Shabnam Shirzadi
Ghosts and Bewilderment: Persian Poetic Epistemologies in Performance Analysis
How can we read performance through what it leaves behind rather than what it shows?

Shabnam Shirzadi
11.15 - 13.00 

This workshop/sharing grows out of my ATD Teacher–Researcher Fellowship and experiments with another way of thinking performance: one that treats paradox, hesitation, and the not-quite-understood as meaningful sites of knowledge, rather than problems to be solved.

Most performance analysis ground itself in what can be seen, decoded, and explained. Yet performances work on us through what slips away: gestures and images we can’t recall, a feeling lodges somewhere between throat and chest. Drawing from Persian poetry and the concept of “hauntology, “I ask how do performances speak through what disappears from the vision yet continues in our bodies. 

In Persian poetic thought, knowledge often emerges from paradox, from images written on water, from the space between presence and absence. This project activates these ways of knowing as tools for performance pedagogy, developing embodied practices around concepts like hayrat (bewilderment as a form of knowing), asar (trace), ghiyab (absence), khiyal (the interior image) and tazād (paradox). 

The Sharing

We will move between poems and bodies, using Persian poetic epistemologies as a small toolkit for performance analysis. Together we will touch on classical voices like Rumi and Hafez alongside modern poets such as Forough Farrokhzad and Reza Baraheni, writers who teach us to attend to what is fleeting, hidden, or unsayable.

Through short embodied experiments, we will try out some of these ideas as lived experience. You might find yourself walking as if late and with all the time in the world, sensing the invisible lines your previous movements have left in the room, or creating fragments that capture the ghost of a performance that still haunts you.

These exercises are not about technique or correct interpretation. They are invitations to cultivate different modes of attention: to notice what performances do to our interior worlds, how they lodge themselves in the bāten (the hidden, inner sphere), and what they quietly devalue, disturb, or transform in us.

This work proposes a small shift in questioning: from “What was the piece about?” toward “What has this work left behind? Where does it reappear in our bodies, our rooms, our language? And what can those remains teach us about how we are living and making together?”

We gather around questions -Monikondee film screening

The film starts at 15:00 hrs.
The film lasts 1 hour and 45 minutes.
The discussion afterwards will last approximately 30 minutes.

Information about reservations will follow

Collaborative documentary by Surinamese theatre director Tolin Alexander and Dutch artists Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan. 

A boatman delivers cargo to remote Indigenous and Maroon communities along the river bordering Suriname and French Guiana. His winding journey offers an inside look into the complex challenge of maintaining local customs in the face of rampant gold mining, multinational corporations, and a changing climate.