by George Robinson

It has been a busy couple of years for Galeet Dardashti. She’s been working on her dissertation on the cultural politics of performing Middle Eastern and Arab music in Israel, and speaking at academic conferences on the topic. She’s been performing intermittently with her superb all-female band Divahn as it prepares to go back into the studio to record its second album. She’s finally close to the end of her most personal musical project to date, “The Naming,” a multimedia extravaganza that will have its live debut next Thursday and be released on CD this summer.

One other small item: She gave birth to her first child 15 months ago.
“Yes, there have certainly been a lot of births in my life lately,” Dardashti says with a laugh.

As fans of Divahn will tell you, Dardashti is the granddaughter of the famed Jewish-Iranian singer Yona Dardashti and the daughter of Cantor Farid Dardashti, who is highly regarded in the Middle East.
“The Naming,” a series of stories of women drawn from the Bible, midrash and even her own family history, is Dardashti’s most ambitious project to date, utilizing not only her own singing and songwriting and her band, but the Syren Dance Company, electronics and video projections. The project, which was developed through the Six Points Fellowship, represents, to her mild surprise, her first excursion into issues relating to gender.

“The songs that I decided to write were impacted by the experience of giving birth. It left me thinking about gender in ways ... well, it’s just pretty intense.”

The concept for “The Naming” was a search for female heroes in unexpected places. In a roundabout way, Dardashti found her heroines first, plumbed their characters later.

“I know the stories most people know, but I thought it would be more interesting to do ones that not as many people know, finding something inspirational and empowering about these characters we never knew. Characters who weren’t Jewish, too.”

As a result, Dardashti gives us unexpected portraits of the Queen of Sheba, the Witch of Endor and Queen Vashti, as well as more familiar figures like Shifra and Puah, the midwives who saved Moses at his birth. But what do all these women have in common?

“I think there’s something in them — even if they’re larger than life —there’s something that we can relate to today, something in their story that we can connect to,” Dardashti says. “And the breaking of stereotypes — what resonates for me is the unexpected in a character you think is going to be predictable.”

“The Naming” will have its live premiere on March 5 at Santos Party House (100 Lafayette St., just below Canal Street) at 7:30 p.m. Proceeds will benefit Earth Birth, a global women’s health collective helping women in war zones give birth safely and peacefully. For information, go to www.galeetdardashti.com or www.santospartyhouse.com.