Baku to present extraordinary performance at Nasimi Festival

By Trend:

Azerbaijan will hold the Nasimi Festival of Poetry, Arts, and Spirituality for the first time on September 27-30.

The festival, organized by the Heydar Aliyev Foundation with the support of the Ministry of Culture of Azerbaijan, is dedicated to the work of Imadaddin Nasimi (1369-1417), one of the brilliant poets and thinkers of the East.

The festival will be held under the slogans “Beyond the limited self”, reflecting the philosophical views of the poet, and “I am a particle, I am the sun” which are the poet’s lines.

The program of the large-scale event covers various types of art and knowledge fields. During the festival, programs will be organized in various places in Baku, as well as in Shamakhi, the native city of the poet.

One of the events will take place on September 29 at the Magsud Ibrahimbayov Creativity Center. The fragments of the immersion play "Immolatio" ("Sacrifice", the authors are poetess Leyla Begim, filmmaker and screenwriter Yefim Abramov) directed by People's Artist of Azerbaijan Vagif Asadov will be demonstrated to the audience in the Azerbaijani and Russian languages.

The "İmmolatio" ("Sacrifice") play is dedicated to two great thinkers - enlighteners born in one year, who lived during one period in different parts of the world - in the East and the West, in Azerbaijan and the Czech Republic.

Imadeddin Nasimi (1369-1417) and Jan Hus (1369-1415) had identical views, ideas, attitude to the preservation and development of the native language. The play is written in Russian language and translated into the Azerbaijani and English languages.

Presently, rehearsals of an extraordinary and very interesting performance are being conducted. The creative team, in which the actors of the Samad Vurgun Azerbaijan State Russian Drama Theatre are involved, shared their thoughts about the festival and the performance with Trend.

“This play is primarily a story about the unification of two cultures, views of representatives of the East and the West,” director of the play Vagif Asadov said. "The Nasimi Festival on such a grand scale will be held for the first time in Azerbaijan, with the participation of famous actors, artists, philosophers from different countries.”

“The "Sacrifice" play was created by our compatriots Leyla Begim and Yefim Abramov, who now live in the Czech Republic and Israel,” Asadov added. “Azerbaijani poet Nasimi and Czech poet Jan Hus have very similar and tragic fates, but the main thing that unites them is the struggle for the ideology of mankind, high moral principles, loyalty to the Creator!

“Although they did not know each other, but the dramatic space allows bringing together those historical periods,” he said. “We give the opportunity to our heroes to hear each other. The dialogs of Nasimi and Jan Hus are the search for the way of the East to the West, and the West to the East. First of all, this is a desire to hear each other.”

“According to the plot of the play, this desire arises also among young people in the 21st century - students of the Prague University,” Asadov said. “Young people are also representatives of the East and the West. They are sure that both Nasimi and Jan Hus left some sort of a message to the future generations."

"The festival is dedicated to great poet Nasimi and this is a significant cultural event in the life of Azerbaijan," Anna Ibrahimbayova, director of the Maqsud Ibrahimbayov Creativity Center, said. “We are very pleased that the excerpts from the remarkable play "İmmolatio", which tells about Nasimi and Jan Hus, the parallels between the cultures of the East and the West are shown, will be demonstrated at the Maqsud Ibrahimbayov Creativity Center."

"A very interesting job allows me, as an actor, to disclose a very complex image of Nasimi, the great Azerbaijani poet and philosopher," said Oleg Amirbekov, who plays Nasimi. “The performance will be presented for the first time in Azerbaijan and it will be demonstrated at all floors and rooms of the Maqsud Ibrahimbayov Creativity Center, which is a very surprising and unique spectacle. During the performance the audience will move together with the actors. This has not happened in Azerbaijan before!"

"Nasimi's creativity is an inexhaustible bag of knowledge and high philosophical views for the sake of human perfection," said Honored Artist Fuad Osmanov, who plays the Angel and the Ruler. “Nasimi was the first poet in the history of Azerbaijani literature, writing lyric love poems - ghazals in the Azerbaijani language. Thanks to the play, not only spectators but also the actors themselves make a kind of excursion into the past to find the truth of human existence."

"My image of the Blind Angel is one of the unique images in the play as his blindness is superior over sighted people," said Honored Artist Maqsud Mammadov. “Through his dark glasses he sees many things that others can not, or some people simply do not want to see. Since the time of the creation of mankind, the struggle between good and evil is so intertwined that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the truth. For example, there are a person and his shadow, and they are inseparable from each other. That is, to know the good, it is necessary to know what is evil.”

"In ancient Roman mythology, Janus was depicted with two faces turned in opposite directions, to the past and the future," says Teymur Rahimov, who plays Janus. “One was the face of a young, beardless man looking to the future, the other - the face of a bearded old man turned to the past. The two-faced Janus is an insincere, hypocritical man. In this play he is a peculiar jester, a negative character who is trying to knock people out of the way."

For the first time such a grandiose festival will be held for spectators through registration on the official www.nasimifestival.live website rather than via tickets and invitations.