483 Puppets Bring Persian Epic to Life

Date: 15 March 2025 - 21:42

News ID: ۱۳۷۹۶۴

NEW YORK (NY Times) -- On a recent afternoon on 42nd Street in Manhattan, a mythological bird was preparing to take flight.
Backstage at the New Victory Theater, a black-clad puppeteer put on an elaborately stylized mask and stepped into a beam of light, throwing the shadow of fluttering hands onto a large scrim.
Nearby, two other performers were gearing up to practice a sword fight. Then the music started, and a crew of nine began a full run-through of “Song of the North,” an elaborate shadow puppet staging of stories from the 10th-century Persian epic the “Shahnameh.”
From the audience, the show unfolded like a seamless animation. But backstage, the next 80 minutes were half ballet, half mad scramble, as the performers grabbed hundreds of different puppets, props and masks stacked on tables and, with split-second timing, jumped in and out of the light beams streaming from two projectors.
Leaning against a backstage wall was the show’s creator, Hamid Rahmanian. His role? “Stressing out,” he said.
Since premiering in 2022 in Paris, “Song of the North” (which is intended for audiences 8 and older) has received enthusiastic reviews and played to packed houses on three continents. Its arrival in the heart of Times Square, where it begins a weeklong run on March 15, is timed for Nowruz, the Persian new year celebration. It also coincides with the release of a new contemporary prose translation of the “Shahnameh” that Rahmanian produced in collaboration with the scholar Ahmad Sadri — the first complete English version by Iranians, Rahmanian said.
The show is mind-dizzyingly complex, involving 483 puppets, 208 animated backgrounds, 16 character masks and costumes and nine performers who follow more than 2,300 separate cues.
But the idea behind it, Rahmanian said, is simple: to bring the richness of Persian culture to young audiences and adults whose views of Iran may be dominated by negative stereotypes.
“Everything about Iran is seen through the lens of politics,” he said. “Iranian culture is a symphony. But in the West, we only hear the drumbeat.”
The “Shahnameh,” or Book of Kings, is said to be the longest poem ever written by a single author — twice as long as the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” combined. It was composed by the Persian poet Abu al-Qasem Ferdowsi, who spent 33 years turning centuries of historical and mythological lore into more than 50,000 couplets.
In Iran, where many people give their children names of characters (Rostom, Sohrab), it remains a cultural touchstone. But growing up in Tehran, Rahmanian, now 56, was resistant to his father’s admonitions to actually read it.
He was more drawn to visual art, and by 19, he said, had founded his own graphic design business. In 1994, he moved to New York to study computer animation at the Pratt Institute. In 1996, he was hired by Disney, where he worked on projects like “Tarzan” and “The Emperor’s New Groove.” But he felt like he didn’t fit in, and left two years later.
“Since then,” he said, “I’ve only worked for myself.”
In 1998, he and his wife, Melissa Hibbard, founded Fictionville Studio, which has become the hub of their shared creative life. Over the next seven years, they made five films together, including “Shahrbanoo,” a documentary about the unlikely friendship between an American expatriate and a conservative Muslim woman in Tehran, and “Day Break,” a feature about a man on death row in Iran.
Then, in 2008, Hamid pivoted to what has become his life’s work: promoting the “Shahnameh.”
Today, he and Hibbard (a co-writer and producer on “Song of the North”) run what feels like a cottage industry out of a cozy ground-floor studio in their Brooklyn Heights apartment building, which is crammed with puppets and artwork from their thirteen “Shahnameh” projects so far.
The first was an elaborate 600-page illustrated abridged edition of the epic, published in 2013, that was also produced with Sadri. To create it, Rahmanian compiled and remixed more than 8,000 Persian-style miniatures from across the Islamic world — much as Ferdowsi himself gathered existing material to create his epic.
“I stepped into the light beam and saw my own shadow,” Rahmanian said of developing the work. “I realized that I could use an animated background and then dictate the choreography.”
Rahmanian’s first show, “Feathers of Fire,” and “Song of the North” each took about three years to create, requiring hundreds of storyboards and nearly 12 weeks to work out the intricate backstage choreography.
But the enterprise almost ground to a halt in October 2023, when a van holding his puppets, props and equipment was stolen from a hotel parking lot in San Francisco.
The van was recovered, but about a third of the puppets and costumes were lost or destroyed, and the two projectors were gone. Rahmanian considered giving up. “I thought it was kismet,” he said — fate.
But the theft made headlines across the country, and within a month a GoFundMe raised nearly $100,000, allowing Rahmanian to recreate the puppets and resume the tour a few months later.
Rahmanian says he has no bitterness about the theft, citing the show’s theme of forgiveness. “That’s a really important message today,” he said.
“Song of the North” covers only a small slice of the “Shahnameh,” the love story between Bijan, a warrior from the kingdom of Iran, and Manijeh, a princess of the rival kingdom of Turan. Backstage at the rehearsal at the New Victory, hundreds of puppets and props were arranged in stacks of carefully organized trays — “almost like books,” Rahmanian said.
J Hann, a puppeteer who has been with the show since 2021, handles more than 100 different puppets and props and plays several characters, including that mythological bird, Simurgh, who ascends to the heavens in a particularly dazzling scene.
“It’s just in my body at this point,” Hann said of the show’s complexity. “There’s a lot of muscle memory.”
Nazgol Ansarinia, a visual artist visiting from Tehran who was watching backstage, said she was amazed by both the intricacies of the performance and the immediacy of the storytelling.
“In Iran, everyone knows the stories and characters from the ‘Shahnameh,’ but the text itself is not that accessible,” she said. “Hamid has really made it accessible.”
After the run at the New Victory, “Song of the North” will travel to Seattle, Vancouver and, in the fall, Saudi Arabia. And Rahmanian is already planning more “Shahnameh”-derived projects, including a “theatrical symphonic experience” featuring widescreen animated backdrops, “rave-style lighting” and four dozen live musicians, including the singer Azam Ali. (It will be scored by Loga Ramin Torkian, who also composed the music for “Song of the North.”)
Does Rahmanian worry about exhausting the subject matter? He shook his head.
Every culture’s mythology, he said, is a garden. “But the ‘Shahnameh’ is a forest.”