Listen to Music of the Iranian Diaspora
Six new videos bring the Persia After Hours performances to you
For the 2022 event series Persia After Hours, Iranian artists and performers filled the Villa with Iran’s rich culture and history. The events, which included musical performances, dances, and calligraphy demonstrations, complemented the exhibition Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World. At the performance pictured above, Fared Shafinury, Naghme Sarang, Rambod Dargahi, and dancer Miriam Peretz presented a concert performance inspired by Persian poet Rumi.
Photo: Vafa Khatami
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Get immersed in a series of videos featuring music, dance, and poetry inspired by the arts of ancient Iran.
During three summer evenings in 2022, the Getty Villa Museum’s outdoor theater was transformed. Projections of shimmering lights, dancing abstract motifs, and photos of ancient Iranian sites transfixed the crowd. The Persia After Hours event series complemented the exhibition Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World, which explored the artistic and cultural connections between the rival powers of Iran, Greece, and Rome.
The videos below feature performances by artists of the Iranian diaspora—musicians, dancers, and poets who have mastered their culture’s traditions and blended them with unique contemporary interpretations.
Azam Ali and Loga Ramin Torkian curated an intimate performance featuring a collective of extraordinary musicians as well as immersive visuals projected on the facade of the Museum, evoking their title, Persepolis After Dusk.
“As Iranian immigrants and artists in the diaspora, gathering under the full moon with an audience from different cultural backgrounds to celebrate our shared human legacy was one of the most memorable experiences of my career. It was a beautiful testament to the timeless power of art to live on and connect us in ways and places that we can never imagine,” said Ali.
DJ Omid Walizadeh blended his experimental hip-hop roots with sounds spanning 1970s Persian funk to the Tehrangeles scene of the 1980s. “I layered the music performance with older recordings of indigenous Persian instruments such as Tar and Nay flutes. The idea was to sonically intersect the past, present, and future during the performance,” he said.
Fared Shafinury, Iranian American artist and setâr virtuoso, was inspired by the famed Persian poet Rumi, whose writing celebrates a limitless, eternal love that is all-encompassing and void of judgment.
“To perform in the great spirit of love at the Getty Villa will remain with me as one of the most divine performances of my life. The audience, the architecture, the celestial stars, and the music had truly become one with the silence and the chirping of crickets in the night,” he said.
L.A. producer and DJ SHAN NASH has a deep passion for Middle Eastern culture, casting his musical spells through long-format sets and remixes. For his Getty Villa performance, NASH debuted a new track featuring famed Iranian soprano Darya Dadvar and sounds from Iranian producer/DJ SIAAH. He said the Villa was “a perfect atmosphere to showcase my electronic music productions that incorporate Persian melodies and traditional instruments.”
Sholeh Wolpé adapted her translation of Attar’s epic poem The Conference of the Birds to André Megerdichian’s inspired choreography and Fahad Siadat’s music. The story, written by 12th-century Sufi mystic Attar, follows the journey of all the birds of the world through seven spiritual valleys as they seek a leader.
“Attar tells us that truth is not static, and that we each tread a path according to our own capacity. It evolves as we evolve. Those who are trapped within their own dogma, clinging to hardened beliefs or faith, are deprived of the journey toward the unfathomable Divine, the Beloved, which Attar likens to a great ocean that does not turn away any soul. He says some arrive at its shores as pure drops of water; they enter, are absorbed, and become one with it. Others arrive as pebbles, trapped inside themselves, egos intact. They too enter the welcoming ocean, but they sink to its depths and remain there forever knowing only themselves, never the ocean,” Wolpé said.
“To this day, the beauty and wisdom of Attar’s The Conference of the Birds remains unsurpassed. This book may not be able to change the world, but its magic is an antidote to the bitterest ego-concocted poison of our times: extremism,” she added.
Mehrdad Arabifard and his ensemble played traditional Persian music, exploring mystical and contemplative melodies based on the poetry of Rudaki, a poet and musician from the Samanid dynasty well known as the first Iranian poet who wrote poetry in the Persian language.
“We chose to have both a male and a female singer in the ensemble to make a statement because, for more than four decades, women have been prohibited from singing solo in public in Iran, enduring suppression and silence despite our rich cultural history, in which men and women are equal, side by side,” said Arabifard.
