Silk Road Rising has been awarded ArtPlace America’s National Grant to support their civic engagement and new play project, Jamil Khoury's Mosque Alert! Silk Road Rising (formerly known as Silk Road Theatre Project) creates live theatre and online videos that tell stories through primarily Asian American and Middle Eastern American lenses. In representing communities that intersect and overlap, they aim to advance a polycultural worldview.
Mosque Alert is an artistic and civic engagement project that dramatizes the difficulties Muslims face across the country (see https://youtu.be/Ojvgm7r4KU8). Last summer, Jamil Khoury and Malik Gillani—the founders of Silk Road Rising—found the ideal site for their fictional mosque: The Old Nichols Library in downtown Naperville. Working with ten community partners in downtown Naperville, they plan to use Mosque Alert to generate community-wide conversations that will examine fears associated with the building of this fictional mosque.
The project also utilizes video plays, community discussions and live stage work. The final artwork will be a production of Mosque Alert at Naperville’s North Central College in Fall, 2016. The stage play will integrate comments and feedback gathered from upcoming community engagement programs.
Silk Road Rising has been working in Naperville for the past two years on the theme of Muslim American integration. This video, by Naperville Community Television 17 (NCTV17), documents one of their most recent presentations at the Naperville Public Library. You can also read this article by Susan Frick Carlman of The Naperville Sun, discussing one of the presentations we recently conducted in Naperville.
You can watch the video below or at https://vimeo.com/122791461