Prison Talks
Set between the invisible walls of a Foucauldian total institution, Amir Reza Koohestani’s Blind Runner mixes facts with fiction, theatre with cinema and poetry with oppression, tenderly outlining the frailty of love and the sturdiness of hope in the midst of totalitarian repression and thus offering a vehement reflection on freedom from both sides of privilege.
«A man wrote on his Instagram account that he and his wife, who is currently in jail as a political prisoner, promised each other to run each night on either side of the prison’s wall. In the months before her arrest, they had been training to run as part of a plan to leave Iran and reach England. They prepared to cover the 38 km stretch of the Channel Tunnel at the only possible moment, the five hours between the last train of the night and the first one of the morning. But when his wife was arrested a week before their departure, this training for a new life was interrupted». Starting from this true, actual, factual, fictional and frictional (hi)story, Iranian playwright and director Amir Reza Koohestani generously gifts the world with a resounding, silver-tongued vowel of resistance, unafraid to keep quiet.
Following 1979 Islamic Revolution, 2009 Iranian Green Movement (which called for the resignation of then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad amidst accusations of fraudulent elections) and the long series of strikes and protests that began in 2011 and are still ongoing to this day, aimed at ending political corruption, achieving economic and social stability and equality, protecting civil and political rights, including women’s rights, and topping the theocratic regime of the country’s long-time Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – responsible through his Guidance Patrol (aka morality police), amongst other things, also of the death while in police custody of Mahsa Amini, which rekindled and magnified the civil unrest within and without Iran – the land of nightingales, flowers, poets and love has slowly but inexorably turned into a nation of individual achievers, strong family ties and powerful elite. As Koohestani himself admits, «to escape from the image of police officers and the smell of tear gas that were stored in my memory, I ran on a road where, behind the metal fences, you could see the emerging class of new money who had made a living circumventing western sanctions; they clumsily played golf with imported non-standard golf clubs on artificial grass during their idle hours».
Seeking an illusion of liberation, then, the director began running himself to exhaustion, eventually damaging his body in the process. Some years later, when dramaturge Samaneh Ahmadian showed him a photo of the blind runners at the Paralympic Games in Tokyo, he suddenly realised that, «as for a blind person with his or her guide runner, freedom is collective. You can’t be free when you are alone. In the crowd’s presence, freedom and the struggle for it gain meaning», and so, Blind Runner was born.
Rehearsed in Teheran with the Mehr Theatre Group and premiered in Brussels’ Théâtre Les Tanneurs on May 16, the play recounts the moral responsibility of being present, the audaciousness of asserting one’s own utopias, the porosity of one’s own subjectivity and the yoke of untiringly enduring illegality along with the euphoria of one’s own existence. Set between the invisible walls of a Foucauldian total institution (walls that are made transparent – and thus observable, categorizable, deconstructible – also thanks to Iranian student activist Zia Nabavi’s insight on the prison experience), Blind Runner mixes facts with fiction, theatre with cinema, poetry with oppression, tenderly outlining the frailty of love and the sturdiness of hope in the midst of totalitarian repression.
In this regimented, phone-booth dialogues between Ainaz Azarhoush and Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh in which breathless words fall straight like rain, then, running becomes a tool for achieving freedom – or at least experiencing it. But what of those who cannot run, who cannot afford the luxury of a guide, a sponsored flight, a safe passage, an asylum status, a family reunification? The answer, as Koohestani acrimoniously reminds us, is written in the alphabet of drowning, bleeding, tortured, frostbitten, sun-scorched, mutilated, imprisoned, blinded, teargassed, pushed-back and finally dead bodies: «immigrants are either fleeing from dictators who are puppets of world powers or fleeing from poverty resulting from centuries of their property being looted by colonialists. Yet Europeans are unwilling to accept responsibility for destabilising these people’s lives by doing their best to push them back to their destabilized countries. (Just read again The Illegal Migration Bill that had its readings in the House of Commons in Britain last March: anyone who arrives ‘illegally’ will be unable to claim asylum, and the Home Secretary will have a duty to remove them.) As a result, there is no other option for the immigrant except to step on dangerous paths, such as going through the tunnel that has trains travelling at a speed of 160 km/h every few hours. If they can’t cover the 38-kilometre distance before the Paris-London high-speed train passes through, all that will remain is their blood stains on the wall».
The show was played within 2023 Kunstenfestivaldesarts
Théâtre Les Tanneurs
rue des Tanneurs 75 Huidevettersstraat, – 1000, Brussels
Tuesday 16, Friday 19 and Saturday 20 of May, 20:30
Wednesday 17 of May, 19:15
Thursday 18 of May, 18:00Kunstenfestivaldesarts and Mehr Theatre Group present
Blind Runner
by Amir Reza Koohestanitext and direction Amir Reza Koohestani
dramaturgy Samaneh Ahmadian
director’s assistant Dariush Faezi
lights and scenography Éric Soyer
video Yasi Moradi, Benjamin Krieg
music Phillip Hohenwarter, Matthias Peyker
costume design Negar Nobakht Foghani
performers Ainaz Azarhoush, Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh
French and English translations and surtitles adaptation Massoumeh Lahidji
Dutch translation Werkhuis/Erik Borgman
surtitles operator Negar Nobakht Foghani
production, administration and diffusion Pierre Reis/Bureau Formart
logistics and communication assistant Yuka Dupleix/Bureau Formart
production Mehr Theatre Group
coproduction Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Berliner Festspiele, Athens Epidaurus Festival, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Théâtre de la Bastille, La rose des vents – scène nationale Lille Métropole, La Vignette – scène conventionnée Paul-Valéry Montpellier, Théâtre populaire romand – Centre neuchâtelois des arts vivants, Triennale Milano Teatro, Festival delle Colline Torinesi/Fondazione TPE, Noorderzon Festival of Performing Arts & Society
residencies Théâtre populaire romand – Centre neuchâtelois des arts vivants, KWP Kunstenwerkplaats, Théâtre Les Tanneurs
with the support of Ministry of Culture – Regional Directorate for Culture in Île-de-France and the French Institutph. Omar Aitjeddig
