Check my post on the Date Festival with its 1001 Nights theme in Indio California here: http://journalofthenights.blogspot.com/2009/02/riverside-county-fair-and-national-date.html.
I think it would make a perfect place for an annual Nights conference! Maybe one day...
I also think we were some of the only out-of-towners at the festival/fair, which made for a very authentic usa county fair experience complete with 1001 Nights fare and a nightly show.
Here are some videos of the show, they are not good quality but I took them with a digital camera, I wanted to give an example of the songs featured in the stage production of Ali Baba that they did. Sorry for the shortness as well.
If anyone's interested I can upload the program for the festival and the play in pdf.
The most interesting part was the frame story that they gave before the Ali Baba show (and after the nightly "tribute to the troops" which I missed because we were late) - they didn't leave out any of the details of Shahriyar's wife cheating on him (though racial details were out) - and you can see from the first video the violence was left in even with the young age of the actors:
shahriyar catches his wife
ali baba and the 40 thieves intro song (abba! with thieves wandering through the audience)
this clip also has plenty of crying babies in the audience!
whoever wrote this script was pretty clever with the inclusion of some random songs, this one from the smiths!
and amy winehouse
and "kiss kiss" the remade turkish song into english pop dance hit!
you can see the audience has thinned out some, including those that i made come with me to the festival (meet you later...!)
Hi! I'm a scholar who is currently working on a dissertation about Indio's date industry and its imagined ties to the middle east. I just wrote an article about it- I thought you might be interested in it since it has more historic images of the "Arabian" imagery. - Thanks for the website- I ran across it in my research and it's been great to see it. http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/riverside/coachella-valley-middle-eastern-fantasies-desert.html
ReplyDeleteHi! My name is Joe Ortiz, born and raised in Indio. I was part of the performing cast at the Arabian Nights Pageant for three years . The attached photo was taken of me (holding treasure chest) on the pageant stage in 1956.
ReplyDeletehttps://drive.google.com/file/d/0By9dVV_URABMbFFoRVpHZjNza1k/view?usp=sharing