REPORT OF JUDGMENT DAY

“Tables project“

first table

REPORT OF JUDGMENT DAY 2023

Summury:

In 2020, Ali Asghar Dashti, the director of the Alternative Performance section of the Fajr Theater Festival, invites his colleagues, Nasim Ahmadpour, Narges Hashempour, and Hamid Pourazari, to judge the works of this section of the festival and select the best ones. However, before the festival and coinciding with the crash of the Ukrainian plane in the Tehran sky due to missile strike, 18 out of 21 participating groups withdraw from the festival, and they never perform their works at that state-sponsored festival. Three years later, Nasim Ahmadpour decides to hold the judging session of that festival in the form of a performance. It’s a judging session for plays that were never performed. They decide to document and remind the process of selecting projects, the withdrawal of groups, and everything that happened after the withdrawal of groups. Among them shines a name, a girl named Ayna, who was supposed to perform a theater project called “We Burned, You Burned, They Burned” in one of the ruins of old theaters in Tehran. Ayna is diagnosed with cancer during the making of her project. This project is her first life project. But Ayna decides to withdraw from participating in the festival with her friends and colleagues. Ayna has always wished to perform in theater. While knowing that her project is her only chance to perform a theater, she decides to withdraw from the performance. Ayna passes away in 2022 due to the metastasis of cancer and forever loses the chance to perform in theater. Her performance never materializes. In “Day of Judgment,” the jury, a year after Ayna’s death, awards the Best Performance of the Festival, which was never held, to Ayna’s performance, a performance that never happened.

About performance:

The Report on the Judgment Day recounts a jury meeting at the 2020 Fajr Theater Festival in Tehran. Ahmadpour, herself a member of that jury and participant in the festival, had proposed that the meeting be held publicly as a performance during the festival. However, the jury meeting was canceled due to the majority of the nominated performance groups withdrawing their participation in protest against the then evolving political situation in Iran. Written for the four members of the jury, The Report on the Judgment Day is an attempt to perform that never-held jury session. In a sense, Ahmadpour’s text points to the potentials of what is intentionally left unrealised.