Eleven Reflections on September: Themes of War & Identity on Stage | Andrea Assaf
In this Outline event, we talked to Andrea Assaf about her latest project, 'Eleven Reflections on September.' The project explores Arab American experience, wars on and of terror, and “the constant, quiet rain of death amidst beauty” that each autumn brings in a post-9/11 world.
Eleven Reflections on September is a poetry, music, movement and digital media exploration of Arab American experience, Wars on/of Terror, and “the constant, quiet rain of death amidst beauty” that each autumn brings in a post-9/11 world. Based on a series of poems Andrea Assaf has written since 2001, “Eleven Reflections…” spans the fall of the Twin Towers, the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the global rise of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia, and the revolutions and uprisings that have swept through the Arab world in the last decade. Aesthetically, the poems explore the disintegration of language in the face of violence, prejudice, and unspeakable horror, as they progress from lyrical to abstract and broken. The annual witnessing of autumn leaves becomes a metaphor for the fallen. As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, this ever-evolving tour de force finds new relevance and urgency. As an experimental work that lives at the intersection of live performance and digital media, Eleven Reflections on September is beautiful, haunting, and truly genre-shattering.
Outline
This podcast series features a process-focused conversation that looks at a guest's individual projects rather than their full bodies of work. It sketches the journey of the project: the spark of curiosity that led to its birth, the process of implementing the idea, the obstacles that emerged throughout the implementation, and the aftermath of the project, including new questions and new ideas.
