LIVING, WRITING, BREATHING IN TWO WORLDS - RVSD Church Thurs.

`Seven Stories Institute and Picture the Homeless present an evening with famed writer and activist Ariel Dorfman!

LIVING, WRITING, BREATHING IN TWO WORLDS: DOS MUNDOS

Thursday, November 17th 2005

Riverside Church, 7 PM

490 Riverside Drive, above 119th Street

ADMISSION: Donation Requested

Dorfman's work concerns itself with the confluence between art and human rights, and the role of artists in relation to oppression, and the relation between individual struggle and systemic inequity. His characters occupy two worlds: forced into exile, victims of torture, socially marginalized. To put it simply, some people have rights and others don't-but how do these two groups relate?

We here at Picture the Homeless are honored to be co-presenting this event with an amazing artist whose work tackles so many of the questions undergirding our own work: organizing people whose basic human rights have been violated to hold accountable the political and economic systems that oppress them.

More details to come, including additional artists and exact time and space at Riverside. Seven Stories Institute will be selling Dorfman's books at half price, and Picture the Homeless will be selling our dynamic DVD anthologies featuring short films by homeless New Yorkers organizing to fight for recognition of their own human rights-so make sure you bring your checkbook and oodles of cash.

(PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY!)

Ariel Dorfman: Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, journalist and human rights activist, b. Argentina. Dorfman's family moved to the United States shortly after his birth, settling in Chile in 1954. He attended and was a professor at the University of Chile. Forced into exile following the Chilean military coup of 1973, he had divided his time between Santiago and the United States since the restoration (1990) of democracy in his homeland. Since 1985 he has taught at Duke University. Dorfman has written powerful fiction often dealing with the horrors of tyranny and, in later works, the trials of exile. His 1990 play Death and the Maiden is one of the greatest dramatic works of the past thirty years; it was later made into a brilliant film by Roman Polanski, starring Ben Kingsley and Sigourney Weaver.



"But you in your Commission only concern yourselves with the dead, with those who cannot speak. And it turns out that I can talk, it's been years that I haven't said a word, that I live terrified of my own...but I'm not dead, I thought I was entirely dead but I am alive and I do have something to say."