Daniel Mufson

Reza Abdoh

The essays are taken from the doctoral dissertation I wrote at Yale. Most, but not all, of the interviews were an appendix to the dissertation.

• Creating out of Death: An Introduction to the Work of Reza Abdoh.
• Notes on a Life Imagined and Lived. (A brief biography.)
• An Unaesthetic Disease. (An examination of Abdoh’s 1989 production, Minamata.)
• The Trilogy. (On The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice, Bogeyman, and The Law of Remains.)
• Tight Right White.
• Same Vision, Different Form: Reza Abdoh’s The Blind Owl. Originally published in TDR, Vol. 39, No. 4 (T148), Fall 1995, pp. 97-107.
• Quotations from a Ruined City and the Ends of Reza Abdoh.
• What do Ta’ziyeh and Hip-Hop Have in Common? Ethnicity, Nationality, and the Identity of an Author.
• Chronology.
• Bibliography.

The interview transcripts here were not intended for publication–they are mostly unedited, e.g., instead of pretending “inaudible” moments on the cassette tapes never happened, I’ve left them in, just in case someone decides to go back and try to decipher the audio. I do plan on at least editing out some of the “filler,” but I wanted to get the transcripts online, finally, after sitting on them for ten years. The cassette tapes for these interviews are in the Reza Abdoh archive at the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center.

• Interview with Reza Abdoh. 14 January 1995.
• Interview with Homa Abdoh (Mother). 9 September 1998.
• Interview with Salar Abdoh. (Brother, artistic collaborator.) Part I. 11 June 1998.
• Interview with Salar Abdoh. Part II. 19 June 1998.
• Interview with Tony Charles. (Reza’s teacher at British boarding school.) September, 1998.
• Interview with Dokhi Mirmirani. (Close friend.)
• Interview with Meg Kruszewska. (Collaborator on early work.) 28 February 1999.
• Interview with Assurbanipal Babilla.
• Interview with Diane White. (Producer.) 9 April 1995.
• Interview with Tom Fitzpatrick. (Performer.)
• Interview with Ken Roht. (Performer, choreographer.) 2 May 1998.
• Interview with Juliana Francis, Tom Pearl, and Tony Torn. (Performers.) 16 December 1998.

More to come.