Speaker
Description
This paper will analyse the intersection between the hidden crisis and Javaad Alipoor and Chris Thorpe’s play Things Hidden Since the Foundation of The World (2022). Alipoor brings to the stage the story of Fereydoun Farrokhzad, a pop singer famous in Iran in the 1970s, albeit not universally known. His life took a tragic turn following the Khomeini revolution, forcing him into exile in Germany, where he was tragically murdered in his apartment on 7 August 1992.
Revolutions, by their very nature, are crises that resonate throughout society. Through multimedia tools, Alipoor engages the audience in multileveled intertwined crises, including the refugee crisis, homelessness crisis, gender roles crisis, political crisis and the crisis of murder.
Alipoor employs multimedia dramaturgy to portray the fragmentation of individual and collective memories. This paper addresses hidden crises portrayed in the play. By focusing on unignorable crises, it aims to illustrate themes of fragmented information, inequality, the suffering of subaltern groups, trauma and murder. Drawing from Vicky Angelaki’s work, Social and Political Theatre in 21st Century Britain Staging Crisis (2017) and Lauren Berlant’s term “crisis ordinariness”. Alipoor indicates common narratives of crisis in the world. He articulately asserts that the path to healing from these crises lies in the arts, within the transformative power of theatre.
| Keywords | Things Hidden Since the Foundation of The World, Javaad Alipoor, Chris Thorpe, crisis |
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| mesut.gunenc@gmail.com |