In 2016, our company received a grant from Tehran city theatre for a two-week program for which I wrote a performance inviting the audience to “tour” the building and think about the history of the institution, what it means to be at the center of Iranian theatre-making and at the same time at the (literary) center of the city.
A Guide to Tehran City Theater is a site-specific performance that happens in Tehran City Theater. In this performance, the audience is invited to participate in a site-seeing tour of the Tehran City Theater. The tour starts on the foregrounds of the building, explaining the historic buildings’ strategic geo-social positioning in the city, and its historical importance as Iran’s most prominent theater house. After several stops around the building, the tour continues inside, where the tour leader shows a timeline of pictures demonstrating recent scientific research that shows that the building is slowly shrinking in size, and continues on to show the audience the center point of the shrinkage, which is positioned somewhere inside the Qashqai Hall.
A Review of the Performance
by Mohammad Hasan Khodaiee
This evening I went to see the performance “A Guide to Tehran City Theatre.” A tour for witnessing “going to the City Theatre.” Everything begins with complete seriousness, and as it proceeds with precise, technical explanations and the actor’s seemingly scientific and rigorous delivery, the audience gradually realizes that the claims being made do not align with reality. Everything is fabricated, actively deceiving those spectators who, together with the actor, step outside the Qashqai Hall and begin an artistic and historical circumambulation around this national theatre complex.
The signs, symbols, and statues surrounding the complex, once again in the tour-guide narration of the Vaheh Group, entangle truth and falsehood, confronting the audience with a fabricated history that lacks nothing when compared to the complex’s authenticated history. Through constant references to “Mir-e Honar,” the narrative playfully renders itself scientific and credible. As if snowfall in the summer of ’91, or the design of the “Flute Player” statue by Bahman Mohasses, were deliberately conceived and constructed to eventually disintegrate, the tour guide shows the audience a notebook containing Bahman Mohasses’s explanations on the matter.
“A Guide to Tehran City Theatre” points to a rupture—a pause that, through wit and playfulness, narrates the decay, erosion, and marginalization of this temple and central institution of the country’s theatre.