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Why are all Iranian governments – past and present – so afraid of the theater? The army of censors controlling this art has not managed to kill theater over the past 117 years. Theater in Iran is not allowed to dance, it is not allowed to portray the people and certainly not the government and the rulers. What happens to theater and dance in times of upheaval?
“The Stoning”, tapestry in Persian ornamentation from the series “Mantis”.
Pour crime de danse, Astiyazh Haghighi, 21 ans, et Amir Mohammad Ahmadi, 22 ans, ont été condamnés à 10 ans et 6 mois de prison. @AlinejadMasih #MahsaAmini pic.twitter.com/iwtzEOsNdA
— L'important (@Limportant_fr) January 30, 2023
In Teheran
Every child in Iran knows that theater is a dialog between people, artists, and the state. In Iran, people act as if they are three different entities: the people, the art, the power. In this piece, I would like to tell the short story of a great misunderstanding which can only be told in such an exemplary way in Iran. It is the story of how a state takes over theater in order to turn the public against art.
It is a tragic story. It begins with the invention of theater out of the spirit of enlightenment, and ends with the destruction of culture, the public, and consequently the state. Yet theater does not oppose the state. Theater is only fundamentally opposed to tyranny.
Under the law, the state has no right to produce theater, but should support it. The ever-increasing pressure being exerted on the theater by various institutions and positions in Iran only underlines the fact that theater is confronted with ideological positions. And precisely they are its problem. It is only a small step from harmless “theater as a means of expression” to “theater with political and social themes” and then another to “theater as social criticism.” Already theater is accused of being dangerous, just as women are accused of being dangerous. Just like the women who are currently ridding themselves of police “control of women,” of the “Gasht-e-Ershad,” the Guidance Patrol that monitors law and morality, the theater is also coming under threat. Those who evade control are a danger – so says the state.
Censorship has forced Iranian theater to refer to life and reality only in allegorical or ironic aesthetics so as not to appear dangerous. Although theater is nothing less than a social event, prohibitions and restrictions provoke it into circumventing these prohibitions and restrictions. Consequently, it becomes political out of necessity – like all people who do not want to be oppressed and devalued.
The history of Iranian theater, it seems, is a history of censorship and the police. Both are considered teachers of society. Both censorship and the police are excellent instruments for enforcing the law. But wasn’t the theater itself intended from the beginning to play this very role – that of the teacher? It wanted to be newspaper and informant, educator and entertainer, as a social event that came from the street and that is now – at this very moment – being put back onto it.
Why is the theater under the supervision of guardians who can incapacitate it with a wave of their hands? Why does a society marginalize its cultural creators, if not to place all cultural power solely on the shoulders of the state itself? When will the creators of culture and art be the guardians of culture again?
It is like it was in 1850, when the liaison between Iran and the theater began with the establishment of the Dar al-Funun school. This institution was dedicated primarily to the French teachings, which, in addition to cultivating traditional Iranian comedies, translated plays from French and presented works mainly by Molière to the aristocracy, the educated elite, and the Shah’s family. Mirza Fateh Ali Akhundzadeh (1812–1878) is considered the first Iranian playwright. His six plays, written between 1850 and 1857, were included in a collection called “Tamshilat” and were exemplary in promoting theater as a medium of social criticism.
Dance workshop without men on the seventh floor of the Dramatic Art Center, Tehran
Tehran in the shadow of the Elburs Mountains
The constitutional revolution of 1901–1906 led to the establishment of the first national parliament in Iran, which helped support this then new idea. Theater as a social instrument with educational responsibilities seemed to be entirely in the spirit of the European Enlightenment. The Dar al-Funun school became a center under Hassan Moghaddam (1898–1925, not to be confused with the “father” of the Iranian missile project). In a speech about theater, he emphasized the need to ensure that “in countries where people do not yet understand the meaning of freedom and where the freedom to express the truth does not yet exist, theater is one of the effective tools to open people’s eyes and ears and plant new thoughts in their heads.” Theater, he said, is of vital political importance for the education and freedom of expression of the population.
He described theater as the instrument of public enlightenment. If its social and critical functions are emphasized, theater is capable of analyzing the circumstances and responding to the conditions in the country and to the existence of the people. As early as the 19th century, Mirza Fateh Ali Akhundzadeh stressed this role of theater as a tool to stimulate the audience’s critical thinking – as an instrument better than admonitions and sermons, because the art of theater awakens the mind and stimulates thought.
Only its content, the text, the message, and the rhetoric are of essential importance. To this day, Iranian theater is viewed as a linguistic, text-oriented art. The body plays no role.
When Iran became a battleground for Russian, British, and Ottoman occupiers in 1918 following the outbreak of World War I, a famine began that resulted in the death of nearly one-third of the population. The Ottoman government crushed the rebellion of the nomadic tribes in Bushehr, Khuzestan, Fars, Kurdistan, and Kermanshah. The parliament, then still located in Isfahan, was dissolved and moved to Tehran. Plague and typhus emerged. There were numerous uprisings against the aggressors, which laid the groundwork for the 1920 coup led by Reza Shah Khan, who later became commander-in-chief of the army. After the fall of the 130-year Qajar dynasty and the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1925, theater recovered under the influence of modernism and national administration: it finally became a state educational instrument.
The first morality and propaganda plays were produced with the establishment of a “Center for the Cultivation of Thought” in 1938. These pieces served to promote nationalism and a return to Iran’s historical roots – part of a larger ideological movement that, paradoxically, hoped to recapture ancient greatness in the transition to modernity. It was a theater of doctrine and propaganda under the motto “God, King, and Fatherland.” The goal was to establish a spiritual unity within society through a spiritual struggle to strengthen the national spirit by means of reform and education. Reza Shah Pahlavi built roads between cities, constructed railways, established internal security structures, and successfully suppressed uprisings and local unrest. For him, culture was a means of overcoming the differences between Iran’s ethnic groups.
For the first time, censorship was enshrined in the law. Following the model of European state theaters, the government perceived itself as the cultural producer for the nation. There were councils to oversee performances, including rehearsals, premieres, and all subsequent performances. The state viewed itself as a mediator between artists and the people, even when this was met with resistance by Iranian theater professionals. Mirza Fateh Ali Akhundzadeh was again invoked, but from the opposite perspective; those in power perceived the official theater as a medium for their educational and propaganda show. Iranian nationalism was portrayed with a touch of historical revisionism. Comedy was also promoted, especially performances by the popular “lalezari.” The legal dictatorship in Iran was expanded to include a cultural one. And so it remained until World War II, when Iran was reoccupied by British, Soviet, and finally U.S. forces, which ensured the rise to power of the young Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1941.
The assembled “spiritual unity of society”.
“Veiled, Shooting Women”, tapestry in Persian ornamentation from the series “Praying Mantis*innen”.
Iran’s Art Height of its Anti-Americanism
With the end of World War II and the withdrawal of the occupying forces, it became possible to form political parties for the first time. Iranian theater artists were now free to engage in the theatrical forms of their choice. They remained concerned with social issues and ideas on how critical theater could be political theater. One of the protagonists of this period was Abdul Hossein Noushin (1907–1971). He was the first Iranian to study theater in France, at the Toulouse Conservatory, and he translated, adapted, and staged modern theater in Iran. He was a member of the Marxist-inspired Tudeh Party and tried his hand at a correspondingly critical theater in the service of the working people.
The failed assassination attempt on the Shah in 1948 marked the beginning of arrests and the banning of a number of parties and theaters as well as all union activities. There was a political lockdown, if you will. No one left their home – a situation that had first occurred in 1922 during the return to tyranny and the closing of parliament by Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar, and again after the 1941 coup led by Reza Khan.
The Ahmadzadeh couple dances privately, i.e. legally, in “1001 Nights Apart” by Iranian filmmaker Sarvnaz Alambeigi
The fear of risk: a conspiratorial dance company rehearses in “1001 Nights Apart” by Iranian filmmaker Sarvnaz Alambeigi
Mohammad Mossadegh (1882–1967) became prime minister in 1951. During his two-year term, which lasted until the next coup on August 18, 1953, Iranians took to the streets with more political ambition than ever before. Political parties were reactivated. Commercial and artistic institutions worked and produced freely. Mossadegh’s direct contact with the people was a novelty. People began to take a renewed interest in the party, the newspaper, and the theater. After the British embargo was imposed on Iran, Mossadegh presented the “Economy without Oil” program. Democratic rights were expanded and the number of political activists increased. For the first time, there was legal freedom, thanks to legislation such as the Act on Independence of the Bar Association. A social security system was established for workers. Freedom of the press and freedom of assembly were granted. Mossadegh sought solutions to strengthen the lower classes in Iranian society and allow a middle class to emerge. Mossadegh’s words on the connection between the country’s political independence and political free will were gratefully received by the theater. After all, Iranians’ demands on a national scale for “freedom” and “justice” had been discredited time and again up to that point. Freedom is synonymous with chaos and an obstacle to the stability of the rule of law. Despotism is better than any kind of chaos. So it was said. Ignorance of what freedom truly is constantly threatens to legalize the tyranny that labels civil liberties as abnormal.
Although this experience of freedom and national independence was brief, it strengthened the theater and its intellectual supporters. Whenever there was a call for freedom and identity, it had a direct impact on people’s attitude towards their theater.
There was only one group that never heard this call: the supporters of the autocrats, who appeared around 1908 and were characterized by irresponsible behavior and subversion of social trends. Groups that called themselves something else (Luti, Lampan, Chumaqdar, Qamekash, Bimokh or Sharan) depending on the period of government. A violent mob armed with knives, they are forces in the shadow of the rulers end emerge as if on cue; it was they who played the key role in the subversion of Mossadegh’s popular and legitimate government in the coup of August 8, 1953. This amorphous group of henchmen regularly succeeded in assuming the role of the outraged and offended people, turning every crisis to their advantage with amazing flexibility, without ever taking responsibility themselves. This happens in other countries as well.
This camp acts as an accelerant in times of unrest, instability, and change, after a revolution, a coup, an overthrow, when the anxious people are disturbed and confused by the events they are witnessing. Members of the organized mob were found among officials and even officers when they appeared in uniform and armed to prevent people from going to the polls during the election that would usher in Mossadegh’s government. During the 1953 coup, the mob appeared in the guise of the people, allowing the Shah to call the coup a “national uprising.” In reality, it was the mob that took to the streets and not the people. Governments in Iran have learned their lesson: Now even the representation of the people as a crowd or chorus is forbidden on theater stages.
This is called “distorting the image of the people,” “falsifying the social role of the people.” Protests, both staged and legitimate, are all too easily denounced. Instead, the “tendency to create heroes” and a “sentimental nostalgia for the past” are said to help the theater. Both claims reflect the official course of Iranian theater. Either one surrenders to the past, in which one seeks the key to salvation today, or one portrays lonely heroes and saviors who are completely out of touch with the real world. Both approaches form the greatest possible contrast to the everyday world in which the audience itself lives.
Trailer for “1001 Nights Apart
Things began to look up in 1962, when the Shah’s reforms, known as the White Revolution, paved the way for an expansion of Iran’s middle class. The urban population, education levels, and social welfare increased. Between 1969 and 1979 for the first time, there was also a tendency towards new forms of performance in which the central medium of theater was not the performance of the text and its criticism, but rather the form of presentation and the atmosphere of the performance itself. This marginal current of theater, also referred to as postdramatic theater, was rejected especially by leftist and Marxist groups. They refused to budge from the hope that “theater should be political in its themes.”
Apart from the popular comedians, the lalezaris, the groups on the stages of the state theaters are sometimes leftist, sometimes liberal, and some have no political orientation at all. However, all of these groups share the conviction that the performance of a play must clearly express a social issue. And it is precisely this clarity that serves as the basis for censorship: Because censorship requires a text-based, logical method. Both sides share the same idea: theater must be a text.
Looking at theater in this way has the decisive advantage that it makes it possible to control a theater. In order to avoid censorship, some theater groups simply began performing foreign plays in which non-Iranian characters appear to have conflicts unrelated to Iran. Even if they were contemporary issues.
In Iran, freedom means above all protection from gazes. Tent vendor in Tehran
With the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the change from a monarchy to an Islamic republic came a cultural revolution and the closing of universities. For 16 months, until April 1980, there was a brief period of freedom for theater groups, especially those whose comedies mocked the monarchy, those who performed dramas about the horrors of the previous government’s security apparatus, and those honoring revolutionaries and heroes. For the first time, a regicide was staged in “Death of Yazdgerd,” written and directed by Bahram Bayzaei. Never before had a king been allowed to die on stage – even Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” had always been on the list of banned plays. Now, murder was permitted. Iranian theater had previously only been allowed to experience this explosive freedom after the constitutional revolution and in the years between 1941 and 1948, during the tenure of Mohammad Mossadegh, which lasted until the coup of August 18, 1953.
Freedom means freedom in the choice of topics. As far as I know, there was only one performance in Tehran during those 16 months that really took advantage of this freedom. The performance, which did not take place in a conventional theater, was titled “Abbas Agha Kargar Iran National” and was directed by Saied Sultanpour (1940–1981). Although these performances were controversial, they were probably the most progressive of their time, as they attempted to establish a new relationship between the audience and the performance with a fresh narrative form that utilized genuine documents and avoided any form of fiction. The radical nature of the production was hardly noticed, since this brief period of freedom for the theater was not so much about aesthetic renewal as it was about the demand for unions and theatrical stakeholders. These are missing to this day.
Universities and theaters remained closed for three years. There was the war with Iraq, with Saddam’s army, which brought its own problems. The reopening of universities in 1985 and a student theater festival introduced a large group of new theater writers, actors, and directors, who would go on to become the most intelligent and progressive artists in Iranian theater to date. Between 1985 and 1990, as the war continued, Iran’s last prime minister Mirhossein Mousavi, who has been under house arrest since 2009, tried to create a platform for the revival of theater. He invited artists who had been expelled or exiled after the cultural revolution to participate. This gave rise to the “Theater Forum,” the first institution of its kind to have its own budget. The Forum demanded independence of the theater from the government. The government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s sixth president (2005–2013), illegally dissolved the Forum in 2006.
The bazaar is the old centre of Iranian society
During the tenure of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani from 1990 to 1998 – the rule of the technocrats – culture and theater were no longer a priority. It was a dark period. Many theaters were closed. People disrupted performances in those that opened. Theater professionals turned to television and cinema to earn a living.
Helena Waldmann: “Letters from Tentland”
However, the reign of Seyyed Mohammad Khatami from 1998 to 2005 allowed for another brief heyday. Over a period of eight years, Iranian theater groups were invited to international festivals, and joint Iranian-European productions such as Helena Waldmann’s “Letters of Tentland” laid the groundwork for the growth of the generation born in the 1980s, who had their first theater experiences as children on the shoulders of their parents. Among them are Samne Zandingad, Panthea Panahi, Ali Asghar Dashti, Reza Tharvati, Amirreza Kohestani, Golzar Hazfi, Hamid Pourazadi, Maryam Mohammadi, Ali Schams, Ashkan Khelnejad, Farzaneh Maidani, Mohammed Mosawat, Yusef Bapiri, Tanaz Tabatabai, Mortezi Ismailkashi, Pegah Tabsinejad, Mehdi Mashhur, Jaber Ramezani, Armin Javan, Ava Sharifi, Ramin Akbari, Hamed Asgharzadeh, Negar Javaherian, Shahab Agahi, Narges Behroozian, Bahar Katouzi, Kayhan Parkhemi, Tahereh Hezaveh, Shakiba Bahramian, Mohammad Reza Aliakbari, Keyvan Sarrashte, Mafham Nazhtshar, Shima Mirhamidi, Milad Shajreh, Hamed Rasouli, Majid Aghakarimi, Bita Kharstani, Jalal Tehrani, Mojtaba Karimi, Naghme Manavi, Golareh Raihani, Nazanin Zahra Rafiei, Homayoun Ghanizadeh, Saeed Behnam, Azadeh Ganjeh, and many more.
They all rejected the mainstream of text-based theater and sought a new body language, new forms of performance, a new atmospheric exchange with the audience.
In 2009, there were street protests against the presidential elections: Once again, theater experienced a new wave of pressure. Performances were arbitrarily banned and artists were arrested by security, military, or judicial authorities. In the years that followed, these institutions controlled culture to put pressure on political rivals of Hassan Rouhani’s government. Under Ebrahim Raisi, who has been in office since 2021, culture as a whole has become a thorn in the government’s side. In February 2022, a number of young people from the modern dance and choreography scene were interrogated by security officials. They had to announce on Instagram that they would no longer pursue their art or train others. The social frustration and the increasing pressure on and surveillance of theater caused theater groups to cancel one performance after another in 2022. Cultural mediators failed to step up in response.
Silent street protest by students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Tehran, December 2022
“The Hanged”, “Tapestry in Persian Ornamentation from the “Praying Mantis” Series
Dancing people in the city of Rasht on the Caspian Sea in November 2022
Today, the middle class continues to shrink, and the lower class is impoverished. What began under Ahmadinejad’s government has been manifesting itself and intensifying from mid-2021 in the form of galloping inflation, ever-increasing prices, and growing poverty, as well as the explosive growth of the bourgeois upper class. While the purchasing power to satisfy even basic needs has dropped to one third for the majority, the internationally discussed death of the Iranian Kurdish Mahsa Amini (2000–2022) following her arrest by the police in September 2022 led to the suspension of all theater performances. Instead, in the wake of the Iranian women’s movement and its slogan “Women, Life, Freedom,” the streets have been transformed into a venue for protest performances. Now the streets are the theater. A policy that distorts Iranian culture beyond recognition and deliberately excludes artists was bound to lead to protests. Over a period of 13 years, from 2009 to 2022, and with increasing pressure, theater has been forbidden to speak out about any of the problems or issues plaguing Iranian society.
The closure of the theater is consistently the result of state censorship, including incompetent, fearful or ignorant cultural officials with dubious tastes. We live in an unstable, narrow, and highly fragile cultural environment where the role of artistry in Iranian society has been denounced, fomenting fears and doubts about the necessity and the how and why of theater. The Iranian women’s protest made this visible and perceptible after the professional ban on female choreographers and dance artists in February 2022: The problem is not the text. The problem is the body.
The demand for freedom of the body in the protest performances of this generation of Iranian men and women contains a clear message for the future: The demand for a true image of Iranian women and men – also, and especially, on stage. Surrounded by taboos and prohibitions, it has hardly been possible for the audience born between 1990 and 2000 to even attend a stage performance. For this generation, there was no amateur theater, no possibility of freedom, no support, and neither cultural mediators nor the heads of cultural institutions – even experts in Iranian theater – seem to have been aware of this issue or to have felt responsible for it.
And once again during these protests, the mob on the side of the government and alongside the police raged against the protesters, aggressively and without accountability, as they did a hundred years ago in the time of the despotic shahs. Before their eyes, citizens are taking over the streets with slogans and activist performances that would not be tolerated on any stage. They are bringing politics directly to the street, as the only arena where people can perform as people. For theater in particular, this comes as a shock. Never again, after these events, will it be possible to ask audiences to watch censored plays and bodies in a theater. Theaters will be forced to reinvent their attitude towards society and their form and manner of performance.
It is a sign of an end and a beginning. Those who today call freedom and the protests by women and youth in Iran chaos, knowingly or unknowingly return to a misunderstanding of the role of theater from 117 years ago. But there are rumors: The relationship between the audience and theater will change; new spaces will open up for human bodies, political bodies, social bodies, natural bodies, urban bodies, moral bodies, thinking bodies, poetic bodies, technological bodies, silent bodies, speaking bodies… for a free cultural body that is responsible for itself.
is director and associate professor with the Department of Acting and Directing in the Faculty of Arts and Architecture at Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran.
This article was made possible with the help and support of https://iranjournal.org/
