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barakha

Thanks for visiting our blog. Please bear with us while we restructure our various sites and pages. We'll be posting stuff as regularly as possible while we continue to work on it.


You've stumbled upon my blog which is the companion to my website Ishah 'El. This site is intended to track my progress in starting a new multi-cultural theatre arts company and bring updates to devoted supporters and curious by standers. Check here regularly for posts on what I’m up to and how it all is faring, and you can join me by posting comments & encouragement. With that I invite you to become friends and enter into my world of art, faith, life & passion. Shalom.

P.s.- This is actually 4 blogs rolled into 1... why? I don't really know. Some sort of strange urge to make it multi-dimensional caused me to lay it out this way, yet people seem to never realize that there is an index at the right which will take you to other interconnected pages. Feel free to explore and share with others!

Thursday, May 31, 2007

love's labors

Those of you who know me well know that I love research. I'm probably more fully in my element when I'm exploring something, letting the process of discovery take me wherever it goes, weaving in and out of seeming discontinuity and revealing connections and relationships that I'd never imagined or suspected. Sometimes I had suspected there was a connection and found out I was right. And then some. It's a fun game - one of my favorites - and I've spent a lot of time trying to convince others that it's my job, my avocation, my calling. My work space should prove that easily enough. I think this goes back to at least grade school when, having become a lover of reading and exploring, I discovered the set of Encyclopedia Britannica we had in our house and began to browse through them regularly. I loved to browse, I loved the idea of browsing and wanted to become a browser when I grew up. In my own solitude and isolation I discovered worlds within worlds out there that I just didn't find available in school or at home, in my backyard or on random day trips. The encyclopedias became my buddies and the library was our Odd fellows lodge.

Thank God and nerd engineers for web browsers, the common day equivalent of my boyhood aspirations. I can find stuff and stuff linked to other stuff easier, and in most cases have access to or own a copy of an item with simplest of ease. For some time now I've been interested in, among other things, stories from around the world. Several months ago I stumbled upon a great book, World Tales, by Idries Shah (printed by Octagon Press). It's a great book filled with wonderful stories from the diversity of our world culture, but it also has great introductions which trace the roots and development of a tale from it's origins and tracks it's sphere of influence within other cultures. Just the sort of book or slew of books I would have loved stumbling upon as a kid. In similar fashion, I discovered this great site last night, also called World Tales; it's a beautifully, wonderfully designed flash site of stories which are animated well and they give some background to the stories and the characters common to the folklore board of advisers. You can also read the tale if you prefer. I hope you find as much enjoyment in these as I have been, and keep the connection going - tell a friend.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Call for suggestions!

We're putting together a series of plays for live performance, radio play & podcast and we'd love to hear your suggestions, especially on plays or adaptations of traditional stories, folktales or poetry from other countries & cultures. Send us a message with your own favorite plays or stories from your country & culture.

Some pieces currently in development or being considered are:

Shehzadi Nautanki
Choon Hyang
Karagöz & Hacivat
Gita Govinda By Jayadeva
Layla & Majnun by Nizami
The Birds by Aristophanes
Hassan of Baghdad by James Elroy Flecker
Tobit
Victory over the Sun by Vladimir Mayakovsky
Jataka tales
Maori Myths & Tales
The Conference of the Birds by Attar
Commedia dell 'Arte scenes
The Case of the Missing Bodies by Tom S. Long
Plays by Rabindranath Tagore
Arabic short play series
Short plays by David Ives
World Tales by Idries Shah
The Guide by R. K. Narayan
The Saddle Bag by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani
Plays by Carlo Gozzi
The long journey of Poppie Nongena
The Ring and The Book by Robert Browning

And more! So many more!

Add your favorites to the list!