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Indigenous Performing Traditions in Post-Revolutionary Iranian Theater

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Saeed Talajooy
Saeed Talajooy*
Affiliation:
Intercultural Studies, University College London
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Abstract

One of the major trends in experimental theater refashions the representational and presentational techniques of ancient rituals, medieval dramatic forms and popular performing traditions to create new forms of dramatic expression. In pre-revolutionary Iran, the proponents of this trend included those who worked with Iran National Theater and Theater Workshop. The 1979 revolution heralded the arrival of a different kind of drama in response to a host of new subjects and restrictions. However, unlike the political upheavals of previous periods which led to catastrophic discontinuity in the development of Iranian theater, it did not result in a complete breach. The post-revolutionary practitioners continued working with the templates devised by their pre-revolutionary colleagues, creating a dramatic tradition that has produced several masterpieces during recent decades. The purpose of this paper is to put the history of this experimental trend in perspective and examine the works of three of its major post-revolutionary practitioners. As such it will not focus on the history of indigenous forms or western-style theater in Iran, but on the recent history of this experimental mode and how its practitioners have refashioned Iranian performing traditions.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , July 2011 , pp. 497 - 519
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2011

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References

1 Naqqali (Recounting) is a form of dramatic storytelling, which dates back to the Parthian Gusan(s). Pardeh-khan(s) were naqqal(s) who carried pardeh, a painting of the key scenes of the stories that they described one by one while narrating and performing the scenes. A naqqal who carried pardeh and specialized in religious stories was called pardeh-dar. Naqqal(s) performed on platforms in coffee houses or in bazaars. See Gaffary, Farrokh, “Evolution of Rituals and Theater in Iran,” Iranian Studies, 17, no. 4 (Autumn 1984): 361–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The use of legends from the Shahnameh made naqqali a major form for the transmission of Iranian myths and cultural values among uneducated people. Its use of narration on paintings also made it the only pre-theatrical form similar to cinema. There are images on a screen, and the narrator goes from one scene to another.

2 Ta'ziyeh (mourning) refers to dramatic performances associated with Ashura ceremonies, the annual mourning rituals commemorating the martyrdom of the Shiite saint, Hussein and the male members of his family. With the establishment of Imami Shiism as Iran's official religion in the sixteenth century, these annual rituals became a locus for the reinforcement of an imagined national identity based on religious cohesion. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, due to royal patronage, the semi-dramatic aspects of these rituals transformed into dramatic forms, creating passion plays about sacrificial figures in Shiite and Islamic historiography, including plays on Abel, John the Baptist, etc. Ta'ziyeh reached its highest status in the nineteenth century when it gave birth to about 2,000 plays on more than 270 subjects, including secular and comic ones. Ta'ziyeh is a treasure house of dramatic techniques from expressionist and minimalist depictions to grand scale re-enactments. The audience knows the events and the outcomes of the plays, which are written and recited in verse. The unities are not observed: the characters might go from one city to another by circling the stage and the time is usually announced in the dialogue. Costume and makeup are essential, but the scenery is usually minimal: a basin of water may stand for the Euphrates, a palm branch in a vase for a grove of palms, a black handkerchief for mourning. Yet during the nineteenth century it was also possible to see ta'ziyeh(s) of epic grandeur with hundreds of people performing. For more see Chelkowski, Peter J., ed., Ta'ziyeh: Ritual and Drama in Iran (New York, 1979)Google Scholar and Malekpour, Jamshid, The Islamic Drama (London, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Taqlid (imitating) originates in the musical plays of pre-Islamic traveling and court entertainers, known after Islam as motreb(s) (entertainers), who performed musical dance and song routines, spiced up by mimicking regional dialects and character traits of various professions. From the seventeenth century, due to royal patronage, motreb(s), who also performed in such carnival forms as Mir-e Nowruzi (Lord of Misrule) and Kouseh bar Neshin (The Ride of the Beardless One), increased the dramatic qualities of their forms and gradually expanded them to create taqlid in the nineteenth century. The actors improvised in the fashion of Commedia dell’ Arte to dramatize satirical or folktale scenarios dealing with moral or socio-political issues. See Beyzaie, Bahram, Namayesh dar Iran [Theater in Iran] (Tehran, 1965/2001)Google Scholar; Gaffary, “Evolution of Rituals.”

4 Chelkowski, Peter J., “The Literary Genres in Modern Iran,” in Iran under the Pahlavis, ed. Lenczowski, George (Stanford, CA, 1978), 35Google Scholar.

5 These European directors were fascinated by the technical richness of ta'ziyeh. Grotowski's configuration of the idea of total drama and his experiments in mixing rituals with dramatic action as a means of unifying the actors and the audience seems to be rooted in his exposure to ta'ziyeh. But whereas Grotowski tried to achieve the union by limiting the space and the number of the audience, ta'ziyeh did not force any restrictions on the number of the audience or the actors. Peter Brook, who was engrossed by the power of ta'ziyeh to move people to various emotional states and achieve communal catharsis, wrote:

I saw in a remote Iranian village one of the strongest things I have ever seen in theatre: a group of 400 villagers, the entire population of the place, sitting under the tree and passing from roars of laughter to outright sobbing—although they knew perfectly well the end of the story—as they saw Hussein in danger of being killed, and then fooling his enemies, and then being martyred. And when he was martyred, the theater form became truth. [Parabola, IV (May 1979): 52]

In 1972 Brook transferred some of these forms to the west in his adaptation of Attar's mystic poem, The Conference of the Birds (1177). It was also in Iran that he and Ted Hughes cooperated with Mahin Tajaddod to produce Orghast (1971) in an attempt to transcend language by creating poignant moments out of the material of “Prometheus and the vulture, the basic myth of the early Persian religion and Life is a Dream” (Hughes, “Language and Culture” in Stan Correy and Robyn Ravlich, “Interview with Ted Hughes,” in Zeta, available at http://www.zeta.org.au/~annskea/ABC1.htm, accessed 8 May 2004) The Shiraz Art Festival was for more than a decade a major forum of international avant-garde drama. However, it was also among the many sources of unrest that were gradually pushing Iran towards the 1979 revolution. The staging of ta'ziyeh sacred plays next to plays which contained explicit scenes of sex was not appreciated by those who still knew what ta'ziyeh meant.

6 Habiballah Lazgee, “Post-Revolutionary Iranian Theatre” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 1994), 9.

7 See Keyhan Farhangi [Cultural Keyhan], 85 (June 1992): 60–63.

8 Chelkowski, Ta'ziyeh, 9.

9 These include Rostam and Sohrab (1997–98), The Flying Shams (Tehran 2000, Paris 2004, Italy 2005, Tehran 2007), Mourning Siyavash (Tehran 2003, Paris 2004) and Rostam's Seven Labours (2009).

10 These include The Miserable (1996), Rostam and Sohrab (2005), Uncle Tom's Cabin (2008), and Rumi (2009).

11 Bakhtin, Michael, Rabelais and His World, trans. Iswolsky, Helene (Cambridge, MA, 1968), 7Google Scholar. Quoted in Innes, Christopher, Avant Garde Theatre 1892–1992 (London, 1993), 9Google Scholar.

12 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 7; Innes, Avant Garde Theatre, 9.

13 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 7.

14 Sahneh, 6–7 (1999): 63.

15 Sahneh, 6–7 (1999): 65.

16 See Nasirian, Ali, “Moqaddameh” [Introduction], Bongah-e Taatral [Theater Agency] (Tehran, 1978)Google Scholar.

17 Imagination helps us imagine ourselves as others and thus refrain from hurting them. It also creates the mental pictures of new forms of being human in narratives that reconstruct personal experience and daily life. The imaginative artist reconstitutes these images in narratives based on premeditated themes and ideals that people then use to reset their ideal models of behaviors. Thus art imitates life, and life imitates art in a circle in which artists create ideal images, and people fail, succeed, reconstruct or transcend them as emulating them.

18 Shelley, P. B., “A Defence of Poetry” (1821), in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2, ed. Abrams, M. H. (New York, 1993), 765Google Scholar. In Shelley's article, the title is used for “the poet,” but as the reference to Shakespeare as bard suggests, poet in this sense means creative artist, poet and dramatist.

19 Beyzaie, Bahram, “Interview with Bahram Beyzaie,” Film Monthly, 120 (1986): 64Google Scholar.

20 Iranian playwrights and filmmakers use this as a self-reflexive device to reveal the precarious relationship between reality and representation. In Under the Olive Tree (1994), for instance, Kiarostami creates powerful moments by displaying the distance between the actors and their roles, the process through which we create narratives to give meaning to our lives and the collapse of these narratives under the actualities of life.

21 Ta'ziyeh Mozhek (comic ta'ziyeh) was performed on non-Muharram periods with a tragic counterpart from the Ashura events. Arousi Belqeis (Marriage of Belqeis), summarized below, for instance, was performed before Arousi Qasem (The Marriage of Qasem) in which the groom was martyred before the couple were united:

The Qoreish (the wealthy ruling tribe in Mecca before Islam) and Jewish women hold a luxurious wedding party for Belqeis, to which they invite the gentle and generous Fatima, the daughter of the prophet. They are planning to show off their wealth and ridicule Fatima's simple ways. Fatima who is aware of their intention decides not to accept the invitation, but the prophet asks her to go, insisting that God will be with her. She dresses herself in her usual outfit and sets off for the wedding. But Gabriel and some heavenly angels appear and dress her in a magnificent dress from paradise. When Fatima enters the wedding with her usual composure and beauty clad in her magnificent heavenly dress, the jealous bride dies of a heart attack. Fatima, however, resuscitates her with her prayer. The miracle leads to the conversion of all the relatives of the bride and the groom to Islam. (Beyzaie, Namayesh dar Iran, 154)

Arousi Belqeis is also classified as a conversion play, in which a non-Muslim converts to Islam due to a contact with one of the Fourteen Infallibles, watching a ta'ziyeh play, or seeing Jesus Christ in Imam Hussein.

22 Post-revolutionary Iranian theater has played an important role in expanding the borders of public life for including some forbidden forms of arts. For instance, if it were not for the persistence of some directors to use dance movements in their theatrical performances, dance would have disappeared from Iran's official public life after the revolution. The same is true about female solo singing, which is illegal in mixed-audience concerts, but is seen in some theatrical performances, with Rahmanian's play being a particularly daring one. One can argue that the day Mirza Abul-Qasem Ibn-e Hassan Gilani (d.1815–16) authorized ta'ziyeh as religiously legal was a crucial turning point for all performing arts in Iran. Ta'ziyeh provided a legal space for impersonation and simulation and helped preserve Iranian music. It also made rhythmic movement to music, which was already practiced in mystic circles, a potential act of piety in orthodox Shiite Islam. The arguments based on his precedence and that of Seiyed Ali Yazdi (date of Fatwa, 1903) and their followers provided a space within the Shiite jurisprudence that helped preserve these performing arts after the revolution. For the precedence of the religious arguments on ta'ziyeh, see Mayel Baktash, “Ta'ziyeh and Its Philosophy,” in Chelkowski, Ta'ziyeh, 95–120.

23 Rahmanian, Mohammad, Shahadat Khani-e Quadamshad-e Motreb dar Tehran [The Tragic Recitation of Quadamshad the Merrymaker in Tehran] (Tehran, 2005), 60, 72Google Scholar.

24 Rahmanian, Shahadat Khani-e, 73.

25 Quoted in Soma, “Wail or Hail: Noruz Celebration with a Ting of Wisdom”, The Iranian (14 April 2000) at < http://www.iranian.com/Arts/2000/April/Majlesnameh/index.html.

26 Mir-e Nowruzi, the Iranian Lord of Misrule, is a festival held from 20 March, the beginning of the New Year in Iran, until 1 April, when people spend a day of festivity and games in picnics. A report written in 1923 and quoted in Allameh Qazvini's paper on the festival reads:

I saw a procession of people on foot and on horseback. One who was clad in an expensive costume and carried an umbrella rode on a splendid horse. People accompanied him, walking in front or behind, as if they were his entourage. Some had long sticks in hand with shapes of animals’ heads on them … as if the King was returning from a conquest. People were following them singing merrily. … People said that during the Nowruz festival, one becomes the clown governor of the town and is obeyed until deposed on the first day of April. … The job was kept in the family. [Yadgar, 1, no. 3 (1944): 14]

Among Mir-e Nowruzi's entourage, there were four costumed figures; Amu Nowruz (Uncle New Day); Haji Firouz (Black-Face Merry Man); Atash Afrouz (Fire-Juggler); and Ghoul Biabani (Desert Giant). During the seventeenth century, these figures stepped out of the procession to create their own dance-plays and merry songs for the New Year Festival or to join popular troupes as stock characters (see Beyzaie, Namayesh dar Iran, 53–4) Dariush Farhang and Mehdi Hashemi's popular TV series, The Tale of the King and the Shepherd (1982) was one of the first uses of the form after the revolution. The series which is influenced by Beyzaie's Talhak (1976) and Death of Yazdgerd (1978) mixes folk narratives with an actual event in the court of Shah Abbas (r.1582–1626) to contemplate the impossibility of political justice under inherited monarchy.

27 The title contains the plurisignation of Mehr as love and as Mithra, suggesting the similarity between the imagined Ali of Iranian culture and Mithra (Mehr in modern Persian), the divine protector of oath and justice in Iranian religions. As evidence for this, one can note the images of Ali and the lion and the centrality of Ali's image in Iran's traditional sports club where before Islam Mithra is argued to have been the inspiring force.

28 Taqiyan, Laleh, Darbareh-ye Ta'ziyeh va Taatr [About Ta'ziyeh and Theater] (Tehran, 1995), 138–52Google Scholar.

29 Ensafi, Javad, Siyahbazi az Negah Yek Siyah [Blackface Play from the Perspective of a Blackface Actor] (Isfahan, 1999)Google Scholar.

30 See Mirza Reza Tabatabaee Naeini, Rouznameh Teyatr and Sheikh Ali Mirza, Hakem-e Boroujerd [Theater Periodical and Sheikh Ali Mirza: the Governor of Boroujerd, 1908], ed. Mohammad Golbon and Faramarz Talebi (Tehran, 1987), 49–53.

31 Amjad, Hamid, Shab-e Sizdahom [The Thirteenth Night] (Tehran, 2000), 104Google Scholar.

32 See Shirazi, Abolqasem Anjavi, Baziyhai-e Namayeshi [Dramatic Games] (Tehran, 1969)Google Scholar.