Marivan to host 10th Intl. Street Theater Festival

The grand cultural event will launch tomorrow with the attendance of 14 Iranian and 4 foreign artists.

As years pass, the event receives more Iranian and foreign enthusiasts which will lead to the development of the cultural event.

One of the festival’s strong points is its educational workshops; in the 9th edition three workshops were held by Iranian professors while a foreign one was also held by a Dutch master.

In the upcoming edition, a three-day workshop is planned on the Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) which will be held by Professor Doug Paterson, a renowned theater master from the US, an official of the festival’s education committee said.

Paterson is a professor of theater at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. He received his PhD from Cornell University in 1972, Mohammad Amin Kohne Poushi added.

Doug has dedicated over twenty years to the methods developed by Brazilian director Augusto Boal and his Theater of the Oppressed.

In August 2011, he was honored with the lifetime achievement award in Leadership in Community-Based Theater and Civic Engagement, given by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE).

In other news, the governor of Marivan county said that the participation of foreign countries in the international event is a sign of security of border regions and added “the enemies of the Islamic Republic tend to show that Marivan is insecure and holding such an event will disappoint them.”

Mohammad Fallahi noted that the festival is a great cultural event and all the officials across Iran like to hold it in the best way.

Moreover the Head of the county’s Islamic Guidance and Culture Office Khosrow Moein said that during the three-day festival totally 36 works will be staged among which 4 are foreign plays which will include Parada from Italy (directed by Aldo Pasquero and Giuseppe Morrone), Encontros from Spain (directed by Lusco Fusco), Limbo a joint Iran and Greece production (directed by Rahim Abdul Rahimzadeh and Stamatis Efstathiou) as well as Tesseract from the Republic of Azerbaijan.

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