Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is the final part of a trilogy of shows that began in At the heart of this trilogy has been a single thread: the relationship between contemporary technology and contemporary politics. Each part of the trilogy has tried to refract this idea through different lenses. The Believers Are But Brothers , the first part of the trilogy, used instant messaging technology like WhatsApp to think about masculinity, extremism, and the Internet. This final part uses Wikipedia and murder mystery podcasts to confront the way the world seems to be moving closer together, at the same time that we find it harder and harder to understand each other.
At its heart is a true story. The unsolved murder of Fereydoun Farrokhzad, an iconic Iranian pop star, living as a refugee in Germany in the early s. When I first began work on it in the middle of the pandemic it had a certain context. And this necessitates it also being about translation. Too often, people in our part of the world, problematically grouped together as the West, use the rest of the world as examples that flesh out their preconceived ideas about how things work.
On the right they want to claim that the world would be fine if everyone followed their example; and on the left they want to say that the West is the font of all evil. But the reality of the countries at the forefront of this struggle, whether Iran, Hong Kong, Syria, or Ukraine, is that they upend such preconceived notions.
It needs to stop putting ourselves at the center. Collaboration has been key to all these works, and in this show, the team has been bigger and more talented than ever before. As well as the performers and creatives you see on stage and operating the show, the project would not have happened without the initial conversations I had with my co-creator, dramaturge, and partner Natalie Diddams.
The co-writing relationship with Chris Thorpe that resulted in the script we perform has come out of five years of working together. The first part of this trilogy received its US premiere here at Ann Arbor as part of the No Safety Net festival in , and so it feels like an honor to share this final part with the unique community around UMS.
