One afternoon, in my New York era, I was eating at a Chinese food court out in Flushing with two of my best friends. As usual, we ordered an ambitious range of foods, including buckwheat noodles in chili oil, pickled potatoes, gelatinous beef tendon, and lamb face. At one of the stalls, a man used a cleaver to cut through a heap of chives for dumplings. I treasure memories like this one; I mean, I’m thinking about my younger days, sure, but also the range of experiences, cuisines, information, and conversation that made up my daily life. New York is, or was, a city where so many things are available. The city’s collection of individuals and items that were, let’s say, on the move, far from home, trying to get to some other place or state—that was a special cocktail.
While we sat eating at a long table, an older man nearby started chatting with us, or we started chatting with him—probably first about the food. (I am informed that he also had a pound of raw tuna, as a grocery purchase, that sat out on the table the entire time.) Eventually this man volunteered information about his experience working with some art festivals in Iran.
As best my two friends and I can piece together our conversation retroactively, this man worked on operas. I don’t think any of us recall what he actually did, or how many of these festivals he attended, but he held opinions about the Shah (well-intentioned if corrupt), and at one point he was trying to get to the festival in Iran from where he was staying in West Germany, but he couldn’t fly, so he drove from one country to the other. At the time, I didn’t have slightest idea about any of these festivals, but as I’ve learned a little about them over the years, I have always wished I could go back and listen to that man speak some more.
From 1967 until 1977, every summer, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi sponsored a festival in the city of Shiraz, which invited figures from the Western avant-garde to rub elbows with representatives of the arts, including traditional music and performance, from across the continent of Asia and other parts of the world. Classical forms featured alongside novel aesthetic and technological practices in very long days and nights of all kinds of performance in settings that were sometimes modern, sometimes ancient. Traditional dance and performance arts from nations all over the globe, plus Max Roach, Shuji Terayama, Andre Gregory, Martha Argerich: the variety is impressive. The festivals gave a larger public stage for Persian performance arts, as well.
Why Shiraz? The organizers wanted a location away from Tehran, reportedly, and the venues of the city’s environs (including the ruins of Persepolis) provided a range of attractive options. The events were a shrewd public relations attempt to foster a cosmopolitan face and perhaps redirect attention from discontent among the populace. Attendees and audiences were relatively socially elite, and security was heavy. The government also supported young Iranian artists who attended the festivals, like Dariush Dolat-shahi, to study and travel abroad. In fact, in the late 1970s, there were tentative (and unsuccessful) plans to have an exchange program between the US and Iran; Chou Wen-Chung, of Columbia University, said (I’m quoting from an article by Robert Gluck):
“The Center would have been something quite exciting. It was to be broadly based around music in the context of cultural exchange between the two countries. Iranian scholars and composers would come to the United States to interact with their American counterparts and be exposed to more advanced studies in terms of compositional principles and technology. There was interest on both sides for it to include electronic music. My interest on behalf of Columbia University was to send American musicians and scholars to research Persian music in Iran, not just ethnomusicology, but also looking to the future of their music.”
Along similar lines, Iannis Xenakis in his years of collaboration with the festival suggested a more permanent “Center for the Arts” which would be a site of cross-pollination for all the various arts—performance, plastic, literary—as well as scientific research, open to all interested participants.
For years I’ve gleaned what I could, just here and there, about these festivals (and I’m citing the sources I’ve kept or bookmarked here, throughout). Vali Mahlouji has curated exhibitions that reflect on this “melting pot of traditional and avant-garde music, theatre and performance, [featuring] artists from both East and West, including the Beatles’ muse, sitar player Ravi Shankar and American composer John Cage, alongside Rwandan drummers and Balinese Gamelan musicians and dancers.” Retrospectives for the film work of Peter Brook, Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, and Luis Buñuel played to large crowds, as did newer films and surveys of Japanese masters and the footage shot by Jean Rouch. In 1976 the film theme covered depictions of “the East” and included Cooper and Schoedsack’s Grass, Ray’s Devi, Duras’ India Song, Rossellini’s India matri bhumi, Paradjanov’s The Color of Pomegranates, Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Pharoah, Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy (or Night of Counting the Years), Pasolini’s 1001 Nights, Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia, and Shengelaia’s Pirosmani—among others! (These titles, and other information throughout here, I gleaned from Mahasti Afshar’s useful report, “Festival of the Arts: Shiraz-Persepolis,” commissioned by the Asia Society.) Major names in Western theatre and performance, like Joseph Chaikin and Jerzy Grotowski, drew upon their encounters with non-Western performance at the festival.
Contrasted with the monotony of streamlined, screen-dominated Content, or perhaps the somewhat different monotony of various chic “scenes” and “markets,” this kind of slightly messy and ambitious and public programming seems, to me, almost like a lost paradise. See how this differs from our current model of a market economy based around attention: “everything” is permitted, seemingly “nothing” inaccessible, and yet “everything” is the same, a tired retread, conventional, bored, tired, depressive (evil). My gut feeling is that for a cultural environment to be healthy, in terms of the arts, it’s not enough for everything to be at one’s fingertips (at the ready via a content kiosk); there needs to be a human element that provides some momentum and some unfamiliarity. Accounts of Shiraz incorporate a charming and palpable sense of strangeness and uncertainty. Cyrus Kadivar writes: “In another part of the dimly-lit room are three cube-shaped television monitors each providing rare colour footage of some of the performances: a crowd of startled Qashqa’i boys and girls express their shock and delight as semi-naked Africans dance in a circle; a bare-footed Indonesian woman in costume swirling against the bas-reliefs of Persian soldiers in Darius’s army; a group of traditional Iranian wrestlers flexing their muscles to the solo chant and drumming of one of their own.”
Of course, state and public rhetoric about the festival should be taken with a grain of salt; it should go without saying that we can also “problematize” and “unpack” some of the assumptions built into the East-West dynamics. The scholar Houman Zandizadeh explicates some of the problems inherent in these activities in an informative slide lecture video, “Peter Brook’s Orghast: Artistourism & the Politics of the State.” In short, Zanzizadeh argues that cross-pollinations often involve relations that are not reciprocal, and we should be on guard for those imbalances particularly where the official rhetoric highlights this presumed reciprocity. Zanzizadeh demonstrates an additional layer to the more widely discussed problems of cultural appropriation, which is the internal sanction of this activity: an elite body providing funding, platform, and approval for the visiting artist come to sample local culture. Many of the celebrity participants came to Shiraz for little or no money, drawn more by the prestige of the event than by compensation; diplomatic sources funded travel for many foreign visitors. Ticket sales provided some partial revenue but the festival operated more like a public relations investment (or a loss leader). There’s also the role of patronage, which we can read as funding but also as a special type of curation, just on a larger scale. Our present moment is aware of the values of curation, but we tend to shy away from the open acknowledgment patronage, perhaps because everyone wants to demonstrate they are more democratic and independent than they actually are.
With strong patronage, though, a public may be treated to delights and curiosities they would otherwise not.
The ruins of Darius’ palace Persepolis provided the site for Xenakis’ controversial 1971 piece Polytope de Persépolis, one of the experiments in space, sound, light, and architecture he ventured under that name, ‘polytope.’ For over an hour, the audience could walk around and listen to music from six listening stations (each equipped with eight speakers), and a lightshow involving lasers, choreographed children bearing torches, spotlights, reflective aluminum, fireworks, and more. This performance was not Xenakis’ first at Shiraz (in fact he was among the most prominent artists involved in the festival for its early years), but as a political gesture Polytope de Persépolis prompted some discomfort from onlookers concerned by perceptions of European imperialism or even fascism. Cultural or religious disapproval of some of these experiments in avant-garde cross-pollination commingled with more ostensibly aesthetic rejections from the population, whether attendees or simply those who reacted to news about the events. (Gluck’s article cites an Iranian businessman who concluded, “Stockhausen was impossible”: a musical bridge too far for that taste formation.)
It was later in the 1970s, in what turned out to be the last several years of the festival, when political pressures caused many Western participants, including Xenakis and members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, to demur from their ongoing attendance at the festival in light of the Shah’s policies. The magnificence that sparked such a cosmopolitan fire for those few earlier years gave way to avoidance, collapsed plans, and cooling relations. Indeed, scholars and critics have approached the Shiraz Arts Festival as a case study in the creaky imbalances of an unequal society poised between an “open” and “forward-thinking” paternalistic elite and a much larger disenfranchised population.
For years now I have had this background interest in all the exhibitions and experiments and frictions of Shiraz, all because of a wonderful chance encounter with this guy at a lunch table in Flushing. Maybe I’ve come across the guy’s name or even his picture in my casual research, and not even realized it.
The salient point about all this is that the cosmopolitanism of these festivals seems to have been partial, compromised, imperfect—and dazzling. And I’m not sure that cosmopolitanism, like a dream spread like samizdat among dreamers, can ever really be robust and organic and long-lasting and grand. It may be that cosmopolitan cultures are, as Dave Hickey said, “like teenage bands”: they coalesce only “so they can fall apart.”
If you’re curious to see a documentary account of one of the earlier festivals, do check out Tony Williams and Mahmoud Khosrowshahi’s 22-minute Sound the Trumpets Beat the Drums (1969).
Great post. As an Iranian, I really like to know more about the festival. Also there is a documentary by Francois Reichenbach which parts of it are available here:
http://pixdimension.com/Shiraz.html