2014
As Jaber's character travels to Lebanon and Jordan, looking for the vanished Ashraf, displaced Syrians tell her their stories. Some are horrific, some are bleakly funny: all have the ring of truth, and remind us of the infinite human ability to adapt to our circumstances, even in the middle of a war zone.
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Read MoreIn this provocative play masquerading as a standup comedy routine, an Indian intersex person, or “hijra,” explores history, mythology, gender roles... and high school.
Presented here in a smart collaboration between Silk Road Rising and About Face Theatre, Brahman/i hinges on a fiery, magnetic central performance by Fawzia Mirza, who pins down just the right kind of dangerous charisma needed to spin this tale...
Read MoreSilk Road Rising was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame, the country’s only known government-sponsored hall of fame that honors members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities.
Read MoreOn November 12, 2014, in a ceremony at the Chicago History Museum, Silk Road Rising will be inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. The significance of this honor, with its myriad of cultural and political meanings, cannot be overestimated...
Read MoreThe Hundred Flowers Project under Joanie Schultz’s vigorous direction is a challenging and exciting work... Well worth seeing.
Read MoreThe Cultural Revolution didn't stop even when Mao declared it over; the ensemble's play won't stop for them, either. It's a brilliant conceit.
Read MoreIt’s to everybody’s credit: playwright Christopher Chen, director Joanie Schultz, the actors, and the techs, that this story comes off as highly credible, despite the fact that it is sci-fi and surreal while not appearing to be set in the future.
Read MoreThe Hundred Flowers Project is a new production that immerses audiences in the creation of a play; layered in process, is something that is tough to capture in words. But the themes and ideas are important, once the mind is wrapped around the opportunity to become lost in what is unfolding in each and every media minute.
Read MoreThere’s a fascinating paradigm shift in the middle of The Hundred Flowers Project, Christopher Chen’s cautionary stage and video thriller.
Read MoreSilk Road Rising’s latest production is the deeply philosophical The Hundred Flowers Project...The endlessly repeating chain of screens and cameras made a fascinating spectacle, aided by Sarah K. Hughey’s lighting and Peter J. Storms’s sound design. Director Joanie Schultz and technical director Jason Pikscher deserve a lot of credit for getting all these elements moving together...The play contains a lot of ideas about how social media seems to be a vehicle for organic expressions but actually result from manipulation, as in the Facebook mood experiment, or allows people to perpetually revise their persona, as with Snapchat.
Read MoreDigital media becomes the perfect "ally" for a group of actors collectively creating a play about Mao Tse Tung's Cultural Revolution. As their work-in-progress starts morphing into a propaganda play about the play itself, disturbing questions arise as to who, or what, is controlling the narrative.
Read MorePlaywright Jamil Khoury creates plays as spaces that open up conversation across countries and cultures Ñ conversation not unlike that which takes place every day at Knox. Khoury is the author of “Mosque Alert,” a play that will be produced at Knox during winter term and directed by Professor Neil Blackadder. This past Wednesday and Friday, Khoury held workshops on his play in which students added to and revised a draft of his work. On Tuesday night, the night before the first workshop, Khoury showed one of his company’s films, entitled “Not Quite White: Arabs, Slavs, and the Contours of Contested Whiteness.” After the film he led a discussion in which students defined and debated cultural identity in America. It was clear Khoury wasn’t just there to lecture; he relished the conversation. That dialogue is a pillar of the Chicago-based theater company Silk Road Rising, of which Khoury is co-founder and Artistic Director.
Read MoreDylan Fahoome (Playwriting, ’16) and Morgan Greene (Theatre Arts, ’15) discuss the present condition of representation in theatre locally, both in Chicago and at The Theatre School with playwright and scholar, Jamil Khoury.
Featured in The Grappler an online magazine of The Theatre School at DePaul University Dramaturgy Program .
Read MoreBy turns comic and appalling, Unmanned dramatizes the lives of two drone operators in a remote desert in the American Southwest—one, a retired male fighter pilot too terrified to fly again; the other, a young female gamer who has never flown. This sets the stage for an exploration of the bizarre and disturbing profession of the military drone “pilot” and the ways in which technology has radically altered contemporary life and warfare.
Read MoreThe Translator tells the story of Sammy, an English-Arabic translator who defected from Syria, and Zaid, his politically active brother who is arrested for peacefully demonstrating against the regime. A fearful Sammy illegally returns to Syria in order to find his brother and in the process discovers his courage.
Read MoreThis event, honoring Reverend Phil Blackwell, featured a reception at the Walnut Room on the 7th floor of Macy's on State and a program of live musical entertainment & poetry followed by a screening of Sacred Stages: A Church, A Theatre, and A Story.
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With this panel discussion we intend to probe and explore questions of identity and representation as they pertain to storytelling, both historically and in our rapidly changing, ever-globalizing world.
Read MoreGender, cultural identity and the pains of adolescence get a thorough filleting and grilling in this story of an American child of Indian immigrants who is born intersex, with both male and female genital characteristics.
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