"Hearing"; Iranian Girls and Student Dormitory at the Avignon Festival

The spell was finally broken, and the Avignon Festival - the largest performing arts festival in the world alongside Edinburgh - hosted a performance from Iran in its main section for the first time in seventy years: "Hearing," directed by Amir Reza Koohestani. Koohestani is from a young generation that has valued experimental theater since the beginning of his career and has tried to explore new realms in performance. This experimental approach has opened the way for him since "Dancing on Glasses," and he has likely had the most performances among Iranian directors in various countries over the past decade. Olivier Py, the director of the Avignon Festival, says he was familiar with Koohestani's work and asked him to perform in this year's special section of the festival, "An Approach to the Middle East." "Hearing" has a simple story that is told in a complex manner: initially, a girl named Samaneh is forced to answer some not-so-kind questions posed by the dormitory security - a female guard. Apparently, Neda brought her boyfriend to her room on New Year's Eve when the dormitory was almost closed, and Samaneh supposedly heard them. Everything begins here; at first, we think this event occurred, but as the story unfolds, more complex layers of reality emerge, and by the end of the performance, it remains unclear whether Neda actually brought her boyfriend to the dormitory or not. Although the form of the work is very striking and seems fundamentally formalist, this performance also has intriguing social layers in which various aspects of the position of women in today's Iranian society are discussed: "Hearing" narrates a point where a young girl is accused - for something that is unclear whether she did or not; and in any case, it is a personal matter - she is quickly condemned and expelled from the university, and later, when she faces a rejection for her asylum application in Sweden, she commits suicide. "Hearing" presents this story only through dialogues of two or three people that resemble an interrogation. These two girls stand facing the audience and must defend themselves. With the interrogator/guard placed among the audience - suddenly illuminated by light on her face, we realize she is also sitting among the spectators - we find ourselves in the position of the interrogator: we are actually prying and questioning the personal life of a girl that, under normal and natural circumstances, has nothing to do with others. The performance expands this theme. With the introduction of a video camera - placed on the characters' heads and projecting their image on the screen behind them - reality gains various dimensions: the aspect of "hearing" and "seeing." In several dialogues, the difference between hearing and seeing is emphasized (Samaneh has "heard" the couple but has not "seen" them), and the video camera, which may initially seem like a formal game, conceptually seeks to establish a connection between hearing and seeing: it records the interrogation - perhaps for historical documentation - and also gives us the opportunity to see the faces - albeit distorted - of the two main characters offstage/court. Neda and Samaneh go from the stage to backstage, and we witness them with the camera on their heads. We hear their voices ("hearing") discontinuously and must guess parts of their dialogues. Later, however, we see and hear the complete form of this dialogue again. Repetition forms part of the structure of the performance and becomes an important element. Some scenes are repeated several times, and dialogues, sometimes in subsequent repetitions, become more complete to perhaps unravel a knot of reality; however, ultimately, "reality" is not the issue of the performance: whether Neda brought her boyfriend to the dormitory or not is actually of no importance (it truly does not matter in the ordinary life of humans in the contemporary world in places other than Iran), what matters is the destruction of a girl's life who, alone and exhausted, commits suicide across the waters, leaving her guilt for Samaneh (and perhaps her interrogator/interrogators?).