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New York, February 25, 2012 – Six successful years of festival
production has been an adventure for New York-based not-for-profit, Persian
Arts Festival, Inc. (PAF), an organization devoted to providing a platform for
Persian artists and visionaries. Thursday, March 22nd marks PAF’s 6th
Annual Festival as they join forces with City Lore, Bowery Arts + Sciences and
other NYC-based groups and Persian cultural organizations to present a New Year
extravaganza, free to the public, featuring NYC’s POEMobile, poetry, music and
film against the beautiful cityscape of DUMBO, Brooklyn.
“Norooz”, literally translated as
“New Day” in Farsi, is a holiday celebrated around the Spring Equinox by
Persians, Kurds, Turks, Afghans, Tajiks, Parsis, and other ethnic
communities. In 2006, when PAF first
entered the scene with its inaugural multi-media festival, the impact on the community
was established when Mayor Bloomberg declared a City of New York Proclamation
announcing March 19th as the official “Norooz” NYC holiday and acknowledged the
Persian Arts Festival’s commitment to promoting the Persian culture’s
captivating arts and traditions.
The evening of March 22, 2012 at VII
Photo Gallery begins at 7:00pm with a film viewing of Niloufar Talebi’s The Persian Rite of Spring:
the Story of Nowruz, followed by a performance art piece titled, “The
Metamorph” by Aphrodite Desiree Navab,
who, through her theatrical performance will explore the symbolism,
inevitability and beauty of the rite of spring. The evening will then dive into
its main attraction: 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 surrounding buildings. The final act will be a musical performance by Middle East-meets-country-rock
band, Vatan.
Norooz not only marks the
rejuvenation of the earth but it also allows people to gather and share in
their unique traditions. New York is the
perfect city for the occasion, and the Persian Arts Festival Norooz Celebration
is the place to usher in the spring season with outstanding Persian traditional
and contemporary arts and culture.
About the 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 worlds 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. PAF thanks this year’s music
performance sponsor: Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA). Other promotional sponsors include New York
University Persian Club, Persian Mirror, Columbia Iranian Students Association,
Shabeh Jomeh, Network of Iranian Professionals of New York (NIPONY), Association
of Iranian American Writers (AIAW), Oznoz Entertainment. For more info, go to www.persianartsfestival.org.
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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. 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. For more info, go to www.twitter.com @POEMobile or www.citylore.org.
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 poets at the 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. Bowery Arts + Science,
Ltd. is grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for its New York
City Cultural Innovation Fund award.
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Contact: Mona Kayhan (917) 406-3080, mona.kayhan@gmail.com
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