Guided Search: Community Arts, Middle East

Can an immigrant’s story be universal in today’s America? To find out, Emmy-award winning performer Kayhan Irani excavates memory and experience to reconstruct a sense of belonging. Using video projections, live performance, and humor, Irani embodies characters from her journey and invites the audience to share their own stories. IJ curator Alex Shaw joins Irani as a guest artist.

This six-piece Brazilian jazz group of Philadelphia features vibraphone, electric and nylon string guitars, bass guitar, drums, percussion and saxophone. Inspired by the music of Brazil, the group creates a spacious, welcoming sound.

Our Youth Arts Workshop students spent this summer exploring the theme of portraiture and creating artwork using various media, such as drawing, sculpture, photography, and public engagement, and learn to talk about identity, stereotypes, and visibility. Spend the afternoon with us and come see all the great things our young artists have been working on!

"[Mouawad] works his way into the depths of your soul... the latest piece by this native Lebanese artist had the effect of an exploding bomb." —Le journal de Montreal

Come and experience a taste of Lebanon, from delicious Middle Eastern food to traditional dance and music as well as a performance from St. Maron's Dabke Troop.

Jaffna plays original acoustic music rooted in the Indian and Middle Eastern backgrounds of its members, who have worked for decades to create a musical universe where oud, guitar, tabla, and dumbek can live together, argue, eat and stay good friends.

The Dialogue Institute is co-sponsoring a special performance of "In Between," a one-man show that portrays the complexities inherent in Israeli-Palestinian identity

SUKHISHILI has performed for fifty million people in eighty-eight countries on five continents. It was a headline attraction with New York City Ballet for the George Balanchine Centennial. It has previously performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Avery Fisher Hall, Madison Square Garden Albert Hall, the Rome Coliseum and La Scala where it was enthusiastically welcomed with rousing ovation and a record-setting number of curtain calls.