BODY AND SOUL: Kayhan Irani: stories from the waters of memory

Kayhan Irani (photo: Jehangir Irani)

 

Kayhan, dark hair and dark eyes, sits sideways on a bench. Her arms are folded as they rest across the back the bench. She is looking slightly off camera to someone as if she's in conversation.

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Kayhan Irani--writer, performer, artivist, mother--finds herself  aswirl in a constellation of stories, savoring books by writers of color whose values point the way to a positive future. Come be inspired by Irani's beautiful talk on the textures of memory and how stories help us re-weave community.

Listen to the podcast episode here.

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Read below for more about my special guest, Kayhan Irani!

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

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Kayhan Irani performs There is a Portal in Philadelphia (photo: Aidan Un)

Kayhan, standing on a dark stage with eyes shut. She is in profile and a spotlight illuminates her face and chest. Her left arm is lifted up above her head, palm closed as if holding something. Her lips are slightly as she exhales.

BIO: I am Kayhan Irani, a writer, a performer, a cultural organizer, and a Theater of the Oppressed Joker. For the past twenty I have used the tools of participatory theater and storytelling, internationally and in the US, to develop grassroots leaders and seed transformative change. I make art that brings people together to deepen our relationships to each other through story. Performance as conversation, as memory, as a way to return to ourselves what we have disregarded. My current project, There is a Portal, is performance as pedagogy. A deeply personal, reflective digital journey, coupled with in-person spaces of gentle, collective inquiry and local/diasporic storytelling. The project offers embodied poetic exploration to help us divest from narratives of erasure, restore our core metaphors, and build narratives that orient us toward self-belonging.

www.artivista.org/