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WORKSHOP SERIES - RESILIENT CREATIVITY: PERSIAN SINGING CIRCLE WITH MAHSA VAHDAT


  • Silk Road House 1944 University Avenue Berkeley, CA, 94704 United States (map)

WORKSHOP SERIES: 6 Sunday evenings (March 18-April 22) from 7pm - 9:30pm

Kitka is truly honored to have the opportunity to present six vocal workshops and intimate dialogues on creativity and resilience with the exquisite vocalist and cultural activist Mahsa Vahdat from Tehran, Iran. 

Reserve your space here

In this workshop series, Mahsa Vahdat will share songs and vocal techniques from the lineages of Persian traditional and classical music. Singing together as a group, participants will explore Persian musical modes, ornamentation, and traditional song styles from different regions of Iran. Evocative poetry is fundamentally woven into the fabric of Mahsa's repertoire. Mahsa will demonstrate how to find paths to text interpretation to generate profound personal emotional expression.

In these gatherings, Mahsa will also share her experiences of being a professional vocalist in Iran, including the challenges she has overcome to keep intact the rich legacy of female vocal arts alive in an era when the voices of women are harshly restricted from public presentation. 

Together, workshop participants will summon the power of song to forge personal and community resilience, empowerment, and liberation in the face of hardship.

Registration is limited to 25 participants and open to musicians of all levels.

ABOUT MAHSA VAHDAT
Born in Tehran in 1973, Mahsa Vahdat began studying piano and Persian singing from an early age. She also learned to play the setar, a traditional Persian stringed instrument. Mahsa entered the University of Arts in Tehran in 1993, graduating with a B.A. in Music. Since 1995, Mahsa has performed and taught as an independent artist in concerts and festivals in Asia, Europe, the US, and Africa, and has collaborated with numerous musician from many continents. She performs regularly in a vocal duet with her sister, Marjan Vahdat.

Following her participation in the 2004 Lullabies from the Axis of Evil, recording project, Mahsa started a long partnership with the Norwegian record label Kirkelig Kulturverksted (KKV) which has led to worldwide release of a series of critically acclaimed albums. Since 2007, Mahsa has been an ambassador for the Freemuse Organization, an independent international organization that advocates for freedom of expression for musicians and composers worldwide. In 2010, Mahsa Vahdat was granted the Freemuse Award.

Mahsa's most recent recordings, "The Sun Will Rise" and "Endless Path" (with Coskun Karademir) are receiving widespread global acclaim.