the other and my colleagues and I continued to use art as a means to agitation.”
In 1999 Karimi-Hakak staged a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Clips from a documentary about the production were shown with haunting passages from that well-known play made far more lyrical through translation into Persian. The play was eventually raided and shut down. Karimi-Hakak was forced to leave the country after many court appearances and a threat directed at his wife and young daughters.
“Perhaps agitation may not work as the best tools for bringing people together. Maybe cultural understanding could do it,” he stated about what he learned from the experience.
Enter Ralph Blasting, current dean of Fredonia’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, former dean of Liberal Arts at Sienna College in Albany where Karimi-Hakak is a professor. In 2010, Blasting worked as the dramaturg on a production with Karimi-Hakak titled HamletIRAN. The idea was that of placing Hamlet within the Iranian Green movement, which emerged after the apparent vote fraud that reelected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency in 2009.
This movement eventually triggered the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, leading to similar movements in Greece and eventually inspiring, in part, the Occupy Wall Street movement and all of its extensions. A famous haiku poem of the green movement, translated to English, reads simply “where is my vote?”
Kirimi-Hakak and Blasting collaborated to create a production in which Hamlet’s pursuit of the truth and his receiving of all testimonies in the case of his father’s death, is putting forth the concept of a grassroots democracy. Each citizen, one vote.
Karimi-Hakak stated that when he was young he realized “that art can be used as entertainment, as a happy way of releasing the tension, or as a political tool, in which case it will create the tension.” An artist’s job is to be an agent of change, to hold up a mirror to society.
“Politicians cannot bridge that gap,” he said. “We know academics cannot bridge that gap, now perhaps is the time for artists. But we cannot do that without you, the audience. What you think of as you walk out of the building, that is what theater is.”