Emruz Festival

May 1st:

A night rooted in Iranian and Afghan Traditional Music

1) Of Roots and Colors is a concert-length musical project that explores the cultural geography of Greater Iran through sound, memory, and shared musical lineage. Drawing on regional repertoires from Khorasan and Tajikistan in the northeast, to Fars in central Iran, and the Bakhtiari, Luri, and Kurdish traditions of the Zagros mountains, the project asks: how do music and oral tradition preserve historical connections across regions, languages, and borders, even as political boundaries shift?

At its core, this work treats music as a living archive. Each piece reflects a distinct regional identity—mode, rhythm, poetic language—while revealing deep structural and aesthetic affinities that point to common roots. By placing these traditions in dialogue within a single performance, Of Roots and Colors highlights both cultural continuity and difference, inviting the audience to hear Iran not as a monolith, but as a vibrant, plural soundscape shaped by centuries of exchange.

The project comes to life through carefully curated arrangements that respect the integrity of each tradition while allowing for subtle interaction among them. The performance unfolds as a journey from east to west, with spoken contextual framing that situates each musical segment historically and culturally. Improvisation plays a key role, echoing the oral transmission practices central to these traditions and allowing the musicians’ lived experiences to shape the performance in real time.

Inspired by ethnomusicological research, fieldwork, and long-term engagement with regional musicians, Of Roots and Colors is envisioned as both an artistic and educational experience—one that fosters listening across difference and re-centers music as a bridge between communities, histories, and shared cultural memory.

Performers:
Sirvan Manhoobi: Oud
Roxana Sarrafi: Vocalist
Mehrpouya Daneshvar: Clarinet

2) And the Mountains Echoed will be a live, intimate performance centered on the Afghan rubab, inspired by the themes of memory, separation, and enduring connection explored in And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini. Rather than retelling the novel’s narrative, the project will translate its emotional and psychological landscapes into sound—using music to explore how love, loss, and responsibility echo across generations and geographies.

Rooted in Pashto folk and Afghan classical traditions, the performance will unfold through a series of improvisational movements. Melodic fragments will emerge, repeat, and transform, mirroring the way memories are carried, reshaped, and preserved over time. The rubab will function as both melodic and rhythmic storyteller, with its sympathetic strings and natural decay allowing resonance and silence to become active compositional elements.

The work will emphasize restraint and intimacy. Space, breath, and stillness will be treated as core musical tools, inviting deep listening and reflection from the audience. Subtle rhythmic frameworks inspired by Afghan and Hindustani forms will support the melodic arc without overpowering it, ensuring the rubab remains the central narrative voice.

Presented within Emruz Festival’s Tapestries of Freedom series, And the Mountains Echoed will frame freedom as emotional and artistic openness—the freedom to hold complexity, to honor inherited traditions while allowing them to evolve, and to let a historical instrument speak vulnerably and honestly in the present. The performance will offer audiences a contemplative sonic space where personal and collective histories quietly resonate with one another.

Performers:
SAHEL: Rubab
Shraman: Sitar
Milan: Tabla

3) A contemporary exploration of Persian music through original compositions and reimagined traditional material. Drawing from classical Persian forms, regional influences, and contemporary compositional approaches, the program moves fluidly between intimate acoustic textures and more expansive ensemble writing. The music is shaped through varied instrumentation and evolving arrangements, allowing melodic modes, rhythmic structures, and timbral colors to unfold in multiple dimensions.

Santur serves as the central voice of the performance, acting as a traditional instrument and a contemporary sound, interacting with a flexible ensemble that may include strings, winds, percussion, electronic elements, or voice. Improvisation plays a key role, creating moments of spontaneity and dialogue between musicians while maintaining a clear compositional framework.

Performers:
Hamidreza Maleki: Santour
Behfar Bahadoran: Tar
Parisa Karimi: Kamancheh

May 2:

This evening of theater brings together three distinct works—a musical reading, a short play reading, and a fully staged theatrical piece—each exploring themes of displacement, survival, and hope.

1) The night begins with a musical reading that blends storytelling and song to set the emotional tone.

2) It is followed by a reading of Longest War by Humaira Ghilzai, where two best friends, Nargis and Pari, stay connected across 7,000 miles through a fragile WhatsApp call, navigating life in America and Kabul under Taliban rule.

3) The evening culminates in KISMET, a two-person, actor-driven play about a Turkish immigrant couple who unexpectedly find themselves on stage and begin performing their own journey from Istanbul to the U.S.–Mexico border. Using minimal props and direct address, the piece moves between humor and heartbreak as it asks what it means to start over. Together, these works offer a powerful, multi-form portrait of migration, identity, and resilience.

May 3:

An evening of theater and music offering distinct yet resonant theatrical forms—a modular, multilingual experimental piece and a myth-based storytelling performance—each interrogating power, truth, and the politics of knowledge.

1) Ceasefire Later! is a choreopoem built entirely from found and verbatim text, tracing the narratives and propaganda surrounding the genocide in Gaza after October 7, 2023. Structured in modules of varying lengths and performed in an order determined by the audience, the piece unfolds as a fragmented collage of social media, interviews, movement, and song, resisting a fixed timeline and conventional theatrical form.

2) Following, a solo piano performance.

3) Concluding the night with Testament of Bondar Bidakhsh by Bahram Beyzaie reimagines a Persian myth through the lens of naqqāli, with two storytellers offering competing accounts of a king and his vizier. As Bondar’s invention—a world-seeing chalice meant for collective knowledge—becomes a tool of power and control, the audience is positioned as witness and judge. Drawing parallels to contemporary technologies like AI and surveillance, the piece explores who owns knowledge and how it is used. Together, these works create a layered dialogue between past and present, form and fragmentation, storytelling and truth.

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Host or Publisher Brooklyn Art Haus