For the selection of her two hour live radioshow, Sachli Gholamalizad (actress and theatre-maker) will let herself be guided by the main characters she honours in her third, upcoming, solo theatre performance. Strong Iranian female voices, from then and now. From two ground-breaking Iranian artists, Googoosh and Forough Farrokhzad, the women who with their words shaped the ways of her mother and grandmother, to contemporary feminist voices.
A meandering and enchanting investigation into what it means to be a woman today, through means of music, poetry, sung and spoken word.
A musical narration about the leading ladies who helped scaffold Sachli’s struggle in womanhood.
BIO
Sachli Gholamalizad (Iran, ° 1982) is active in film, television and theatre. She studied dramatic arts at RITCS in Brussels and took acting classes with Jack Waltzer in Paris.
In 2013 she created her first play, A Reason to Talk, the first part of a trilogy. This production won several prizes, traveled around and abroad, and received critical and public acclaim. In 2016 she made her second play (Not) My Paradise. She is one of the faces of KVS (Brussels’ Flemish city theatre), and for the next five years she’s artist in residence at Vooruit in Ghent. In 2019 she will produce her third solo performance, for KVS.
After a dive into Sachli’s family history with A reason to talk and (not) my paradise, her third creation takes a hesitant step towards the future. How can we rinse and peel off the judgements and interpretations of the outside world in order to return to the core of our being, our purest self? Supported by strong women from various traditions, and with a lot of questions at the back of her mind, Sachli samples different definitions for the future: about love, about friendship, about womanhood. A musical narration about the leading ladies who helped scaffold Sachli’s struggle in womanhood.
Last year she acted in Domino (2018), Brian DePalma’s last feature, and other (inter) national series such as Stockholm Requiem (2019), De Twaalf (2019), Loslopend Wild (2012-2018), and she played one of the leading roles in De Bunker (2015).
She continues to tour with theatre plays, acts in various international and national TV series and films, and has a column for Mo * Magazine.
“On Loving”
a Poem by Forugh Farrokhzad, translated by Sholeh Wolpé
Tonight from your eyes’ sky
stars rain on my poem,
my fingers spark, set ablaze
the muteness of these blank pages.
My fevered, raving poem shamed by its desires,
hurls itself once again into fire, the flames’ relentless craving.
Yes, so love begins,
and though the road’s end is out of sight, I do not think of the end.
It’s the loving that I love.
Why shun darkness?
The night abounds with diamond drops. Later, jasmine’s intoxicating scent lingers on the spent body of night.
Let me lose myself in you
till no one can find my trace. Let your dewy sigh’s fevered soul waft over the body of my songs.
Wrapped in sleep’s silk
let me grow wings of light,
fly through its open door
beyond the world’s fences and walls.
Do you know what I want of life?
That I can be with you, you, all of you, and if life repeated a thousand times, still you, you, and again, you.
Concealed in me is a sea: how could I hide it? How could I describe the typhoon inside?
I’m so filled with you
I want to run through meadows,
bash my head against mountain rocks, give myself to ocean waves.
I’m so filled with you
I want to crumble into myself like a speck of dust, to gently lay my head at your feet,
cling fast to your weightless shadow.
Yes, so love begins,
and though the road’s end is out of sight, I do not think of the end
for it’s the loving I so love.
This poem is from the award-winning book ‘Sin—Selected poems’. Farrokhzad, who died in a car accident in 1967 at the age of 32, was a poet of sensuous extremes. Writing during the 1950s and 60s, her poems were considered unconventional and scandalous, as they very well might have been considered so by Western readers of that era. Today, she is an icon and one of the most beloved and respected poets of twentieth-century Iran. Her work has inspired and continues to inspire many.
Portrait Sachli © GAËTAN CHEKAIBAN / KVS