Eleven Reflections on September

Written, Directed & Performed by Andrea Assaf

Featuring Live Music by Aida Shahghasemi

Video Art by Pramila Vasudevan

Music created & performed by Aida Shahghasemi, Tim O’Keefe & Salah Abdel Fattah.  Sound Design by Owen Henry & Keegan Fraley.

Eleven Reflections on September is a Spoken Word & multi-media performance on Arab American 
experience, Wars on/of Terror, and "the constant, quiet rain of death amidst beauty" that each autumn brings in a post-9/11 world.  This production is based on the series of poems Andrea Assaf 
has been writing since 2001, spanning the fall of the Twin Towers, through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the current revolutions and struggles in the Arab world.  Aesthetically, the poems 
explore the disintegration of language in the face of violence, prejudice, and unspeakable horror; as such, they progress from lyrical to abstract and broken.  The annual witnessing of autumn leaves 
becomes a metaphor for the fallen-the fighters and the innocent.

Presented as part of "THIS Bridge:  Arab, Middle Eastern & Muslim Artists" series, by Art2Action in partnership with the University of South Florida, this special one-night-only performance features 
guest artist Aida Shahghasemi.  A vocalist and percussionist specializing in Persian music and the Kurdish Daf, Aida Shahghasemi is an accomplished musician who has toured internationally with Iron 
& Wine, and released two albums with Marketa Irglova.  

This project is made possible in part by a grant from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP), Building Bridges: Campus Community Engagement Grants Program, a component of the 
Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art.