The Bacchae

About the production

“The Bacchae” was an underground performance, based on Euripides’s tragedy, staged in November 2024 in Tehran. In this project, we turned to exploring the vocal possibilities of performance rather than relying on the text. We used vocal scores inspired by various musical traditions, including Scandinavian and Jewish folk singing, as well as indigenous vocal practices from Iranian ethnic communities. The songs served primarily to create atmospheres — for example, in the scenes where the priestesses’ chants invoke Dionysus’ victory. The outcome was a performance mostly driven by wordless sounds and songs in foreign languages and dialects, rather than by dialogue or narrative. Only a few monologues and brief dialogues were drawn from the original tragedy and rewritten by the dramaturg in order to create a sonic and sensory impact.

As the director, I supervised the process of rewriting the text by the dramaturge. After selecting the vocal scores and designing exercises for improvising them, my role involved choreographing movement and mise-en-scène. My central aim was to reclaim the human voice as an expressive instrument that directly transmits space, emotion, and impulse. This liberated voice, freed from the confines of language, resonated with the central concept of our production: freedom. I chose a bare stage, containing only a single ladder, which had various functions in different scenes — as a tree, a throne, or an altar. One of the major challenges was to integrate movement design with the physical dynamics of the ladder. To cast long shadows on the upstage wall and create sharp contrasts of light and shadow across the performers’ faces, the lighting sources were positioned at eye level. As a performer, I collaborated with three other female performers in staging the ritualistic dimension of the original text through vocalization and embodied movement.

Production credits

• Based on The Bacchae by Euripides
• Director: Ramtin Sadeghinezhad
• Dramaturg: Zahra Mirmohammadali
• Assistant Director: Nima Shahbazi
• Performers: Ramtin Sadeghinezhad, Mastaneh Mousavi, Mahshid Aghakhani, Zahra Mirmohammadali
• Poster Designer: Arian Zamani

Performance photographs