AUDIENCE FEEDBACK:
•Great use of space and environment you had to work with
•Variety of stories; mix of humor and seriousness. Topic very applicable.
•Poems were inspiring
•Entertaining/educational format.
•The presentation was a very timely and accurate portrayal of the various aspects of Muslim women.
•Performance was geared towards modern topic. I was happy to hear the poem by the Palestinian boy. I feel it is extremely important that Americans constantly hear what the people in these conditions go through. The media here seems to forget that.
•Interactions with the audience; visual; knowledge.
•Excellent presentation!
•Opened our minds about Islam and Muslim women’s experience.
•Delivery; content.
•I enjoyed it. It was enlightening. The topics were relevant.
•Great presentation. I like the skits. Very well done.
•I loved the performance. It was a great way to expose the cultural experience.
•Enthusiastic
•Excellent presentation! Very emotional (inducing sadness, happiness, humor, etc.) It was great!
•Great performance. It raised my awareness of Muslim women.
•Content was presented and delivered very well.
•Excellent performance.
•It was beautiful!
•Mixed media.
•Wonderful overall package – visual, audio, script, etc. Nice collection of scenes from the show. Super job!
•Entertaining and appropriate for the time period.
•The presentation of subject matter; visuals, music.
•The visual presentation; the changes in attire went very smoothly; the enthusiasm.
•Learned about another culture; very informative.
•The delivery; the charisma, the quiet energy was powerful.
•Beautiful presentation. It’s a wonderful way of educating while entertaining at the same time. It was wonderful how you took the time to explain things the audience might not understand ahead of time.
•Acting was good; PowerPoint show was nice.
•I think this was a very creative way to teach about Islam culture and spark good dialogue about the subject. I enjoyed the multiple sides that the play displayed and the range of comedy and seriousness.
•Humor; informative
•Thank you for your performance
•Excellent – this should be seen by many students
•Should be performed often and at various locations.
•Wonderful, wonderful performance!
•I would love to see the whole show!
•Please keep up the good work. Your stories need to be told.
•This should be filmed and sold (if Bayyinah wishes) or performed all over the country. It is fabulous!
•This performance was excellent, well needed, and thought provoking! Continue the excellent and hard work.
•Good performance. Great open, honest dialogue. It was great to have a younger perspective to balance the dialogue.
•Great culture exposure to others.
•Very good!
•Excellent! We need more productions like this!
•Wonderfully done. Clear and concise
•I appreciate education through art. Thank you for sharing. We have a lot to learn.
•Nicely performed!
•Great. I want to see the full show.
•Excellent! I hope you are able to educate more Americans.
•I really liked the segment about a Simple Salaam. It showed that women are alike no matter where they are from. Church women do the same thing when a brother says, “God bless you sister.â€
•Extraordinary.
•It was great!
•Overall, good presentation. Good delivery techniques. It was clear and easy to understand. Excellent performance. Great topic to bring to DFI. It helps in understanding diversity.
•Great job!
•Audience interaction; handled question period very well.
I'd like to meet:
My name is Bayyinah Muhammad and I am the writer/compiler/director of UNVEILED: Stories From the Lives of Muslim Women. I am also a Muslim woman not unlike the characters you’ll meet in UNVEILED. I was inspired to work on this project after watching a production of Eve Ensler’s Obie-award winning play, The Vagina Monologues. While I enjoyed the production, I was disturbed by her play’s representation of Muslim women in the sketch entitled, “Under the Burqa.†I found myself unable to reconcile her depiction of why Muslim women choose to wear the traditional head-covering with what I knew to be my own reasons and those of many other Muslim women like me.
My agitation about the commonly-held misunderstandings about Muslim women only increased as I began to realize how pervasive they were at all levels of American public discourse. My feelings ran the emotional gamut, beginning with anger, and ending ultimately with determination, a determination to raise my voice to alter the public’s perceptions of Muslim women. As a devout Muslim woman who is also deeply rooted in American culture, I sensed that I was uniquely poised to provide a bridge between the two cultures in a language that would clearly be understood by both.
Joining the ranks of artists like Mohja Kahf, Heather Raffo etc… I chose theater as my medium and decided to leave a thirty-year career in elementary education to pursue the MFA in Theatre Education at EMU, with the intention of participating in a blossoming American-Islamic artistic renaissance.
Unveiled: Stories From the Lives of Muslim Women debuted on the fifth anniversary of September 11th in 2006 which had both artistic and political significance. While efforts like ours can neither mitigate the horror of what occurred that day nor explain the motivations of those who committed those atrocities, it is my hope that this production will leave you with a more robust portrait of who Muslim women are, how we live, and what we have to share with our American countrymen and women. In an era in which Muslims of all colors are viewed with suspicion if not outright hostility, these are not simply semantic issues, but issues that have real-life consequences for real, live men and women.
