June Interview- Kayhan Irani Artivista

Kayhan Irani, artist and activist, recently won an Emmy for Best Writing for a T V show, in “We are New York” a program created by the NYC’s Mayor office for adult education to teach English. I interviewed Kayhan, just weeks after this remarkable honor, as she herself is still basking in the afterglow of being distinguished by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for being a relevant and important voice among people who make TV today.

How did the idea for the show “We are New York” come about? What methods do you use to engage the audience into learning the English language?
The idea was developed with the Mayor’s office for Adult Education and the City University Department of Language and Literacy as an effort to reach approximately 2 million immigrants in New York City who need English language education. The current capacity of free classes offered can only serve about 70-80,000 of that population. The concept of a television show presented a fun and engaging way to both teach English to a wider audience since most everyone has and watches television. The format of the show was inspired by telenovelas, (soap operas) a format that most people are already familiar with. Through our focus groups and theatre workshops with students in English as a Second Language, we developed contents for our episodes that address the problems such that immigrants struggle with : employment, smoking cessation, healthcare-- combining them with solutions and services that the city already have set in place.
How does watching a telenovela as entertainment, cross over to actually teaching the language?
The telenovela became a more fun and engaging way to teach English than showing a teacher in a classroom setting. We built in some basic language teaching strategies in the learning processes such as: setting the dialogue at a slower pace, showing subtitles and using repetition of words and terms throughout the episode. Most importantly, we used language in the context of the action, so that the language really comes alive. We are New York, is a show for everyone. We used the city of New York itself as a character, filming in ethnic locations such as Flushing, Sunset Park, Washington Heights, real communities in which immigrants live in. We show people in work settings, subways and other situations that are contextualized realistically. By seeing themselves, and seeing themselves in their reality makes learning possible because the audience becomes engaged and genuinely interested in the stories.
How did you feel when you received the Emmy? What went through your mind?
When they called our names, it was unreal-- I couldn’t believe it. For me, it was an affirmation about how if you stick to you principles and if you truly do what you believe and you do it well, you will be rewarded-- people will recognize it. No one had ever done anything like it, a completely new show in a telenovela format to teach English as well as civic messages. From the beginning we had to create our own world continuously creating our vision. It was an affirmation to those folks that think -- people won’t like it, people are not ready, etc. I say, offer people something new, create an alternative, go against trend and you more likely to find that you have an audience.
Your body of work is largely political. ‘We’ve come undone’ was first performed in 2003, a relatively short time after the events of 9/11. You were the sole actor in the piece, channeling diverse voices of women from Arab, Muslim and South Asian origins. From where were these voices created? Are they founded on real people or are the characters construed to represent stereotypes to provoke the audience’s own judgment about such?
They are collage of real people and real incidents and examples. I pieced experiences, people, settings, and situations to create a more complex picture of what I wanted to show. For me, a stereotype is a piece of a person extracted from their true context from which they live in, taking their mannerisms, their accents, their behaviors extracting them from their real lives. In this play I actually showed women in their context. As an example in ‘We’ve come undone’ I portrayed a Sikh woman with an accent confused by a caller on the phone. The initial impulse is to laugh at her, but as the situation unfolds, and the audience is able to see how the confusion is natural within the context, one is moved to empathize with her. The woman with an accent is not a stereotype, the question is, how are you portraying the woman with an accent? A woman with an accent does not represent a person who is stupid, ignorant, or uneducated. An accent is just an accent. If one understands the person in their life’s context, one goes against the stereotype, building an understanding and showing how particular reactions and behavior make sense.
Artivista is a combination of two concepts, arts and activism. When is one concept more important than the other or are they equally proportioned in your work?
The arts are a vehicle, the format in which we build understanding, meaning and knowledge. On the other hand, activism is its own thing, an impulse towards social justice, liberation and human equality. How you deliver the message can be through writing a policy paper, teaching, organizing or making an artistic representation. The Arts call in the whole human being; with no need for special skills, only the five senses and the ability to emphasize. We are all born with empathetic understanding with an intrinsic a sense of injustice. The Arts are a way to highlight and draw attention to understanding issues of injustice. To me art and activism are equally important, I could not do one without the other.

What came first, your desire to create art of your desire to engage in activism?
Since I was little, I created plays that had meaning, such as in the 4th grade, I wrote and produced a full length play about a woman fighting for the right to vote. Although I always felt the connection between art and activism, my earliest experiences were in making art, playing dress-up, and acting out different roles.
Tell me about Telling Stories to Change the World, the powerful compilation of stories of global voices on the power of narrative to build community and make social justice claims. What is the relevance of telling stories?
In our modern day society, our history has been based on Western and male dominance. The history of minorities and women have been subjugated in this larger realm, with much of their history erased or unrecorded. By allowing these marginalized groups to tell their stories makes a larger statement that there is a place for them to live in the larger continuum of history, giving them in turn, hope and grounding. Also, telling stories is the primary way that humans understand the world, whether told through myths or legends, they serve a practical purpose, telling us how to live our lives. It’s important that these stories are shared because they can show people how they can live without oppression and that all beings have the potential to self-actualize.
In one moment in your life, you directed you career to Business, going opposite from your actual passion. What was the situation that drew you towards this direction?
I would say, hopelessness. As an immigrant, woman of color, I found there was not a place for me in mainstream performance. In mainstream casting, I was typecast as a Middle Eastern or Indian woman, which I found to be confining given my love for character acting. Not seeing myself in the acting opportunities that I was interested in, I decided then to do the complete opposite, which was business. I soon realized that business wasn’t going to satisfy my calling and I went back to the arts world. Through meeting different people who were doing arts to change the world I was inspired to do what I actually wanted to do in the arts, creating my own opportunities that were lacking.
How have women of your cultural background reacted to your work? Are the reactions of younger different from the older?
1000% supportive, I feel women to be embracing of my work, cross-generation. Some don’t understand how to talk about what I do because artivism is a new term, but they love my work, and are supportive in sharing and broadcasting to their communities. Women of Muslim backgrounds have really appreciated the humanization of their plight in my work expressing to me how it has given them hope and courage.
What is your vision of an equitable society?
Equitable society is one which every human being is given resources they need to lead a good life. Where human beings cooperate with each other across culture, across generation and each person has an opportunity to self-actualize following their hope and bringing forth their ideas. The systems of sexism, racism, classicism and cultural imperialism are set up to discourage sharing with each other, due to the sense of entitlement in which one feels they deserve more than the other. People persist in their belief that there are not enough resources of education, health, economic resources, food. If we can erase these systems, and instead, cooperate and share, we might find that there are enough resources to sustain all human life and to create an equitable society.