Intimacy, love and separation in contemporary Iranian theatre

http://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2013/dec/17/timeloss-intimacy-love-iran-theatre

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Iranians are not very expressive about matters of personal intimacy. Whether on film, in the theatre, or even the visual arts, most Iranian artists at home and abroad don’t explicitly address intimate behaviour. They prefer discretion and metaphor. This is the effect of a cultural phenomenon that goes well beyond official censorship.

In one well-known example the married couple, Nader and Simin, in Asghar Farhadi’s film A Separation, never frankly discuss the state of their intimate relations in front of the camera. It is, rather, their social problems – the illness of Nader’s father, Simin’s desire to leave the country, their financial difficulties – that justify her request for a divorce. As nothing about any deeper explanations for the breakup is made clear, spectators (especially foreign ones unfamiliar with Iranian culture and artistic codes) have to figure out what is really going on.

Even better examples may be found in the theatrical work of Amir Reza Koohestani. In 2001, he staged a remarkable autobiographical play, Dance on Glasses, about a romantic relationship and its conclusion.

“At the age of 22,” he recently described, “I was crazy about Metallica and a girl I haven’t seen since. Metallica’s CD was always on the player, and at any time for no particular reason, while writing or not, day or night, we could hear James Hetfield’s voice from my room. Even the day the girl knocked at my door to break up for always, the CD was playing.

“We talked for one hour or two using words boys and girls say at this age when they break up. Despite the fact I could hardly hear her voice, and that she kept saying ‘what, what?’ when I was asking her questions, I didn’t make a move to turn off the music. I couldn’t. I was knocked out by her words and unable to stand up anymore.”

In Dance on Glasses, a man and a woman face one another, sitting on opposite sides of a long table. They desperately try to communicate and understand each other. As if paralysed, they are fixed to their chairs. Their love is condemned and they are forced to break up their relationship.

Created during Mohammad Khatami’s first term in office, often considered a golden age of artistic freedom in Iran, it is striking to see how this play freely reflects intimacy as well as passionate feelings and despair. The man and woman are both 20 years old. She lives in a friend’s house and regularly visits her lover to rehearse a dance performance named Dance on Glasses. She smokes and seems to have drug problems. Throughout, the unusual way Koohestani directs actors is notable: a specific way of dealing with the Farsi vernacular, a subtle body language that is extremely unusual in Iranian theatre, where overacting and loud if not hysterical dialogue remain the norm.

As I rediscovered the piece on DVD, I was astonished to see how flexible the censorship system was 12 years ago. It actually authorised scenes in which the couple danced together and talked about matters such as drugs, freedom and intimacy. More broadly, it authorised the depiction of a young girl who has fled her family home and is trying to lead an independent life.

According to Koohestani, “This Khatami period was a very creative era. And directors like myself, Hamid Poorazari, Reza Servati and Hassan Madjooni, among others, we all started directing plays during that time. Things were much easier and we had much more freedom of speech.”

Dance on Glasses’ vision of youth at a time of transition, right after the dark postwar period, is fascinating. During this transitional era, Iran had very limited access to western culture, to satellite channels or the web in its early years. Young people listened in secret to rock music, particularly hard rock acts such as Metallica, Queen, and Scorpions, whose sounds seemed to perfectly echo Iran’s suffocating atmosphere.

Dance on Glasses was a major hit and toured internationally for four years. While Khoosetani observed that the play was “a success much bigger than we could ever imagine,” his feelings about it are mixed. Today, at the age of 34, he is celebrated in Iran and abroad. He writes and mostly directs his own plays and his Mehr Theatre Group travels around the world. However, he spent years without returning to the subject of love. He went through great doubt and hesitation before deciding to undertake a project that builds on the 12-year-old work that first made his name.

At the Festival Actoral in Marseille this autumn, Koohestani presented his new play, Timeloss. Commissioned by the festival and co-produced by the Mehr Theatre Group and Switzerland’s Festival La Bâtie in Switzerland, the play premiered in Geneva a few days before its Actoral debut.

In a program note, Koohestani wrote, “Some weeks ago, I was cleaning my room and found an old Kunsten Festival des Arts brochure with one visit card inside. On it, there was my name followed by a phone number. Flashback, 2004: the show Dance on Glasses comes across with an unexpected audience success. The day after our last show, the festival has given me a mobile phone with a Belgium SIM card and some visiting cards with my name and new phone number.

“Back in 2013: I looked at the visiting card and dialed the number. After some rings, a young man picked up the phone. I said hello in English. He answered me in English too, but with a foreign accent. So I asked him in Persian: ‘I’d like to speak to Amir Reza Koohestani.’ He answered: ‘This is him.’ Then I said: ‘I’d like to ask you for the right to adapt Dance on Glasses.’”

This surreal anecdote suggests the structure of his new play. Koohestani’s voice is fragmented through three characters: a stage director, heard only as an offstage voice; an actor, playing his former life; and another offstage voice, heard at the beginning and end, reading a love letter for the woman he lost. By using multiple narratives strategies, combining the past and the present, Koohestani distances himself from his own personal history and confuses spectators about a couple’s intimate relationship.

In Timeloss, two actors – played by Mahin Sadri and Hassan Madjooni – meet one another after years of separation. They are called upon to collaborate again as the director of Dance on Glasses wants to dub their voices for a DVD version of the play. The action happens in a recording studio, using video sequences from Dance on Glasses over which the actors on stage speak.

After a while, they start arguing about their separation, and it becomes difficult to understand whether their words belong to the text of Dance on Glasses or if they are debating their own past relationship. One thing, however, is certain: this couple is no longer a couple. In contrast to the previous play, they sit at two different tables and face the audience; they do not look at one another until the play’s end.

The reason for their separation is unclear. They did not fight nor did they make any effort to give things another chance. They simply decided to end the relationship, while each secretly hoped that the other would save it. And now, we discover, neither has been able to rebuild a life – they cannot repair the past, and they cannot move on from it. Once again, Koohestani shows us a couple who cannot withstand the reality of their relationship.

In conversation, he evoked the difficulty of his own mental journey back in time. “Rather than expressing my personal intimacy, I was looking for a documentary reality. You see, Timeloss is a time explorer machine. How could I get back to my twenties, when I didn’t even know what theatre really was? I had barely seen four or five plays in my life. And even though I really wanted to get back to my early feeling of love, I realised it was impossible because my conception of love has radically changed since that time. Also, I have no relation to memory and never feel nostalgic.

“Twelve years have passed and Timeloss is the story of a separated couple still in love and unable to stay together more than an hour. In Islam it is said that the dead, before reaching paradise or hell, have to pass an intermediate state, a space where nothing is good or bad, an indefinite space where everything is unclear and transitional. And here is the state of this couple in Timeloss: they play an endless game where they make their partner and themselves suffer.

“Such a situation is really linked to Iranian society: in Iran, single individuals are not socially recognised and they face difficulties whenever they want to rent an apartment of their own or find a job – not to mention the family pressure. Therefore, the young are, to some extent, forced to live in couples and may face endless issues in their relationship if they can’t get along. Basically, in order to be part of the society, couples do whatever they can to save their relationship.”

For Iranians, the consequences of separation are not easy to bear. Timeloss is about not only personal intimacy, but also the seeming impossibility of living a single, independent life in Iran. “What needs to be found is a legal recognition of the single individual,” according to Koohestani. One might suggest that something else needs to be found as well: social (and legal) recognition of personal intimacy.

Koohestani is now presenting Timeloss in Tehran. How did the Iranian censors react?

“Once they read the play, they didn’t know what to say," Koohestani said. "They found it so intimate that they felt the need to judge it once it was on stage.”

<em>The play is scheduled to run in Tehran through 10 January 2014</em>

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