FOR(NAMED)

Fall 2018

Tehran

Summery

The story revolves around the journey of an Iranian director, Ali Asghar Dashti, to Saint Petersburg, Russia, to stage a theater production. It’s a grand project that gets canceled unilaterally by the festival director. Now, Ali Asghar Dashti recounts his version of how the project was canceled after his return from Saint Petersburg. He attempts to blend reality and imagination in this narration. The performance culminates with the director dancing on stage for his mother.

About performance

is a semi-documentary show about the trip of Director to St. Petersburg in order to do a collaboration with a Russian festival; his proposed show will be based on 3 texts; Dostoyevsky’s “White Nights”, Pushkin’s “The Little Tragedies”, and “One Thousand and One Nights”. The project was designed as a walking theatre in which the audience followed the actors in the streets of St. Petersburg. After 75% of the show was prepared and rehearsed, the project was canceled through the unilateral decision of the festival. The show begins with a documentary narrative of the personal collapse of the Iranian director in Russia, and with his imaginary interview with Mikhail Gorbachev in search of the roots of this collapse in that country; he is trying to find parallels between this emotional aspect of collapse and the collapse of the Soviet union, but as he is too involved in his own tragedy, the interview turns into a monologue and some kind of lecture performance about what could be and how it ended.

The meetings between the Director and the Festival director and their liaison (Interpreter) come alive with the help of different theatrical forms and devices, but representing the past becomes difficult when we only have one side of the story.

Throughout this endeavor we see the director’s collapse and the emergence of a new idea from the ashes of that collapse, but only through a very personal expression of his hardships.