This week Shahin Sayadi’s Asheq: Ritual Music to Cure a Lover returns to Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Onelight Theatre’s 2018 hit will be presented in a special free virtual reading of Shahin Sayadi’s hit soon-to-be-published one-man show, Asheq: Ritual Music to Cure a Lover.
Written and performed by Sayadi, this compelling story will be live-streamed from the Bus Stop Theatre in Halifax’s north end.
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“Sayadi is able to bring an entire world filled with different characters, as he simply and seamlessly shifts between them….a tremendous performer”
– Deanne Kearney, Mooney on Theatre
Developed under the artistic leadership of Shahin Sayadi, Asheq: Ritual Music to Cure a Lover is the story of forbidden love, a family divided by long-held secrets, and a community trying to find balance between traditional ways and the modern world. The play culminates in a Zar exorcism ceremony, intended to rid a young man of the “sickness” of his love for an outcast young woman, that ultimately reveals a father’s long-buried secrets.
Asheq: Ritual Music to Cure a Lover is set on the shores of the Persian Gulf in southern Iran where East African and Persian traditions have blended over time to produce unique cultural practices, including the modern Zar rituals. The play explores how cultures and communities change over time: how traditions can be sustained from generation to generation and also how there can be sudden, overnight cultural change.
Asheq: Ritual Music to Cure a Lover premiered in 2018 at the Prismatic Arts Festival in Halifax, and had its Ontario debut at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre in Toronto, December 2018. For more information about the production
Click here!
