One-Horned or Two-Horned?

About the production

“One-horned or Two-horned?” was staged in 2022 at the Tadjrobe Theatre Festival in Tehran. The project emerged from my experience after being briefly detained during the political unrest in November 2019 in Iran. The primary aim of the performance was to transform the experience of street protest into a stage- based, bodily experience. Rather than linear narration, this performance was framed around body, space, and a sensory encounter with the audience. As the designer and director, I guided a process based on physical improvisations and spatial experiments to translate concepts such as erasure, suppression, and everyday anxiety into performance. The text was a dramaturgy of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Sartre’s The Flies, interwoven with improvisations based on the bodily experience of street protest. The scenography was built on centrifugal spatiality: the seating area was fragmented into single chairs scattered in different directions within, so that no focal point could exist. The turbulent, unstable embodiment of the street protest experience was transferred to the audience through this strategy. The audience had to constantly shift their gaze, head, and body position, moving away from a passive observer.

The hall was entirely transformed into a playing field in which the performers generated a continuous sense of threat and potential collision by running and passing through spectators. Their distance from the audience was reduced to less than five centimetres at times, triggering instinctive reactions such as shrinking the body or abruptly moving the chair. This spatial design was combined with sound: the noise of running, breathing, and even the airflow produced by the bodies in motion became acoustic elements that were both heard and physically felt by the audience. During the post-performance discussion, some spectators spoke of the chill caused by the draft of bodies running past, others of the constant surprise and instability, reminding them of the street protest experience. Ultimately, “One-horned or Two-horned?” created a shared, embodied experience by removing the traditional distance between stage and auditorium.

Production credits

• Based on Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Flies
• Director: Ramtin Sadeghinezhad
• Playwright: Zahra Mirmohammadali
• Performers: Amirali Behbahani, Mahshid Aghakhani, Yasaman Dehghani, Abbas Saberi
• Poster Designer: Arian Zamani

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Performance photographs