20:00 Women’s Music in Iran
Lecture & Screening by Yalda Yazdani
In 2017 Yalda Yazdani founded the “Female Voices of Iran” festival at Zeitgenössische Oper Berlin. The idea for the festival came from the extremely restrictive situation for female musicians — especially singers — in postrevolutionary Iran. Women are, for instance, not allowed to sing solo in public. Thus a large part of the creative output of such artists occurs either underground or in exile. Yazdani is both a musicologist and a tar player, and she lived in Isfahan and Teheran until 2012. For the opening of the thirteenth Jazzwerkstatt Bern she will share insights about the lives of female Iranian musicians and their strategies for escaping censorship.