Alternative Discourses of Heroism and Emancipation in Iranian Theatre
Day One: Wednesday 23 September
Panel One: 13.30-15.30: Music, Narration and Gender as Emancipatory Forms
Saeed Talajooy, University of St Andrews ([email protected])
The Emancipatory Aesthetics of Self-reflexive Parallel Narratives
Abstract: This paper examines the ways presentational, confessional or testimonial parallel narratives or monologues have been employed in Iranian drama to reflect the complementary, contradictory or metatheatrical narratives of events at personal, interpersonal and sociopolitical levels. While at personal levels such narratives reveal our conflicting or reinforcing narratives of selfhood as they determine our thoughts, actions and reactions, at interpersonal levels they compete to present 22 alternative versions of truth about events and relations, and at sociopolitical and historical levels, they reflect the rivalries and alliances of dominant and subsidiary discourses of collective identity as they attempt to turn the individuals into subjects of ideologies and carve a people’s path to an imagined future by presenting themselves as bearers of truth. The paper begins with a diachronic overview of how Naʿlbandian, Khalaj and Beyzaie used parallel narratives to reflect the relativity of truth, the fluidity of human identity, the conflicts of heroes and their shadows, and the layered and perspectival nature of memory and historical reporting. It, then, focuses on two recent reformulations of this emancipatory trend which remain personal in their focus but reflect the way totalitarian discourses of being and belonging overwhelm our lives by highlighting the ways characters reconstruct their memories or remain entrapped in their personal obsessions. The first play examined in the paper is Amir Reza Koohestani’s Shenidan (Hearing, 2015) which focuses on the reports of an event when it happened and years later when the people involved are much older and one of them is dead. The second play will be Ali Asghar Dasthi’s Nāmbordeh (The Above-Named Person, 2018), a metatheatrical play on the experience of an Iranian director whose failure during a trip to Saint Petersburg coincides with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Bio: Saeed Talajooy (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) of Persian and Iranian Cultural Studies at the University of St Andrews. His research explores changing patterns of Iranian society and the modalities of Iranian identities by studying the ways ideas, forms, stories and characters travel across eras and genres to produce new ways of seeing, hearing and understanding in society. His recent publications include thorough examinations of some of the most important emancipatory discourses in Iran in two monographs, Iranian culture in Bahram Beyzaie’s Cinema and Theatre: Paradigms of Being and Belonging (1959-1979) and Bahram Beyzaie’s Cinematic and Dramatic Worlds: In Dialogue with Time, (1979-2025). His other recent works include an edited volume, The Plays and Films of Behram Beyzaie: Origins, Forms and Functions, translation-and-analysis of two of Beyzaie;s plays in two books The One Thousand and First Night and Afra Or the Day IS Passing; and a chapter entitled ‘From Earth and Water to Spandarmaz and Anahita: Women as Archetypal Agents of Emancipation and Sovereignty in Iranian Myths and Folktales’
Parmis Mozafari, University of St Andrews ([email protected])
Staging the Forbidden: Theatre as an Emancipatory Space for Dance and Women’s Solo Singing
Abstract: This paper argues that although after the 1979 Revolution, dance, female solo singing, and popular music were subject to sweeping bans, their strategic relocation to the theatrical sphere made the stage a key site of aesthetic negotiation and cultural emancipation. The paper first provides analyses the various approaches that facilitated the reemergence of music and dance under alternative names and conditions. For instance, it shows how dance was first reintroduced in public performances as harakāt e mowzun (“rhythmic movements”), a restricted but legally permissible form framed as theatrical expression rather than dance; how traditional popular music found renewed legitimacy almost exclusively in plays; or how female solo singing resurfaced in theatrical musicals, where singers were positioned as actresses rather than vocalists. It, then, categorises the types of productions that evolved since the 1990s to show how music and dance evolved from being occasional tools of stylised expression to primary forms of expression in several major theatrical trends: (1) indigenous-style plays with music and dance as nostalgic or satirical forms for questioning the present; (2) grand musical adaptations of Iranian legends and Sufi narratives; (3) grand musical adaptations of Western novels and plays; (4) puppet operettas on Iranian and non-Iranian narratives; and (5) plays on the conditions of the marginalised people and narratives with nostalgic use of pop music highlighting the cosmopolitan and multi-layered nature of Iranian identities. In the final section, the paper analyses three recent productions that create emancipatory visions by protecting, absorbing and reshaping music and dance to reintroduce new ways seeing and understanding. The paper proposes theatre as a site of cosmopolitan visions where embodied movement, gendered voice, and popular sound reconfigure understandings of agency, visibility, and cultural resistance.
Bio: Parmis Mozafari is an Associate lecturer of Persian language and culture at the University of St Andrews. In addition to teaching Persian at different levels, she also contributes sessions on Iranian music and gender, music and censorship to undergraduate and graduate modules in ethnomusicology and Iranian cultural history. She also teaches Persian calligraphy and has done several projects of reading and translating Persian manuscripts. Her research interests include song, music and national identity; music and female performers in contemporary Iran; music and female performers in Persian literature; religious music in Iran; and the role of religious minorities in Iran’s musical culture. [email protected]
Parisa Sajjadi, University of St Andrews ([email protected])
The Pleasure of Ignorance
Abstract: In this paper, I read Farhad Nazerzadeh Kermani’s The Eunuchs of Eagle-Dragon as a deliberate undoing of heroic memory across time. The play draws on the historical prestige attached to the names of its three central figures, a dynasty of celebrated physicians, an acclaimed poet and administrator, and a revered Sufi poet, then reassigns their professions, so the healer becomes a Sufi and the mystic becomes a physician, showing that this prestige is not rooted in any stable heroic essence, but can be detached from the name and reassigned elsewhere. The same undoing is repeated in the men’s actions, since heroism here is not betrayed but absent from the start. Arbab, the owner of their pleasure garden, deliberately keeps the three unaware of the Mongol invasion of Nishapur, and their final submission, accepted with almost no resistance, confirms there was never any heroic substance there to defend. Nazerzadeh Kermani then refuses to let this undoing stay confined to the thirteenth century. Malkom, an extratemporal figure recalling colonial priest admirals and medieval travellers such as Marco Polo, appears alongside the funeral procession of Il-khan, carried by double headed colonels, one Mongol and one Western, and followed by modern allegorical figures named Money-amorous, Smuggling-amorous, War-amorous and Tech-amorous. Through these figures, the same catastrophe extends into present day financial, military and technological forces. Only the chained Theatre Director, still holding his script close to his heart, keeps a form of faith in art alive against all this. As the play’s English translator, I approach it in relation to the workshop’s interest in the reformulation of heroic ideals and ancient heroes in new attire, arguing that its historical and allegorical displacements are a deliberate undoing of heroic memory across time.
Bio: Parisa Sajjadi holds a PhD from the University of St Andrews, where her research explored the image of utopia in modern Persian poetry. She is currently working on translations of the work of Farhad Nazerzadeh Kermani, a celebrated Iranian playwright, bringing his writing to new audiences. Outside academia, she works in operations management.
Fahimeh Najmi, Paris 8 University ([email protected])
Women as Emancipators in Contemporary Iranian Drama: A Look Back at Four Iranian Plays Written Between 2016 and 2023
Abstract: Since the 2010s, the Iranian theatre scene — alongside the major social upheavals that have shaken and continue to shake society — has undergone a certain evolution in its portrayal of women. This paper, which adopts a mainly socio-critical approach by focusing in particular on the relationship between the individual and society – and more specifically on the individual’s place within society – proposes to examine four plays: Dāmpezeshki (2016) written by Shirin Jaroughi, Is (Ast, 2018) written by Parnia Shams, Catalepsy (2019) written by Ali Amir-Riahi, and The Old Maids (Pirdokhtarhā, 2023) written by Ali Shams, in order to demonstrate how, within a theatrical structure where social ties and political tensions are directly intertwined, women have found opportunities to take on the role of emancipators.
Bio: Fahimeh Najmi is an associate researcher at the “Scènes du monde, création, savoirs critiques” Laboratory (EA 1573) – University of Paris 8. NAJMI holds a doctorate in Theatre Studies from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is the author of Le Théâtre, l’Iran, et l’Occident (L’Harmattan, 2018) and of articles in New Theatre Quarterly, Registres and Alternatives théâtrales. Deprived of work in Iran after five years of teaching, including in the Faculty of Art and Architecture of Tarbiat Modares University (TMU) in Tehran, she now lectures and researches in France. In parallel, translator (among others of Quelques histoires des pluies d’amour et de mort by Abbas Nalbandian, L’Espace d’un instant, 2023, and Les Vieilles Filles de Ali Shams, L’Espace d’un instant, 2026) and critic, her current research and writings focus on the question of identity, the role of women and ideologies in theatre.
Panel Two: 16.00-18.00. Heroes and Antiheroes of Myth, History and Resistance
Dr Anna Heller, Marburg University ([email protected])
-Configurations of the Heroic: Gholam-Hoseyn Saʿedi’s Five Plays of the Constitutional Revolution
Abstract: Gholam-Hoseyn Saʿedi (1936–1985) is regarded as one of the leading representatives of late Pahlavi Iran’s Committed Literature (adabiyāt-e moteʿahed). He was particularly passionate about theatre and wrote more than thirty plays, including twelve pantomimes. In his 1966 collection Panj Namāyesh-nāmeh az Enqelāb-e Mashrutiyat (Five Plays of the Constitutional Revolution), published under the pseudonym Gohar Morad, Saʿedi drew on a historical subject widely employed by committed writers to articulate social criticism under censorship.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, Saʿedi does not focus on the leading figures and intellectual architects of the Constitutional Revolution, but rather on the common people and their motives for resisting state violence. This also reconfigures the heroic: Saʿedi’s plays do not centre on the conventional hero, but on ordinary individuals in their everyday struggle for existence, fought within the narrow confines of social and political circumstances they perceive as immutable.
Moving beyond the prevailing interpretation of the five one-act plays as allegories of the increasingly autocratic Pahlavi state, this paper examines the conditions under which the heroic emerges in Saʿedi’s fatalistic vision of society. Although each play explores a distinct category of heroism—the hero, the anti-hero, or the martyr—the heroic in Saʿedi’s works does not appear as an inherent trait of his characters but rather emerges as a situational phenomenon. It takes shape in moments of existential and moral crisis, manifesting as involuntary heroism, moral bravery, or heroism born of despair. The plays thus invite interpretation not only as political allegories but also as reflections on the emergence of the heroic in conditions of political violence, existential hopelessness, and moral choice.
Bio: Anna Heller completed her PhD at the Otto Friedrich University of Bamberg in 2021 with her thesis on the theatre and dramatic literature of early Pahlavi Iran. Since 2021, she has been employed as a Postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Iranian Studies, CNMS, at Philipps University of Marburg. Here she is researching new topics on 20th century Iranian theatre. Since 2014, Anna has been teaching language courses (Persian basics) and seminars for the BA programmes of the CNMS and the MA Iranian Studies at the Philipps University of Marburg. Her current project is entitled ‘Women in 20th-century Iranian Theatre History: A gender-inclusive Theatre biography of Loreta Hayrapetiyan and Abdolhoseyn Nushin’.
Parviz Jahed, Independent Theatre and Film Scholar ([email protected])
Reconstructing the epic heroism and the character of Rostam in Mohammad Rezaei Rad’s Hashtomin Khan
Abstract: Mohammad Rezaei Rad’s Hashtomin Khan (The Eighth Labour) constitutes one of the most sophisticated dramatic reinterpretations of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh in contemporary Iranian theatre. Rather than merely adapting the final episode of Rostam’s life, the play subjects the epic hero to a profound aesthetic and philosophical transformation that questions the ideological foundations of classical heroism. This article argues that Rezaei Rad employs an emancipatory aesthetic to reconstruct, rather than simply deconstruct, the figure of Rostam. Through the techniques of theatrical defamiliarisation, psychological interiorisation, existential dialogue, and intertextual rewriting, the play liberates both its protagonist and its spectators from inherited conceptions of heroism grounded in physical strength, martial glory, and patriarchal authority. Instead, it proposes a post-epic model of heroism founded upon vulnerability, ethical self-consciousness, compassion, and the acceptance of mortality. The encounter between Rostam and Esfandiar becomes not merely a continuation of their legendary conflict but a philosophical confrontation between competing conceptions of history, religion, memory, and violence. The article combines close textual analysis of Hashtomin Khan with theoretical perspectives drawn from Jacques Rancière’s notion of the emancipated spectator, Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarisation, Bertolt Brecht’s concept of historicisation and George Steiner’s understanding of tragedy. Through direct analysis of the Persian text, accompanied by English translations, the article demonstrates that Rezaei Rad transforms one of Persian literature’s greatest epic heroes into an ethically complex modern subject. In doing so, Hashtomin Khan exemplifies how contemporary Iranian theatre reimagines cultural memory by replacing the certainty of myth with the uncertainty of human experience and offers an alternative vision of heroism grounded not in conquest but in the courage to confront one’s own humanity.
The play’s central innovation lies in its creation of an “eighth labour/trial” beyond Rostam’s traditional seven labours. Unlike the heroic trials of the Shahnameh, which require physical strength and the defeat of external enemies, the final labour/trial presented by Rezaei Rad is an internal confrontation with memory, guilt, mortality, and the destructive demands of heroic identity. By transforming Rostam from an invincible warrior into a wounded and questioning human being, the play reveals the hidden costs of the heroic tradition (loneliness, violence, sacrifice, and the impossibility of ordinary happiness). Through the theoretical perspectives of defamiliarization, trauma studies, and performance theory, this article examines how Rezaei Rad uses myth not as a static cultural inheritance but as a site of reinterpretation and ideological questioning. The play does not reject Rostam’s heroic status; rather, it proposes a new form of heroism in which tears, doubt, fear, and compassion become signs of moral strength. In this sense, Hashtomin Khan participates in a broader movement within contemporary Iranian theatre that revisits classical narratives in order to imagine alternative forms of identity, resistance, and human dignity.
Keywords: Mohammad Rezaei Rad, Hashtomin Khan, Rostam, Esfandiar, Iranian theatre, emancipatory aesthetics, heroism, Shahnameh, defamiliarization, existential theatre.
Bio: Parviz Jahed is a filmmaker and a critic, researcher, and lecturer in film and theatre studies. Parviz holds a PhD in Modern Languages (Cultural Studies of Cinema) from the University of Saint Andrews, UK. He is the editor-in-chief of Cine-Eye, also known as Cinema-Cheshm, a UK based film journal focused on independent and art cinema in Iran and all around the world. He is the editor of the first and second volume of Directory of World Cinema: Iran, which published in 2012 and 2017 by Intellect Publication in the UK. Parviz’s latest book, titled The New Wave Cinema in Iran: A Critical Study, was published by Bloomsbury Publication in London in 2022. His forthcoming book, Ebrahim Golestan’s Modernist Cinema and Literature (Bloomsbury, November 2026), will be published in November 2026. In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Parviz is a filmmaker and his documentary films deal with the lives and cultural contributions of various artists, exploring their artistic visions and addressing social and political themes. Some of his notable films include Ta’zieh Another Narration (2000), Bonjour Monsieur Ghaffari (2011), Michael Culver: A Portrait of an Actor (2008), Solaiman Minasiaan: A Man with a Movie Camera (2006), The Message of the Wall (2009), Maria: A 24-Hour Peace Picket, Day-Break (2007), Coffee-Cup Reading (1996), and The Killer Is Among Us (2025). Parviz currently teaches Film and drama at the University of Art in Shiraz.
Dr Ramin Farhadi, University Manchester ([email protected])
Resisting Powe and Ideology: The Practice of Political Theatre in Contemporary Iran
Abstract: This paper argues that contemporary Iranian theatre has developed two dominant dramaturgical strategies for resisting ideological power: the adaptation of canonical texts and the staging of history. While often examined separately, I propose that adaptation and istoricization constitute complementary forms of political theatre that enable indirect critique under conditions of censorship and political constraint. By reworking western authors, classical literature, and Persian cultural texts, or by revisiting Iran’s historical events and figures, playwrights create aesthetic distance from the present while inviting audiences to interrogate contemporary structures of authority, violence, and social injustice. Rather than offering straightforward political commentary, these dramaturgical practices function as emancipatory aesthetics that disrupt official narratives, recover suppressed voices, and expand the horizons of political imagination. Through selected examples from post-2009 Iranian theatre, this paper demonstrates how adaptation and istoricization have become the principal artistic languages through which Iranian dramatists negotiate censorship and transform the stage into a space of resistance, critical reflection, and alternative political possibility.
Bio: Ramin Farhadi holds a PhD in Drama from the University of Manchester. His research specialises in postwar British theatre, Persian drama and performance, censorship studies, and contemporary Shakespeare. His publications address American, British, and Iranian theatre and performance, and his work has appeared in prestigious journals including Ibsen Studies, Asian Theatre Journal, and Studies in Theatre and Performance. He has also served as a reviewer for academic journals in the field. His forthcoming monograph, Shakespeare Speaks Persian: Adaptation and Performance in Contemporary Iranian Theatre, will be published by Manchester University Press in June 2027. The book is the first critical study devoted to Shakespearean theatrical adaptation and production in Persian. His forthcoming book chapters include “Postrevolutionary Fiction Prison Writing” in The Cambridge Companion to World Prison Writing and “The Afterlife of Macbeth in Iranian Performance” in Reimagining Shakespeare, both forthcoming in 2027. His recent research has expanded into theatre of war in Iran, and theatre and environmental crisis in Anglo-American theatre.
Marjan Moosavi, University of Pittsburgh ([email protected])
Reading the Monstrous: Alternative Heroism in Naghmeh Samini’s Monster Reading
Abstract: How can a monstrous body become a site of heroism? This paper examines Naghmeh Samini’s Monster Reading (2011; staged 2014) as a theatrical reimagining of heroism that departs from dominant paradigms of sacrifice, bodily perfection, and moral certainty in contemporary Iran. The play locates heroism in acts of reading, listening, caregiving, and ethical endurance performed by women whose lives unfold within the constraints of domestic space, disability, and censorship. I argue that Monster Reading transforms the home from a site of surveillance into a space of ethical and imaginative possibility. Through its intermedial dramaturgy, the play bends conventional understandings of embodiment, temporality, and perception and offers an alternative discourse of emancipation grounded in everyday ethical and ontological practice. I read the monstrous, in this context, as a dramaturgical strategy that unsettles normative assumptions and the heroic imaginaries about femininity, motherhood, bodily integrity, and social value. My contextualized textual and aesthetic analysis situates the play within ongoing debates on gender, disability, censorship, and theatrical aesthetics, arguing that Samini’s dramaturgy redefines heroism as the capacity to inhabit it collectively and creatively.
Bio: As an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre Arts, she specializes in decoloniality, dramaturgy, global and diasporic theatre, MENA/SWANA theatre, and theatre historiography. Marjan’s research has been supported by fellowships and grants, including those from ASTR, Fulbright, the Mellon Foundation at Harvard, and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Her articles have appeared in scholarly journals and edited collections, including 50 Key Performance Artists, Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, Asian Theatre Journal, TDR, Theatre Topics, and New Theatre Quarterly. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming two-volume anthology Decolonization and Dramaturgy in Global Theatre and Performance (Bloomsbury in 2027), and is working on her manuscript on contemporary Iranian theatre. Marjan also collaborates as a research dramaturg and cultural consultant with theatre companies across the U.S. and Canada. She serves on the MENATMA Educators Circle Committee and is a Regional Managing Editor for TheTheatreTimes.com.
Play Performance: 18.30-21.30
‘Theatre Laundering’
Day Two: Thursday 24 September
Panel Three: 9.00-11.00 Alternative Forms of Representation and Scholarship
Ali Shapouran, University of St Andrews ([email protected])
Methods of Studying Cultural Production: A Reflection on Theatre
Abstract: How different, in the end, are the cultural behaviours of scholars and artists today from those of a thousand years ago? This short reflection addresses this question. It begins with the fact that people can be wrong about the reasons behind their decision-making and proceeds to two cases of intellectual history.
Comparing modern editorial practices on the Shahnama with medieval scribal activities, the study suggests that the routines of modern discipline of textual criticism to establish texts show strong structural commonalities with the practices of earlier learned communities. What looks like progress often remains a more elaborate version of the same underlying patterns used for millennia. A parallel continuity appears in artistic production. The study compares the Parvin, Sasan’s Daughter (Parvin, Dokhtar-e Sasan) with the Shahnama to show that Sadeq Hedayat’s (d.1951) selective reformulation of the glorious past is clearly analogues to that of Ferdowsi (d. c.1025) himself. In both cases, earlier narratives are reworked under present pressures to serve new aesthetic and ideological needs. In both scholarly and artistic cases, modern ways of framing arguments and competing for recognition follow the same patterns as medieval ways as well.
If real, then methods focused primarily on local nuances and individual variations may be insufficient without an overarching framework. The study suggests that approaches able to detect long-term patterns— including those informed by cultural evolution—offer a more cumulative way of studying cultural production across time.
Bio: Ali Shapouran is a researcher in Middle East history, prioritising intellectual history of the Persianate world. His research combines close philological and phylogenetic analysis with attention to cultural transmission and scribal and elite networks. He is particularly interested in long-term patterns of literary and artistic production. His PhD thesis, recently completed at the University of St Andrews, analyses the medieval textual history of the Shahnama. He is currently developing a postdoctoral project on elite networks and cultural transmission in the pre-Mongol and early Mongol periods. He has published on various topics, from manuscripts and textual criticism to intellectuals of the twentieth century.
Behzad Lotfi, University of St Andrews ([email protected])
Performing an Alternative Sensible: Symbolic Repertoires and Political Action
Abstract: Political symbols do not merely provide resources for representing identity or interpreting reality. When assembled into a symbolic repertoire, they can contribute to the formation of a world within which roles, actions, and affects become perceptible and intelligible in different ways. Bringing scholarship on symbolic repertoires into dialogue with Jacques Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible, this paper argues that the invocation of figures, narratives, and symbols drawn from Iran’s pre-Islamic past can be understood not simply as the return of markers of national identity, but as contributing to the formation of an alternative sensible: an order of relations in which past and present, body and affect, legitimacy and resistance, and political role and action are differently configured.
Drawing on Diana Taylor’s distinction between the archive and the repertoire and Richard Schechner’s concept of restored behaviour, the paper approaches performance as a site where this alternative organisation of the sensible becomes perceptible through embodied actions and repeatable roles. From this perspective, a symbolic repertoire is not merely a collection of shared meanings; it contributes to the formation of a world in which particular roles and actions become intelligible and performable. Performance, in turn, is not simply the expression of a pre-existing political identity, but can involve assuming, repeating, and reactivating patterns of action whose meanings depend on the relations that organise that world. Two examples illuminate this relationship: dancing during mourning rituals, which may appear incompatible with conventional codes of grief but, within an alternative sensible, can reconfigure the relationship between body, mourning, and resistance; and the declaration “I must become Fereydun,” in which Fereydun shifts from an object of mythic reference to a role assumed by a political actor seeking to reactivate its pattern of action in the political present.
The paper argues that the political significance of such performances lies not merely in their difference from established practices, but in how they disclose and sustain an alternative distribution of the sensible. The established order may appropriate and redefine individual symbols within this repertoire—from Mount Damavand and the Homa bird to Fereydun—but the alternative sensible cannot be reduced to its constituent symbols, since its meaning resides in the relations it establishes among symbols, bodies, affects, roles, and actions. Its incorporation into the established order would therefore require the neutralisation of the very principle by which it is organised. What these performances contest, then, is not merely the content of the existing order or the admission of new subjects into it, but the organising principle that determines what is intelligible, which roles are conceivable, and what kinds of action can be recognised as political.
Bio: Behzad Lotfi is a PhD candidate in Persian Cultural Studies and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. His research examines the aesthetic regime of the Islamic Republic through Jacques Rancière’s theory of the distribution of the sensible, focusing on cinema, political media, and alternative visual cultures in contemporary Iran. His broader interests include political aesthetics, media theory, censorship, and Iranian cinema.
Amin Azim, Toronto University ([email protected])
Dissensus Beyond Borders: The Transnational Politics of Form in Contemporary Iranian Theatre
Abstract: This paper asks what happens to the politics of dramaturgical form when contemporary Iranian performance moves across national, linguistic, institutional, and spectatorial borders. Rather than approaching transnational Iranian theatre primarily through exile, diasporic identity, or the representation of Iran, I examine how mobility and its restriction, translation, circulation, mediated presence, and intercultural spectatorship become internal to the organization of performance itself.
The paper develops the transnational dimension of Dissensus Dramaturgy, a historically situated and relational critical concept emerging from my broader study of contemporary Iranian theatre between 2009 and 2024. Dissensus Dramaturgy does not designate a genre, movement, or stable aesthetic shared by artists. It describes a plural historical tendency in which political and institutional pressures enter dramaturgical organization and, under particular conditions, may disturb established arrangements of visibility, audibility, presence, agency, spectatorship, and performability. Political force, in this account, resides not simply in what theatre represents but in how theatrical relations are organized.
Through comparative readings of Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit and NASSIM, Amir Reza Koohestani’s En Transit, and Javaad Alipoor’s Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, I examine distinct ways in which transnational conditions become dramaturgical material. Soleimanpour transforms restricted mobility, absence, language, and translation into procedures of delegated presence and circulation. Koohestani makes border regulation, transit, multilingualism, and suspended mobility constitutive of theatrical form. Alipoor uses digital platforms, global capitalism, and infrastructures of online knowledge to unsettle the epistemological frameworks through which Iran and the non-West are rendered legible.
These works do not constitute a unified diasporic aesthetic. Instead, they raise a more difficult question: what travels when dissensual form travels? I argue that transnational circulation does not simply transport an already existing political force; it reconfigures the relations among form, audience, institution, and historical context through which dissensus can become perceptible. Cosmopolitan Iranian theatre thus emerges not as the transcendence of cultural specificity, but as a field in which identity, legibility, spectatorship, and political form are continually renegotiated.
Bio: Amin Azimi is a Tehran-born, Toronto-based dramaturg, theatre director, critic, and scholar of theatre and cinema. Trained in Dramatic Literature and Cinema Studies, he has more than a decade of experience teaching theatre, film, dramaturgy, playwriting, and directing at universities in Iran and Canada. His research interests include transformations in twenty-first-century dramaturgy; the aesthetics and dramaturgies of postdramatic theatre; the politics of producing and representing Iranian social movements on international stages; and digital storytelling and intermedial performance. His scholarly and critical writing has appeared in Asian Theatre Journal, Alternatives théâtrales, Theater der Zeit, and The Theatre Times. His artistic practice includes directing and dramaturgical collaborations in Iran and Europe, and his theatre criticism has received multiple distinctions from the Iranian Theatre Critics, Writers and Researchers Association. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and a recipient of an SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.
Elham Maadani, University of St Andrews, ([email protected])
The Aesthetic Potentials of Documentary Theatre in Contemporary Iran: Citizen Narratives, Public Encounter, and the Ethics of Representation
Abstract: Over the past decade, successive waves of protest in Iran have generated a substantial body of citizen-produced images, videos, audio recordings, testimonies, and narratives through which experiences of violence, loss, resistance, and collective action have been documented and circulated. The expansion of digital media has increased the possibilities for narrating events from the perspectives of those directly involved in them. Taking this condition as its point of departure, this article asks: at a moment when citizen narratives and documents have become significant materials in relation to contemporary Iranian memory, what aesthetic and ethical potentials might documentary theatre offer for creating a public and critical encounter with them?
The article locates the potential of documentary theatre neither in consolidating these materials into a single narrative nor in replacing the media through which they are produced and circulated, but in the transformation that performance may bring to the conditions of encountering them. Placing documents, testimonies, voices, and bodies within a performative structure can bring the relations, tensions, and silences among different narratives before spectators and make them available for critical reflection. Yet this process also raises an aesthetic and ethical question: how can experiences of suffering and loss be given aesthetic form without marginalising the voices of those whose experiences are being represented through processes of selection, arrangement, and representation, or turning those experiences primarily into a means of eliciting affective responses from spectators? From this perspective, the agency of those whose narratives are represented becomes inseparable from any consideration of documentary theatre’s possibilities.
To examine these questions, the article analyses Lola Arias’s Minefield as a case study, not on the basis of any historical equivalence between the Falklands/Malvinas War and contemporary Iran, but by focusing on how the performance brings personal testimony, documentary materials, performing bodies, and memory into relation. An analysis of Minefield’s performative strategies provides a way to consider both the possibilities and the limits of documentary theatre in engaging with historical experience and lived narratives, while opening a space for thinking about what this form might make possible in relation to contemporary Iran. Ultimately, the article proposes that the potential significance of documentary theatre in this historical moment lies not in producing a definitive account of the past or homogenising memory, but in creating a public, plural, and ethically responsible space in which experiences and narratives that participate in shaping contemporary memory can be encountered and reconsidered.
Keywords: documentary theatre; contemporary Iran; citizen narratives; memory; public encounter; ethics of representation; agency
Bio: Elham Maadani holds an MA in Theatre Directing from the University of Art, Tehran. Her research interests include theatre and performance studies, documentary theatre, and philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to performance, with particular interests in sacrifice, melancholia, and the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Jerzy Grotowski. Alongside her academic research, she has experience in playwriting, directing, and performance. Her practice-based MA project, Abraham and the Dagger, explored sacrifice through a performance informed by Kierkegaard and Grotowski. She has also co-authored research on melancholia in Samuel Beckett’s work and co-translated Marvin Carlson’s Theatre and Islam into Persian.
Panel Four: 11.30-13.30 Emancipatory Visions of Being, Swinging and Representing
Arvand Dashtaray, Iranian-Dutch Theatre Practitioner ([email protected])
Let’s Swing a Bit: Resilience, Playfulness and Evolutionary Survival
Abstract: A reflection on the necessity of performance, playfulness and swinging for evolutionary survival.
Bio: Arvand Dashtaray is a theatre and filmmaker who played major roles in Tehran’s independent cultural scene for over two decades through Virgule Film and Performing Arts Company. He directed 35 theatre productions, pioneered independent production and international collaborations, and initiated the construction of Hafez Hall. As International Director of the 2018 Fadjr Festival, he curated a landmark programme featuring artists and companies including Dries Verhoeven, Susanne Kennedy, Philippe Quesne, Heiner Goebbels, Rimini Protokoll, and Münchner Kammerspiele, while also establishing the festival’s first residency programme. Dashtaray made his feature-film debut with The Absent Director, a one-shot film exploring the tensions and hidden agendas of a Tehran theatre company. Premiering at the Busan International Film Festival in 2021, the film blurs the boundaries between past and present, fiction and reality, with actors playing versions of themselves. Since 2022, Dashtaray has been based in the Netherlands, where he has collaborated with Rose Stories and QISSA and directed Verhalenhuis, De Verhalenslager, and Find The Actor at Theater aan het Spui. In 2023, he directed Ik ben Antigone, a Virgule–Altstadt Rotterdam co-production inspired by the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in Iran, which also prompted his departure from the country.
Naghmeh Samini, Playwright and Scholar
The Absent Hero: The Challenges of Creating the Iranian Hero
Abstract: Playwriting in Iran faces two major challenges: one global and the other more specific to its own context.The global challenge is the encounter with the posthuman world. Theatre, from its very beginnings, has been shaped by the definition, exploration, and analysis of human situations. Now, however, it must find ways to reinvent itself in a world where Homo sapiens, as a species, is gradually losing its intelligence and agency to AI., and with them its position as the protagonist. The more locally specific challenge is connected to the recent movements and wars in Iran. When external circumstances become an acute reality, in which people perform genuinely heroic acts or experience tragic deaths, what happens on stage as representation or simulation can lose much of its impact. Under such circumstances, how can theatre preserve its essential, ontological position?
In this presentation, I would like to pose this question and explore biographical theatre as one of the forms that, in recent years, has attempted to move beyond some of the limitations and challenges facing theatre.In the posthuman age, AI is still incapable of experiencing the minute details and complexities of an actual human life. In this sense, turning to the lived experiences of real people can still possess a distinctly theatrical quality. At the same time, in an era when any hero constructed by the imagination risks falling short of reality, engaging with real-life figures may offer a meaningful proposition for this transitional moment.
I will explore this idea through three examples.The first is a play I wrote for the Virgool Theatre Group, “Theatre Laundry”, based on the experiences of three living women artists.The second is “The Angle of History” by Mohammad Rezayi Rad , Based on Walter Benjamin’s life and death , and The third is “Do Not Touch Me” by Asghar Dashti, which focuses on the life of an Iranian artist who has been imprisoned. Through these three works, I will consider how biographical theatre can respond to a moment in which both the traditional representation of human experience and the conventional figure of the theatrical hero are being radically challenged.
Bio: Naghmeh Samini (PhD) is a playwright, scriptwriter, and lecturer in Dramatic Arts. Born in Iran, she earned her BA in Drama and MA in Cinema from the University of Tehran. She completed her PhD in Art Studies at Tarbiat Modarres University in Tehran, with a thesis focused on Drama and Mythology. Naghmeh was a professor at the University of Tehran for 15 years and has been an affiliate professor at the University of Washington (Seattle) since 2019 and Seattle University since 2024. Over twenty of her plays have been staged in Iran, France, India, Canada, the United States, and other countries. Notable works include the child, Sky Horses Rain Ashes, The Home, and The Forgotten History of Mastaneh. Her screenplays, such as Main Line, Heiran, and Three Women, have won awards, and she is the scriptwriter for one of the most popular Iranian series, Shahrzad. With over 25 years of research on One Thousand and One Nights, her insights are reflected in her theoretical publications, speeches, and creative works. Inspired by One Thousand and One Nights, she employs magic realism and non-linear narratives in her plays. Naghmeh is also the author of several semi-fictional and theoretical books, including Wars and Bodies, The Theatre of Mythology, and I Am Sindbad, You Are a Traveler.
Saba Zavarei, Goldsmith University, ([email protected])
Performing the Ordinary: Everyday Acts of Emancipation in Iran
Abstract: This presentation examines women’s everyday performances of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran as forms of emancipatory aesthetics that reconfigure conventional ideals of heroic action. It focuses on Donya Rad and Sara Sasani’s performances of the ordinary: appearing in public without the compulsory hijab, choosing how to dress, walking, gathering, dancing, and occupying spaces from which their bodies had been regulated or excluded. These gestures transformed everyday life into a site of performance and political possibility.
By performing the ordinary in previously prohibited ways, women not only challenged state regulation of female bodies but also participated in producing a new social reality. Drawing on Erika Fischer-Lichte’s transformative understanding of performance, the paper considers how the body became both a refusal of an imposed identity and an enactment of another; one in which women could appear, move, dress, and inhabit public space according to their own choices. These performances complicate conventional notions of heroism by locating emancipatory action in everyday practices that make alternative ways of living visible and imaginable. At the same time, they transform public spaces through alternative forms of social production.
Bio: Saba Zavarei is an artist, researcher and urbanist working at the intersection of performance and urban studies. Her research explores the relationship between bodies and public space, and how everyday practices produce, negotiate and transgress urban environments. She is an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, founding editor of Konesh, and Visiting Research Fellow at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. Her forthcoming book (Cambridge University Press, 2027), based on her doctoral research, examines how Iranian women create emancipatory spaces through transgressive everyday performances. She is also co-editor of Everyday Revolutions: Socially-Engaged Art in Contemporary Iran (Routledge, 2027), exploring art and activism in Iran over the past two decades.
Sanaz Afshin, University of Groningen, ([email protected])
Looking for a Small Cultural Pause through Theatre: A reflection on Theatre Laundering by Virgule Theatre Company
Abstract: This presentation explores Theatre Laundering by Virgule Theatre Company, written by Naghmeh Samini and directed by Arvand Dashtaray, as a performance that creates a cultural pause: not a suspension of politics but a deliberate interruption that unsettles normalized assumptions without resolving the tensions it exposes. Focusing on its premiere at Spui Theatre in The Hague on 14 March 2026, as well as formal and informal conversations with the performance group, the presentation asks how theatre can create a moment in which dominant narratives are not replaced by new certainties, but rendered unstable enough to be re-seen.
Approaching pause as both a dramaturgical and political act, the presentation reads the performance through Jacques Rancière’s account of dissensus and emancipatory aesthetics. It argues that the performance’s power lies in redistributing perception, intensifying contradiction, and sustaining multiple perspectives in suspension. By staging parallel narratives without compelling alignment with any single position, Theatre Laundering transforms theatrical space into a site of collective reflection and even discomfort, where established frameworks are temporarily disrupted, and invites the audience to sit with uncertainty, even when it feels uneasy.
Rather than offering grand answers, the performance exemplifies theatre’s political potential in modest yet urgent acts of interruption. In a cultural moment demanding immediacy, resolution, and position-taking, such a pause becomes a radical aesthetic and political act, a moment where familiar assumptions fracture and the world, even temporarily, becomes newly available for thought.
Bio: Sanaz Afshin is a Theatre and Performance Studies researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Groningen. Her research focuses on participatory theatre, storytelling, migration, representation, and the relationship between the arts and society. Through an interdisciplinary approach, she examines how participatory artistic practices create spaces for migrants to share experiences, negotiate representation, and address broader social and political questions. She holds an MA in Theatre Studies from Sapienza University of Rome and has experience in research, education, and community-based cultural projects. Her experience includes collaborative projects that bring together academic research, artistic practice, and community engagement.