TURAN DOKHT

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tURan doKhtAftab DarvishiMiranda LakerveldNilper Orchestra

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Synopsis

Notes

A conversation with Miranda Lakerveld

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date & starting time Wed 5 June 2019, 8.30 pmThu 6 June 2019, 8.30 pm

venue Muziekgebouw

running time 1 hour 20 minutesno interval

language Farsi and Italian with English and Dutch surtitles

introduction by Peyman Jafari7.45 pm

Hamid Dabashi – Persian culture on The Global Scene Thu 6 Juni, 4 pmPodium Mozaïek

cRedits

composition Aftab Darvishi

libretto, direction Miranda Lakerveld

conductor Navid Gohari

video Siavash Naghshbandi

light Bart van den Heuvel

costumes Nasrin Khorrami

dramaturgy, text advice Asghar Seyed-Gohrab

vocals Ekaterina Levental (Turan Dokht), Arash Roozbehi (The unknown prince), Sarah Akbari, Niloofar Nedaei, Tahere Hezave

acting musiciansYasaman Koozehgar, Yalda Ehsani, Mahsa Rahmati, Anahita Vahediardekani

music performed byBehzad Hasanzadeh, voice/kamancheMehrdad Alizadeh Veshki, percussionNilper Orchestra

production World Opera Lab, Jasper Berben

with support ofFonds Podiumkunsten, Gieskes-Strijbis Fonds, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, Nederlandse Ambassade Tehran

world premiere 24 February 2019Azadi Tower, Tehran

Turan Dokht is inspired by the Haft Peykar of Nizami Ganjavi and Turandot by Giacomo Puccini. The fragments of Puccini’s Turandot are used with kind per-mission of Ricordi Publishing House.

All the flights that are made for this project are compensated for their CO2 emissions.

websites World Opera LabMiranda LakerveldAftab Darvishi

synopsis

The seven beauties from Nizami’s Haft Peykar represent the seven continents, the seven planets and the seven colours. The number seven, in turn, symbolises harmony. In the prologue, the seven women come together. A curse has been cast; the equilibrium between the planets has been lost. Two souls appear, about to be born. Will they restore harmony? Under the sign of Saturn, the black planet, a prince is born in Persia. Astrologers predict a brilliant future for the boy, but his father is jealous and sends him away. The boy grows up. When his father loses the throne, the prince returns to his homeland to reclaim it, and war breaks out. The seven princesses appear and send him on a journey.

A very special young woman lives in the country of Turan. She is beautiful, has special gifts and is proficient in all the arts and sciences. But she doesn’t want to get married because of a cen-

turies-old family curse. A distant ancestor was once dishonoured during wartime. Her scream still reverberates through the daugh-ter of Turan. Her father agrees to build a castle on a mountain sur-rounded by a magical green garden. Anyone who wishes to reach the castle, but whose intentions are impure, runs into enchanted talismans that immediately decapitate them.

The prince makes it all the way to the castle and falls in love at first sight, but the garden is red with the blood of fallen suitors. The prince is afraid and begins to lose his resolve. Is there any point going into the garden and possibly losing his life? The daughter of Turan appears and tries to shoo him away. She doesn’t want there to be any more casualties, but he digs in his heels. He dresses in blue for protection and undergoes the Ceremony of Riddles. By looking deep inside his own soul, the prince is able to answer all questions in the ceremony, until the daughter of Turan asks him the final, ultimate question: what is her name? Looking at the starry sky, he finds the right answer. She is the first and the last; her name is love. After he has given the right answer, the sun rises, casting its golden rays on the landscape.

The curse has been broken, and old wounds are healed with the scent of pink sandalwood. The ancestors are reconciled, and the couple gets married, dressed in brilliant white. In the epilogue, the seven beauties come together again. The power of love has broken the curse. Now they are finally free to go back home, to their planets, from where they lovingly observe life on our Earth to this day.

notesThe opera Turan Dokht by Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi and director/librettist Miranda Lakerveld is inspired on the epic poem Haft Peykar (‘The Seven Beauties’) written by the 12th-century Persian mystic and scholar Nizami Ganjavi. It’s a mystical frame narrative in which the symbolism of the number seven plays a key role.

Seven princesses tell stories from different cultures to a prince. Each tells her story in a different coloured pavilion. The red pavil-ion’s princess tells the story of Turan Dokht, presenting the prince with riddles to test his self-knowledge and the moral correctness of his actions.

The protagonist in the beloved opera Turandot by Giacomo Puccini is based on this princess but, inspired by playwright Carlo Gozzi’s version of the story, librettists Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni moved the story to China and made Turandot into a vengeful princess who kills her suitors. In Turan Dokht, Darvishi and Lakerveld bring Turandot back to her origins. Where the princess in the Puccini opera is a female Bluebeard, Turan Dokht is about an inner search for self-knowledge and humility. Puccini had already combined Eastern and Western elements in his opera. Darvishi, who was born in Iran and completed her music education in the Netherlands, takes this one step further. Her music for the Nilper Orchestra, which is complemented by Iranian percussion and a kamanche (an Iranian bowed string instrument), is based on Western tonality, but with flourishes derived from Iranian music. Darvishi’s use of repetition gives voice to the mys-tical aspects of Nazimi’s text. The performance includes projec-tions created by Siavash Naghshbandi based on the miniature paintings illustrating Haft Peykar.

by Vincent Kouters

On February 20th 2019 the opera Turan Dokht received its world premiere at the iconic Azadi Tower, Tehran. As the Dutch director Miranda Lakerveld and the Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi de-scribe it, they have created an ‘intercultural rewriting’ of the an-cient Persian tale about Turan Dokht, ‘the daughter of Turan’. This character is the heroine of many operatic and theatrical pieces, of which Puccini’s Turandot is the most famous. The production will be seen for the first time in the Netherlands at the 2019 Holland Festival.

a conveRsation with MiRanda laKeRveld

Where did the two of you begin your journey towards Turan Dokht?Miranda Lakerveld: ‘After the premiere of Sacrifice, in 2017, for which Aftab wrote the final chorus, she said she wanted to create a full evening opera, and that she’d really like to do it in Iran. My answer to her then was: “You’re completely crazy. We’re not going to do that.” But meanwhile the idea really did start bugging me.’

Why is that so crazy?‘There’s almost no opera in Iran, and strictly speaking it’s prohib-ited. There are regulations, which you can get around, if you’re creative. But then there’s the enormous bureaucratic mill that a production has to go through. The structures for putting on an opera just don’t exist there. And here in the West almost no one wants anything to do with Iran, because of the sanctions. Fortunately, the Holland Festival was really enthusiastic about the project. Anyway, it looked like a good moment to do this. It was relatively quiet at that point. President Rohani had just been re-elected, some sanctions had been lifted, the situation was full of hope. That was the moment to do something. We thought it would be a long road to get the project going, but not that it would be well-nigh impossible.’

So what did you do?‘In my work I always try to search within the opera repertoire for links to other cultures, in this case Persian culture. I think it’s really important that we raise questions in art about what links us with each other. Opera can do that extremely well. It’s a form of art that permits multilingualism and in which universal myths are well represented. Opera has many different routes to other cultures.’

‘For a project in Iran operas such as The Magic Flute or works by Handel seem obvious, because they often feature Persian kings. But these pieces didn’t have the right resonance. I was looking for a story in which both the European and the Persian cultures are represented.’

How did you track down Turan Dokht?‘I read Nizami Ganjavi’s Haft Paykar (‘The Seven Beauties’) and then suddenly realized: crikey, Turandot doesn’t have Chinese origins after all. It’s a Persian story. Then everything fell into place for me. I really love Puccini’s Turandot, but I’ve always found it an odd piece, with all those mystical elements and the chinoiserie. In 2015, when I was working on The Inner Landscape for the Holland Festival, with Frank Sheffer and Guo Wenjing, I was actually in China. One day I asked a Chinese opera company, which had Turandot in their repertoire, if they knew where the story came

from. Was it really a Chinese fairy tale? They didn’t know the an-swer either. It was a folk tale. That was all they could say.’

What are you doing with this story?‘Our production is a dialogue between Nizami Ganjavi’s story and the European Turandot tradition, which reached its zenith with Puccini. It’s a very rich tradition. There have already been so many adaptations of the story. In the 17th century Carlo Gozzi creat-ed a commedia dell’arte play from it. This was later translated into French, and then Schiller translated that piece into German. Schiller’s play was then translated back into Italian, and then the composer Bussoni made another version of it, then Brecht. Puccini made the ultimate version in 1924.’

‘We could have chosen to tell only the Persian version of the story of Turan Dokht. But we wanted to retain the marvellous frame narrative, which is an important aspect of Haft Paykar and uses rich symbolism to let us see the psychological development of the main character. Nizami Ganjavi places his very human stories, in the manner of a fable, against the backdrop of cosmic motion. There are seven stories about seven princesses who correspond to the seven planets and to the days of the week. In the Haft Paykar each one of these princesses tells a story. One of those stories is Turan Dokht. We’ve kept the frame narrative. There are seven women on the stage, all of them very different: four members of the orchestra and three singers, who play the princesses. We really extend the colour symbolism. The designers and I immersed ourselves in the art of the Persian miniature, so we could under-stand the exact meaning of all the different colours. Persian min-iatures use colour in a very special way – full of contrasts and very expressively. This created the guideline for Siavash Naghshbandi’s video design and for the marvellous costumes designed by Nasrin Khorrami.’

What is Turan Dokht about in your opinion?‘It’s become a production filled with love, almost romantic. Love, according to Nizami, is what sets the universe in motion. What love actually is, remains a mystery. In essence the piece is about this mystery, as it was for Nizami. To bridge the differences that exist between us, we always need that spark of love, and human contact with all its challenges is vital for that. That, in my opinion, is the function of the riddles in the story.’

‘How human attachment actually works is a mystery. In Sufi lit-erature they place this under a magnifying glass and distinguish between human love and divine love. What causes people to do

what they do? Our production, as far as I’m concerned, is more about self-insight and self-knowledge, rather than about the Chinese riddles in Puccini’s opera. Our production is much more like a ceremony. A ceremony to gain self-knowledge. Aftab and I researched several trance rituals for this.’

Why do you like working with Aftab Darvishi? ‘Aftab writes truly new music. In melodic terms it’s very strong. And her multivocal choral work is extremely colourful. She understands how to place Western and traditional Persian instruments within one continuum, as, for example, with the kamanche and the per-cussion elements in Turan Dokht. But the musical dialogue doesn’t stop there. There’s space in Turan Dokht for various ways of work-ing, for different tonal systems and for improvisation, so that the play, the design and the music are a true synthesis. There’s a lot of folk music in this show, firstly because that’s the speciality of the three singers, Sarah Akbari, Niloofar Nadaei and Tahere Hezave. They create very unusual physical theatre with traditional music. But the folk music has acquired a special function in the show. It effectively makes its own journey and mirrors Iran’s musical versatility. For example, there’s an ancient Zoroastrian song in

the prologue and also a bridal song from the Qashqai region. In the space between this folk music and the sound world of Puccini, Aftab’s music sounds like a logical conclusion of the dialogue.’

What was it like, performing this show in Tehran?‘Difficult. The production’s fate seemed to be linked to the worsening diplomatic relations between Iran and the West. At the beginning of 2018, as we were writing our first plans for the production, Trump announced new sanctions, and the rial, the Iranian currency, immediately plummeted in value. That meant we were hardly able to make any financial arrangements or carry out any kind of forward planning. Two days before I travelled to Iran, to carry out the project, there was a diplomatic conflict between Iran and the Netherlands. The local festival that was going to sort out our visas dropped off the radar. This caused problems with visas and permits. Our singer Ekaterina Levental was refused a visa. Fortunately, we found a good substitute for her there, Sayeh Sodefiye. In Amsterdam, however, Ekaterina will be singing the role that was written for her. Sayeh will be singing here as well, in the programme with Hamid Dabashi.’

Was it a success?‘The foreign correspondent Thomas Erdbrink was at the perfor-mance. He called it a historic moment. Yes, the reactions were really positive. But I myself find it problematic to call it a success. It sounds harsh to call it that, when things are really not going well there at all.’

Why was it historic?‘For a long time opera was forbidden in Iran. Because women wer-en’t allowed to sing solos. Moreover, it was perceived as being too Western, something that’s still frowned on there. Nowadays, more is permitted, as long as women don’t sing solo. That didn’t prevent us from making an opera that solved the problem by having a trio of women always singing with the main role.’

Turan Dokht is partly inspired by the work of Hamid Dabashi. Who is he?‘As far as I’m concerned, he is one of the greatest post-coloni-al thinkers of our time. I engage with his work for every show I create. His latest book, Persophilia, is especially relevant to this production. In this work he breaks away from Edward Said’s idea of ‘orientalism’ and argues that there’s no question of any kind of one-way traffic in the influence of the West on the East. According to him, there’s mutual influence. You can see that, for example, in how a tale like Turan Dokht travels the world and then comes back

again. Dabashi also writes in Persophilia that opera is part of this worldwide exchange and that the opera repertoire is influenced by Persian stories. That’s something that’s often overlooked in Europe. It’s no secret that Turandot is based on a Persian story, but before now nothing has been done with this simple fact.’

‘Cultural appropriation’ is an international subject of debate, both in the media and in public life. Is cultural appropriation a theme that interests you?‘Of course. It’s something that happens and we should absolutely discuss it. I think that the discussion about who is the rightful own-er of culture and of stories, and the vehemence of that discussion, is one of the symptoms of modern society. We live with so many different people on a relatively small surface. That’s fantastic, but we don’t pay enough attention to how complicated that is. That clash is the result of global development. We often use the power of cultural heritage to conduct a dialogue in our creative work. That means we have to be especially careful with it. I’ve devel-oped a way of working in which all the ‘voices’ must have equal value, also in the making process. Everyone who participates has a say in it, and has the right to veto the use of his or her heritage, in Turan Dokht too. That’s exactly what I want to do: to create that dialogue. We haven’t used this 12th century text about seven princesses from seven different cultures for nothing. Our cultures came into existence through dialogue with each other. That’s what Turan Dokht is about.’

With Turan Dokht are you bringing an artistic treasure back to its original country?‘That sounds rather paternalistic. And it’s not my task to do so either. I do want people to see, however, that the opera repertoire is absolutely not as European as we perhaps think.’

Aftab Darvishi (Tehran, 1987) started taking violin lessons when she was five. Later on the kamancheh (an Iranian bowed string instrument) and the piano followed. She studied music at the University of Tehran and composition at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, where her teachers included Martijn Padding and Yannis Kyriakides. She studied Carnatic music (classical music from southern India) with Rafael Reina at the Conservatory of Amsterdam, along with film composition. Darvishi’s music has been performed at festivals throughout Europe and Asia in collaborations with ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet and the Hermes Ensemble. She has created countless productions with various companies, including World Opera Lab. She performed at a number of festivals with KHZ kollektiv, the electronic ensemble headed up by Yannis Kyriakides, among them the Holland Festival. Since 2015 she has regularly been invited to give guest lectures at the University of Tehran. In 2017 the Kronos Quartet asked

her to compose a piece for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire. She has continued her collaboration with the quartet with a new piece for Music for Change – The Banned Countries. She lives in The Hague and in Tehran.

Director and librettist Miranda Lakerveld (1976) creates stagings for opera and classical music in which the bringing together of cultures, religions and artistic disciplines is the guiding principle. She founded World Opera Lab with this pur-pose in mind. Important projects in recent years have included Orfeo in India (an adaptation of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo) in Ahmedabad, featuring European and Indian musicians and singers; Erda, an opera installation with music by Calliope Tsoupaki at the Dutch National Opera; De thuiskomst van Odysseus (‘The Homecoming of Ulysses’) in Amsterdam-West, with compositions by Monteverdi as well as traditional music from Morocco

aboUt the aRtists

and Turkey; Majnun & Leyla, with music from Iran, Morocco, India and Turkey, and a series of debates and operas about con-flicts in the Middle East in cooperation with the De Balie cultural centre in Amsterdam. She worked with documentary filmmaker Frank Scheffer on The Inner Landscape, a project about traditional Sichuan opera that combined film and live opera per-formance which featured at the Holland Festival in 2015. In 2017 she made Temple of Time with composer Sinta Wullur, which was also shown at the Holland Festival Proms. Since 2011 Lakerveld has been researching traditional, religious musical drama in countries including Iran, Japan, China, Mexico and the Tibetan community in India. She has created three previous productions with Aftab Darvishi: Dance with the Seven Veils, Zeynab/Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut and The Sacrifice.

The Nilper Orchestra was established in 2006 by artistic director and conductor Navid Gohari to perform contemporary compositions. As the only ensemble dedicated to contemporary music in Iran, Nilper performs works by both Iranian and international composers, and regularly presents world premieres and Iranian premieres of contemporary pieces. The orchestra also brings together talented musicians and artists living and working in Iran, inviting them to take part in its projects. Ever since the orchestra was first established, it has performed two major concerts each year, with a repertoire that includes around sixty pieces of contem-porary music to date. Nilper works with renowned composers and soloists from all over the world and invites them to present their work in Iran. The orchestra organises an annual festival for contem-porary music. Under the auspices of the ‘Music for everybody’ project, the musi-cians travel all over Iran to bring together

communities through contemporary music. Last year Navid Gohari and the singers Sarah Akbari, Niloofar Nedaei and Tahere Hezave, who all appear in Turan Dokht, received the Music Theatre NOW award for Prometheus/Plague, which was voted the best performance of the past two years.‘Nilper’ means ‘lotus’ in ancient Persian. The flower symbolises peace and friend-ship – the way Iran has traditionally ap-proached other countries.

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textVincent Kouters

text editorKaren Welling

translationAntoinette Fawcett, Emma Rault design thonik

lay-out Mark Drillich, Erna Theys

photography© Rodrick Estimadascene photography © Ali Zamaniportrait Miranda Lakerveld © Sjoerd Derine

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