Theater, Governance, and Incarceration: Voices from Inside

Creating Theater in Prisons with Nesser Rahmaninejad

Creating theater in prisons, though, has a long history around the world, but attention to it has been started not long time ago. Rahmaninejad’s talk about this issue focuses on his own experience in creating theatre as a political artist/prisoner in Iran.

Bio: Nasser Rahmaninejad, a foremost, celebrated Iranian artist started his theatre career in 1959 in Iran. In response to the authoritarian cultural policies and harsh censorship of the Shah’s regime, he founded his alternative, independent theatre group, Mehr, in 1966.

His group, which later changed its name to Iran Theatre Association (1968), became very influential in the field, competing with other well-financed, state-sponsored theatre groups until it was shut down by the SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, and all the actors, including Nasser Rahmaninejad, were arrested and imprisoned in 1974.

Incarceration as a mode of Governance: Stories of Life “Inside” with Shahla Talebi

In this presentation Talebi will seek to tell a story of Pr*son that disrupts the boundaries of inside/ outside, mad/sane, dead/living, and emphasizes everyday modes of reclaiming life, centering untold stories/histories, and imagining a form of ecosociality that binds the dead and the living into a web of alternative kinships.

Bio: Shahla Talebi is a social cultural anthropologist, currently an associate professor of religious studies and a faculty of anthropology of religion in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of awards winning book, Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran, published by Stanford University Press.

Host or Publisher Institute of Arts & Humanities