Norooz Celebration
MARCH 22, 2012
7pm-11pm
VII Gallery | 28 Jay Street | DUMBO Brooklyn

Bowery Arts + Science and City Lore
in collaboration with the Persian Arts Festival Present:

Bowery Arts + Science, City Lore and Persian Arts Festival ring in the Persian New Year in DUMBO, Brooklyn with contemporary literary and musical performances that will delight all ages and backgrounds.  Come together and celebrate the wealth and beauty of Persian art and culture this Norooz!

Featuring:

• Multi-media performances by poets on the subjects of life, death, homeland and love. Poets include Roger Sedarat, Sara Goudarzi, Amir Parsa and Kaveh Bassiri. Poems will be projected in Persian morphing into English translations from the roof of the POEMobile, a hand-painted truck and traveling cinema of words, onto DUMBO’s buildings and streets surrounding VII Gallery!

• Film viewing of Niloufar Talebi’s The Persian Rite of Spring: the story of Nowruz. Clips  available for viewing here.

• Musical performance by Middle East-meets-Brooklyn band, Vatan.

• Performance Art, titled “The Metamorph”, by Aphrodite Desiree Navab: Through her performances, photographs and writings, Aphrodite explores the symbolism, inevitability and beauty of the rite of Spring.

Bowery Arts + Science, Ltd. is grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for its New York City Cultural Innovation Fund award.

Sponsors:
Music performance is sponsored by Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA).  Promotional sponsors include Columbia Iranian Students Association (CISA) Shabeh Jomeh, Network of Iranian Professionals of New York (NIPONY), Association of Iranian American Writers (AIAW), Oznoz Entertainment.

About Persian Arts Festival:

Founded in 2005, the Persian Arts Festival (PAF) is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to showcasing the magnificence and diversity of Persian art and culture through its voices, artists and visionaries. PAF brings local and global communities together to support these artists and explore one of the world’s most ancient and rich civilizations. The festival gives audiences of all ages and traditions the chance to discover new Persian voices and celebrate established ones. Areas represented at previous events have included fine art, music, film, comedy, family activities and literary. The Persian Arts Festival is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). NYFA is a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt organization founded in 1971 to work with the arts community throughout New York State to develop and facilitate programs in all disciplines.

About the POEMobile:

This performance is one in a series of poetry events composing A White Wing Brushing the Building, a Bowery Arts + Science and City Lore project highlighting the poetry of New York City’s ethnic communities and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Grant. The project will focus on the poetry of 8 cultural communities in New York in 2011 and 8 in 2012, with the majority of the events happening during the summer. The titular “white wing” is taken from a poem by Martín Espada and refers to the projections of the poems that are integral part of the project as well as the live poetry readings which will happen in each of the communities.

To date, White Wing has hosted projections and poetry performances in the languages of the Lower East Side (Yiddish, Ukrainian, Spanish, and Cantonese) at the New Museum’s Festival of New Ideas and new work by Native American poets at the American Indian Community House and by Greek at Federation of Hellenic Societies in Astoria. Additional 2011collaborating communities included Mexican, Haitian, and Nuyorican; the POEMobile also appeared at the 2011 Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival. The events are stand alone programs but unified by the common elements of the poetry projections, which will reach the city’s neighborhoods—its storefronts, its basketball courts, its warehouse walls—from the POEMobile. http://twitter.com/#!/POEMobile

About The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its Exiles, edited by Sholeh Wolpe.Publication Date: February 1, 2012
During the 1979 revolution, Iranians from all walks of life, whether Muslim, Jewish, Christian, socialist, or atheist, fought side-by-side to end one tyrannical regime, only to find themselves in the clutches of another. When Khomeini came to power, freedom of the press was eliminated, religious tolerance disappeared, women’s rights narrowed to fit within a conservative interpretation of the Quran, and non-Islamic music and literature were banned. Poets, writers, and artists were driven deep underground and, in many cases, out of the country altogether. This moving anthology is a testament to both the centuries-old tradition of Persian poetry and the enduring will of the Iranian people to resist injustice. The poems selected for this collection represent the young, the old, and the ancient. They are written by poets who call or have called Iran home, many of whom have become part of a diverse and thriving diaspora. http://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Poems-Iran-its-Exiles/dp/1611860342