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Three Honorees at Fajr Theater Festival

Three Honorees at Fajr Theater Festival
Three Honorees at Fajr Theater Festival

The 34th Fajr International Theater Festival (FITF) will honor three Iranian theater personalities at the closing ceremony for their lifetime achievements.

Tributes will be paid to Manijeh Mohamedi, veteran female theater director and university professor, Behzad Ghaderi, professor of drama and theater and translator of plays, and Iraj Saghiri, veteran actor, director and playwright, ISNA reported.

Mohamedi, 70, has been involved in dramatic arts and drama therapy, her fields of expertise, for decades.

Born in Tehran, she got her master’s degree in dramatic arts from California State University in San Francisco, in 1977. After graduation, she worked as a lecturer in American universities before returning to Tehran, where she took up teaching at the University of Tehran and the Central Tehran Branch of the Islamic Azad University.

Her enthusiasm in the field led her to pursue her studies again and after her master’s degree she received her Ph.D. in Drama Therapy in 2011 from the same university.

Mohamedi has staged over 40 plays in the US and nearly 20 in Iran. In her choice of the plays, she has always been meticulous on the quality and diversity of the content. She has worked on scripts written by prominent playwrights such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, Dario Fo, Arthur Miller, Eugene Ionesco, Eugene O’Neill, Anton Chekhov, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and David Ives.

Her artistic career also includes working as a make-up and set designer as well as acting. She has published articles on theater in Iranian magazines and translated four books.

 Theater Researcher

Ghaderi, 63, was born in the southeastern city of Zahedan, in Sistan-Baluchestan Province. He got his Ph.D. in romantic and post-modern British drama and theatrics from Essex University.

He has authored six books on theater and literature and translated over 20 plays and stories into Persian. Ghaderi has also written and translated articles on drama, criticism and translation which have been published in academic journals.

His translations include famous plays such as ‘The Hairy Ape’ and ‘The Ice-Man Cometh’ by Eugene O’Neill, ‘Mary Stuart’ by Friedrich Schiller and ‘Sardanapalus’ by Lord Byron.

The theater researcher is among the few Iranians who have made an in-depth study of and analyzed the plays by Henrik Ibsen, a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright who is called a great master of theater along with Sophocles and Shakespeare. He has translated ten works by Ibsen into Persian so far.

Professor Emeritus in dramatic literature at the University of Erciyes in Turkey since 2012, Ghaderi earlier taught at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Tehran and Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Iran.

The noted professor has participated in several conferences in Iran, Bangladesh, China, Norway, and Italy.

 Performance Arts

Saghiri, 69, was born in the southern city of Bushehr. His interest in the performance arts from childhood took him to ceremonies of Ta’zieh, a traditional Persian theatrical genre in which the drama is conveyed through music and dramatic narration, inspired by religious and historical events, symbolizing epic spirit and resistance. Later, Saghiri became one of the main pillars of Ta’zieh events in his city Bushehr.

He has also directed and acted in a number of films and plays and published some story collections.

FITF will conclude on February 1, the first day of the Ten-Day Dawn Festivities that mark the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

 

Financialtribune.com