DORR-E DARI: A POETIC CRASH COURSE IN THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE
★★★★
Carriageworks, January 20
People who love theatre and people who love poetry have a lot in common: both revel in imagery and metaphor and share a willingness to assign meaning to small moments. And, of course, something as simple as an unexpected sentence, or how lights and music frame a scene, can inspire comfort or catharsis.
Dorr-e Dari, a new work commissioned for Sydney Festival.
In Dorr-e Dari: a poetic crash course in the language of love, a new work for Sydney Festival by PYT Fairfield, poetry becomes the very heart of theatre. Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, who also appeared in PYT’s Tribunal, delivers a warm welcome to Country – and then shares a love poem of her own. Immediately, we are transported.
This 70-minute work flies by and leaves a growing, glowing warmth. It’s a celebration of the Persian language and the works created from its hard-won survival – “This has always,” they say, “Been a literature without borders”. The performers speak Dari, the form of Persian spoken in Afghanistan – Bibi Goul Mossavi, Jawad Yaqoubi and Mahdi Mohammadi’s ancestral home. Mossavi describes it as “a language to handle with care.”
