Meeting on the challenges of theater directing these days

Mostafa Koushki considered one of the major challenges in today's theater to be the lack of a troupe, and said: "The theater production process is not like it used to be, and the lack of a troupe is one of the reasons why serious theater is not performed. In our era, you could join the professional theater community from a university festival, and every year we would accumulate an audience for ourselves, and if we had good talent, we would grow."

 

Abbas Jamali emphasized that the issue of the group plays an important role in theater: "We have reached a new situation and a new desperation in theater. The director has three abilities that are intersting and thought-provoking for me. First, the ability to think, because the director is basically a thoughtful being who thinks and chooses. His ability is to think and observe accurately. The director also has the ability to imagine. He can imagine his work with objects, the body, light, etc., and this is the artistic and poetic aspect of his work."
He went on to say: "The director's third ability is to build a group and a community. He has the ability to build the community of his own foundation, and this is where theater practice becomes important in making the cultural space polyphonic, but now we have failed in this community building."

 

Ashkan Khalilnejad also stated: "Theatre groups are always faced with issues that they must think about and come up with a solution to solve them. The problems we face today are similar to the problems that theater groups struggled with in previous decades. Independence and establishment are important issues for our theater. Our theater is forced to make decisions in response to social crises and the politics imposed on it, and sometimes it may even harm itself."

He added: "The theater has now thrown away everything it tried to preserve in the past and is searching for a new form of communication. New performances, often informal, are breaking down hierarchy as much as they can. Artists are trying to find a new way of communicating by questioning the position of the audience."