»And always always always it is world …« Elisa Rössler’s voice sets your teeth on edge. It booms through walls, across the courtyard and over the parking lot during the rehearsals for Hamed Taheri’s one-person show, »Femmina Balba.« Just two years ago, the German-Chilean had nothing to do with the theater. Now, she faces the audience all alone, and confronts them with sentences that seem to erupt from her innermost self.

She speaks about the three-year-old child, paralyzed from the hips down, whom Primo Levi calls Hurbinek in »La tregua« (The Truce), a helpless Auschwitz victim who is only remembered through the author’s text. Rössler call him by a different name, but she speaks of him as would a mother who is lamenting her dead son. She speaks Italian, English, Russian and German, utters sentences that raise the hair on the back of your neck, even without knowing that they stem from Heinrich Himmler. When she, as aforementioned, appears to shout out her worst pain, it’s only a line from Rainer Maria Rilke’s »Duines Elegies.« She is the »Femmina Balba,« a figure from Dante’s »Divine Comedy,« a siren who lures sailors off their course with her stuttering song. She lends her voice to the world’s failures, the unimportant, nameless creatures, the deceased.¹

In Hamed Taheri’s theater there is no stage that would set apart the play from everyday life, no distinction between the actors and their role; the texts he uses, world history and his actors’ personal grief are one. Taheri came to Stuttgart in 2005 through the concert organizer Musik der Jahrhunderte (Music of the Centuries, mdj), which presented the ISCM World New Music Festival 2006. For the first time in the history of the festival, which has been taking place annually in different locations since the 1920s – but for a long time only in Europe – mdj explicitly raised the question of the status of contemporary music in an era of globalization.²

How can one wonder about globalization in a place like Stuttgart without starting out with the people in whose biographies globalization is embodied, Taheri replied when the organizers wanted to know whether he could imagine participating. For two weeks, he approached people on the streets, people from Turkey, Argentina, Ghana or Afghanistan. In the end, three out of 30 candidates were left, as well as Madjid Bahrami from Iran, with whom the director had previously worked.

Before he came to Stuttgart, Taheri already was touted as a sort of insider’s tip for radical Iranian underground theater. He rehearsed with lay actors in a basement room, staged Sophocles’ Antigone and »Les nègres« by Jean Genet. In the Iranian theater world his endeavors did not meet with much success. The critics could not understand that he wasn’t concerned with the color of skin in »Les nègres,« but instead with a clever reversal of the implicit pact with the audience: in the original text, Archibald Absalom Wellington’s introductory speech questions the relationship between a »drama that takes place up here« and the audience that »can sit comfortably and quietly in their seats.«³

Taheri’s efforts to be invited to the great Fajr Theater Festival were unsuccessful. But he found a patron at a Center for Dramatic Arts, a department of the Ministry of Culture, which no one in the Iranian theater world can bypass. This patron made a performance possible at eight o’clock in the morning, with 50 invited Western guests. Taheri received 40 invitations to American and European stages, but hardly any of the engagements worked out in the end since all contacts went through the Center for Dramatic Arts, which had disclaimed the director. Only a few, like Giorgio Gennari of the Parma Theater or Johannes Odenthal of Berlin’s House of World Cultures persevered. Gennari threatened to cancel an entire Iranian theater festival. And Odenthal pretended to have already informed the press, which would surely gleefully pounce on the case.

All of this sounds quite spectacular, but Taheri really isn’t interested in fame and glory. With his first Stuttgart project, he wasn’t trying to reach a large audience but just a single visitor at each performance. In the back courtyard of a publishing house, in the stairwell, the four actors performed thirty fragments. Each visitor saw only one of the fragments, which he or she had chosen from a cemetery–like arrangement in the basement. In addition, the audience was also asked to participate, for example if an actor were to lie down in his path, his breath rattling like the victim of a catastrophe.⁴

In such a dramatic moment, the observer doesn’t care whether the sentence »It is awful that hope sprawls like a malign growth until the very last second« is by Heiner Müller. What is very clear instead is what this sentence means for the actor: for Mohammad Khoramzadeh, for example, who during the rehearsals feared deportation even after the odyssey of his flight from the war in Afghanistan.

The director called the project »Avenir! Avenir!« after an essay by French historian Jules Michelet. Modernity’s dreams of the future have become nightmares. There can be no »grand narrative« here; this story can only be viewed in bits and pieces, in fragments. Maybe it can’t be told at all, but can only touch and present the life stories of each individual: that is why theater is necessary.

»Every biography is a lie,« Taheri says. The story we tell ourselves about ourselves is sugarcoated and full of holes. In his actors’ résumés the director seeks traces of hidden traumatic events. These are symptoms, not only in a psychological sense, but also of history. Theater can neither undo what has been done nor can it offer therapy; it can merely bring out the symptoms. The political dimension of Taheri’s theater lies within this contradiction, a theater that eludes all ideology.

This theater has its preconditions. It stems from the tradition of Antonin Artaud, whom Taheri got to know in a circuitous manner: in photos of performances by Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor, Taheri found the facial expression of his mother, who during the Iranian revolution, when Taheri was three years old, had sudden seizures and could no longer open her mouth. At that point, the electrical engineer decided to turn to theater.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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