Identity is at stake in this oratorio about refugees

As a boy Nowara was a television star. Yasmine won a modelling competition but the agency dropped her when she appeared to be a transgender. For this piece the Iranian Gurshad Shaheman talked to some twenty refugees. They have in common that they left the Middle East of the Maghreb in order to finally be able to express their ideas and emotions.

Now Shaheman brings together their stories in an oratorio for fourteen actors. On stage they transform narrated passages from their life into a mesmerising maze of sound. In their presence, each gesture, however small, appears to be essential to welcome a life, to make the difference between violence and love, a tortured and a loved body.

In this three-part piece Shaheman accompanies the actors on a journey to their early love experiences and the first questions about their sexual and religious identity. He follows them to the causes of their exile. But he also looks at the future. This performance, selected for the prestigious Festival d'Avignon, is an urgent work of art that longs for more voices. Gurshad Shaheman defends art as a unique way to design these testimonies. For him theatre is a complete sensuous experience.

Gurshad Shaheman was trained in Cannes and Marseille and worked as an actor, production assistant and French translator of Iranian literature. Inspired by The artist is present, the legendary performance of Marina Abramovich, he created Touch me, in which the public was invited to have physical contact with him to design his story. For the three-part performance Pourama Pourama that developed from it, he drew from the rich history of his life, navigating between theatre, sound installation and performance. Shaheman is associated with the Centre Dramatique National of Normandy-Rouen and is supported by the Phénix Scène Nationale Valenciennes as an artist within the Pôle Européen de Création.