Performance as a Political Fantasy

I gave this lecture on June 29, 2024, the first day of Iranian Theatre Today: Walking in the Dark, a four-day seminar on unconventional theatre in Tehran.

I started from one claim. Political power depends, in part, on producing a version of reality and keeping it in place: a version in which its structures, values and stories look natural, even inevitable. If that reality is built, it can be interrupted.

A performance sets its own rules. For as long as it runs, the people in the room agree to a different order of time, of relations, of being present together. Inside that agreement, what usually looks fixed can start to look arbitrary. Made, and so open to being made otherwise.

This is where I locate the political force of performance. Not in depicting politics or carrying a message, but in building another reality, however briefly, where other arrangements can be tried out and lived in for a while.

The other talks in the seminar looked at underground theatre in Poland and the Eastern Bloc, alternative theatre in the United States, art around the fall of the Berlin Wall, theatre after the Arab Spring, and histories of independent theatre in Iran.