Moderated by Jamil Khoury
Featuring Rashid Ghazi, Marwan Kamel, Nura Maznavi, Rohina Malik, and Azhar Usman
March 9, 2015
The panel discussion Muslim American Artists: Reshaping the Narrative was held on March 9, 2015 as part of Silk Road Rising’s ongoing commitment to reclaiming, dissecting, and subverting representation. We assembled a panel of five outstanding Chicago-based artists to discuss their work and where it fits against the broader backdrop of American culture, Muslim identity, world events, and the communities from which they hail.
Read MoreFebruary 19–22, 2015
The Chicago Premiere
Written and Performed by Kim Schultz
Original Direction by Sarah Cameron Sunde
Falling in love with an Iraqi refugee was never part of Kim Schultz’s plan, but a man named Omar changed all that. No Place Called Home is that unexpected story—a story about an American woman and an Iraqi man, a story about one refugee in 2 million, a story that isn’t supposed to be a love story.
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Read MoreSilk Road Rising
By Jamil Khoury
January 30, 2015
As evidenced by the lineup, we’ve committed to producing a diverse and eclectic group of stories seldom heard on Chicago’s stages, and already we’re making plans with additional artists. The strong link between contemporary solo performance and the historic Silk Road acts as a vivid reminder: the present is best served when we honor the past and imagine a just future.
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Read MoreFor years we’ve been planning a special commitment to solo performance artists, and the time for that commitment is now. Solo plays occupy an important space in the canon of plays suitable for Silk Road Rising, and for reasons that align conspicuously well with our mission of harnessing one’s own representation...
Read MoreWritten by Jamil Khoury
Directed by A. George Bajalia
January 21, 2015
A thought-provoking and often-humorous reflection on the theoretical and practical differences between two powerful social ideas: multiculturalism and polyculturalism.
Read More2015 - Present
The narrative legacy of the historic Silk Road was embodied, in part, by traveling storytellers and the epic poems and tales with which they regaled their audiences. As our nod to that legacy, with Silk Road Solos we both develop and produce solo performance pieces and one-person plays, and we do so in collaboration with Asian American and Middle Eastern American writers/performers. The initiative provides solo artists the resources and support necessary to translate personal experiences into theatrical journeys that are courageous, poignant, illuminating, and entertaining.
Read MoreSelected by the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame
Awarded to Silk Road Rising
November 12, 2014
Silk 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.
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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 MoreDueling Critics
By Kelly Kleiman
October 29, 2014
The Hundred Flowers Project under Joanie Schultz’s vigorous direction is a challenging and exciting work... Well worth seeing.
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Read MoreChicago Reader
By Tony Adler
October 29, 2014
The 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.
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Read MoreAround the Town Chicago
Lawrence Riordan
October 29, 2014
It’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.
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Read MoreThe Times of Northwest Indiana
By Phil Potempa
October 28, 2014
The 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 MoreChicago Tribune
By Kerry Reid
October 27, 2014
What does it mean to record your experiences even as you're experiencing them? Are you living a life of pastiche, with the cultural influences and opinions of friends and strangers who are just a click away constantly defining and redefining your own perspectives? Or are you a "narrativist" who seeks to cut a path of orderly storytelling in the chaos of information? There are some undeniably smart and thoughtful insights here into how we craft our viewpoints in the age of instant media. We can "erase" our online presence, but that history is living on somewhere. The multimedia elements, designed by Michael Stanfill, integrate seamlessly with the onstage performances. The beauty of "The Hundred Flowers Project" is that Chen leaves it open-ended enough for you to pluck your own blossoms of insight about messages.
Read MoreNewcity Stage Chicago
By Raymond Rehayem
October 27, 2014
A crafty, circular interplay of “play” and “staging of play”—wherein the director of the show becomes increasingly dictatorial and the participants become increasingly divorced from any solid understanding of the line between reality and fiction, between their own will and the will of their leader...what unfolds connects the structures of two different sorts of leadership (political, or artistic), their manipulated inner circles, and the impact on the masses (society as a whole, or the audience). “Flowers” focuses on the risks of speaking one’s mind in a world where your own mind may be perplexingly subsumed by groupthink. The reliance on multimedia through frequent use of video projection, jarring lighting and sound cues, and quick and substantial set changes must pose notable challenges, but to the credit of director Joanie Schultz and crew, you wouldn’t know it from this adept production. The performances are fine, with Melissa Canciller and Karmann Bajuyo excelling at the center of the revolving narrative.
Read MoreStage and Cinema
Lawrence Bommer
October 26, 2014
There’s a fascinating paradigm shift in the middle of The Hundred Flowers Project, Christopher Chen’s cautionary stage and video thriller.
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Read MoreChicago Critic
By Jacob Davis
October 25, 2014
Silk 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 MoreOctober 16–November 23, 2014
The Midwest Premiere
Written by Christopher Chen
Directed by Joanie Schultz
Digital 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.
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Read MoreThe Knox Student
By Aakruse
October 9, 2014
Playwright 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 .
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