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The Shiraz Arts Festival: Western Avant-Garde Arts in 1970S Iran

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The Shiraz Arts Festival: Western Avant-Garde Arts in 1970S Iran Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon.2007.40.1.20 by guest on 26 September 2021 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE The Shiraz Arts Festival: Western Avant-Garde Arts in 1970s Iran GLOBAL CROSSINGS ABSTRACT Iran in the 1970s was host to an array of electronic music Robert Gluck and avant-garde arts. In the decade prior to the Islamic revolution, the Shiraz Arts Festival provided a showcase for composers, performers, dancers and theater directors from Iran and abroad, among them Iannis Xenakis, Peter uring the twilight years of Mohammed Reza The decision to establish a festi- Brook, John Cage, Gordon D Mumma, David Tudor, Karlheinz Shah Pahlavi’s reign in Iran, a panoply of avant-garde forms val that presented Western-oriented Stockhausen and Merce Cun- of expression complemented the rich, 2,500-year history of arts was fraught with potential con- ningham. A significant arts traditional Persian arts. Renowned musicians, dancers and flict. Iran boasted of openness to center, which was to include filmmakers from abroad performed alongside their Persian intellectual ideas and the social in- electronic music and recording peers at the annual international Shiraz Arts Festival. Elabo- tegration of women, but the state studios, was planned as an rate plans were developed for a significant arts center that was sharply curtailed internal political outgrowth of the festival. While the complex politics of the to include sound studios and work spaces for residencies. expression, unwittingly fostering Shah’s regime and the approach- Young Iranian composers and artists were inspired by the fes- the growth of a radical Islamic cler- ing revolution brought these tival to expand their horizons to integrate contemporary tech- ical opposition who would prove to developments to an end, a niques and aesthetics. Some subsequently traveled abroad for be offended by festival program- younger generation of artists continued the festival’s legacy. further study. Although the 1979 Islamic Revolution marked ming. The opulence of the court the end of institutions sustaining the avant-garde and schol- was on full display throughout the arships for international study, creative expression sparked by 11 years of events, highlighting the the festival has continued in cinema and other arts. economic distress of the general populace. Nonetheless, the creative activity featured at the fes- tival reflected the most forward-looking international efforts, FOUNDING OF THE SHIRAZ ARTS FESTIVAL presenting Iran to the world as pioneering and open. A central goal of Pahlavi rule throughout the 20th century was modernization and industrialization, while still maintaining independence from other nations, particularly Great Britain EXPERIENCES OF WESTERN and the Soviet Union [1]. Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi PERFORMERS AND ATTENDEES hoped to ground his independence and authority in three as- For visiting artists, the Shiraz Arts Festival offered a remark- sertions: secular rule, Pahlavi political hegemony and conti- able experience. Merce Cunningham Dance Company nuity with the ancient, pre-Islamic Persian Empire. In 1967, (MCDC) dancers Carolyn Brown and Valda Setterfield recall the Shah crowned himself Emperor and his wife Empress, their 1972 visit as a “unique . wonderful unforgettable ad- thereby securing her right of succession. The upcoming venture” [3] and as “heady and thrilling” [4]. Gordon Mumma 2,500th anniversary (1971) of the conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian empire, provided a rationale for an international cultural event at the ruins of Fig. 1. Empress Farah greets John Cage and Merce Cunningham Persepolis, the ancient pre-Islamic royal seat. at the 1972 festival. (Photo courtesy of Cunningham Dance The Shiraz Arts Festival began in 1967 as a showcase for the Foundation Archive) royal court, especially Empress Farah Diba, a former archi- tectural student, who convened each year’s events. Musician Gordon Mumma remembers her as “an extraordinary woman of considerable worldly knowledge” [2]. National Iranian Ra- dio and Television (NIRT), also founded in 1967, served as fes- tival sponsor. Sharazad (Afshar) Ghotbi, a violinist and wife of NIRT director Reza Ghotbi, was named musical director. Pro- gramming reflected Empress Farah’s Western-leaning, con- temporary tastes (Fig. 1). Robert Gluck (educator), University at Albany, PAC 312, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12208, U.S.A. E-mail: <[email protected]>. Article Frontispiece. Valda Setterfield of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in a 1968 performance of Rainforest with Andy Warhol–designed pillows. Rainforest, with the same pillows, was performed as part of Shiraz Event at the Shiraz Arts Festival in 1972. (Photo courtesy James Klosky) ©2007 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 20–28, 2007 21 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon.2007.40.1.20 by guest on 26 September 2021 calls it “one of the most extraordinary cul- “Persepolis was absolutely filled with sol- sented Nuits, a choral work dedicated tural experiences of my life.” Setterfield’s diers with rifles. They seemed to appear to political prisoners, some named and memories of Shiraz include: out of the woodwork at every corner. “thousands of forgotten ones whose There was a real sense of wariness and names are lost” [8], and in 1969 pre- drinking watermelon juice for breakfast, danger. You looked at something ex- sented the percussion work Persephassa, huge insects buzzing around and drown- GLOBAL CROSSINGS ing in the swimming pool, the heat of the traordinary, old and beautiful, and sud- commissioned by the festival and Office ground being too much to walk to the denly you would see the soldiers.” Merce de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française pool without shoes. The nearby market Cunningham discovered that pillows (ORTF). Persephassa links cross-cultural was wonderful, filled with the sound of used in the Persepolis performance legends of the Greek goddess Perseph- metal pots being beaten into shape and “were in a room full of machine guns” one. Xenakis’s third and final work for mysterious things to eat. When the sun went down, everything smelled like roses. [6]. the festival was the commissioned multi- media extravaganza Polytope de Persépolis, An elite audience converged on the which premiered at the Persepolis ruins festival. Mumma points out that “the cost PROGRAMMING on 26 August 1971. Xenakis describes the of admission was not only money, but also The Shiraz Arts Festival always included work as security clearance.” A 1976 column in traditional music from around the world. Tehran Journal mixed criticism and gos- The 1967–1970 programming included visual symbolism, parallel to and domi- sip: “the Empress [appeared] in a multi- Indian sitarist Ustad Vilayat Khan, Amer- nated by sound . correspond[ing] to a rock tablet on which hieroglyphic or colored velvet siren suit that quite ican violinist Yehudi Menuhin, numer- cuneiform messages are engraved. outshone most of the ladies’ gowns” [5]. ous Persian classical musicians and artists, The history of Iran, fragment of the Brown recalls that the audience “ap- a Balinese gamelan ensemble, the Sen- world’s history, is thus elliptically and ab- peared far more interested in looking at egalese National Ballet and perform- stractly represented by means of clashes, explosions, continuities and under- the Queen and her entourage than at the ances of the Persian passion play ta’ziyeh ground currents of sound [8]. dancing,” but Mumma found the audi- (“mourning” or “consolation”) portray- ence to be serious and interested: “There ing the founding of Shi’a Islam [7]. Critic James Harley describes Polytope were none of the aggressive arguments Ta’ziyeh, banned under the Shah’s father, de Persépolis as “unrelenting in its density about ‘that isn’t music’ stuff that we often influenced avant-garde Western theatri- and continuously evolving architecture” encountered elsewhere.” cal directors Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski [9]. Security was tight, as Mumma notes: and Joseph Chaikin (who brought The Xenakis scholar Sharon Kanach re- “In Persepolis each of us was given a Open Theatre [Fig. 2]). Visiting dance constructs the scene as follows: ‘guide’ (read ‘guard’) dressed in a West- companies included Merce Cunningham ern suit with a tie and jacket. The pri- in 1972 and Maurice Bejart in 1976. The audience was placed in the ruins of mary jacket function was to conceal their The Western composer most closely Darius’s Palace and was able to move freely between the six listening stations weapons. We traveled in Iranian mili- associated with the Shiraz Arts Festival placed within these ruins. Each station tary aircraft.” Setterfield remembers: was Iannis Xenakis, who in 1968 pre- had eight speakers, one for each track. The one-hour spectacle began in total darkness with a “geological prelude” of Fig. 2. Performance of Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater at the 1971 excerpts from Xenakis’s first electro- Shiraz Arts Festival. Still image taken from a Pars Video documentary. acoustic work, Diamorphoses (1957). Im- mediately afterwards, on the mountain facing the site, two gigantic bonfires are lit, projector lights sweep the night sky, and two red laser beams scan the ruins. Then, several groups of children appear carrying torches and proceed to climb to the summit, towards the bonfires, out- lining in scintillating light the mountain’s crest. Suddenly, the groups of children disperse and climb down the mountain in constellation-like figures (Color Plate E) and finally congregate between the two tombs where their torches spell out in Persian “we bear the light of the earth,” a phrase by Xenakis. One last out- burst and the 150 torch-bearers run past the ravine and disappear through the crowd into the forest [10]. The new work faced mixed reactions. The Empress and NIRT liked it enough to offer Xenakis a further commission for the design of a proposed art center. How- ever, some Iranian critics, sensitive to the legacy of Western hegemony in Iran, as- sociated Greek composer Xenakis’s torch spectacle with the burning of Persepolis by Alexander the Great [11] or suggested that the symbolism could be interpreted as the actions of Nazi brownshirts [12].
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