32. Ali Akbar in his simple white shroud or kafan.
After a long conversation between Hussein and Ali Akbar, Hussein finally gave his consent for his son to go to the battlefield. He tied a green armband around Ali Akbar’s arm. From ancient times there has been a tradition for heroes to carry such armbands when they go into battle, as they symbolize the ties between the hero and his father or ancestors. After this ceremony was completed, Hussein left his son. Now Ali Akbar stood alone in the battlefield, singing a very sad song that made some members of the audience cry. The stage manager entered again and gave the actor playing Ali Akbar a cup of tea to refresh his vocal chords. Ali Akbar then went to the corner of the stage and, with the help of the stage manager, put on the kafan. The musicians played again. The next scene involved Ali Akbar going to his mother, Om-Liala, to say goodbye.13
The tearful scene between the mother and son ended with the arrival of Sakina, his sister, who carried a dove whose feathers were coloured red, symbolizing Ali Akbar’s future wounds. When the conversation between Ali Akbar and his sister came to an end, the stage manager took the dove from Sakina and let it fly up into the sky. The dove here clearly symbolized Ali Akbar, who, after his martyrdom, would join the dove in the heaven. The musicians then began to play again, this time performing a march of war. Ali Akbar, with his sword in his hand, asked Shimr and Ibn-e Saad to come forward and fight him. This was the climatic moment of the play, and the takiyeh was now packed with people. It seemed that they knew when to arrive so as not to miss this scene. The fight started. Ali Akbar and Shimr waved their swords in the air and circled around each other. There was no attempt from either side to depict a real fight. The musicians, however, created wonderful sound-effects that made one really feel as if one was right in the middle of a battle. Ali Akbar was stabbed and fell to the ground. The stage manager then rubbed some red colour on Ali Akbar’s white kafan in front of the audience, without any attempt to hide this act. The bleeding Ali Akbar started a moving conversation with his mother despite the fact that she was still in the camp, and supposedly very far from the battlefield. Time and place were simply ignored in the Taʹziyeh: they were irrelevant to the creation of such an emotional scene. While Ali Akbar was dying of his wounds and thirst, Ibn-e Saad took water from the big pot (the river) and let it run out on to the ground in front of Ali Akbar in order to make his pain even harder to bear. At this moment, Imam Hussein, who was standing on his side of the stage watching the scene, could not tolerate this brutality any more and rushed to the battlefield, took his son into his arms and placed his tongue in Ali Akbar’s mouth. This symbolized the relieving of Ali Akbar’s thirst. Ali Akbar then got unsteadily to his feet and again fought with Shimr and Ibn-e-Saad. He received more wounds and finally fell to the ground. I observed that the women and men in the audience started crying and beating their chests. At this moment, they were no longer spectators watching a play in the takiyeh. Each and every member of the audience identified with Ali Akbar, and shared the pain he felt from the wounds inflicted unjustly upon him. Now the Karbala plain was not a place near Baghdad, but a place in the heart of every person sitting there. Ibn-e Saad then came forward and cut Ali Akbar’s throat. At this point the audience, now standing, and the performers joined together and began to sing religious songs and beat their chests while circling the takiyeh. Even the actors playing Ali Akbar and Shimr and Ibn-e Saad held hands, joined the circle and mourned for the martyred Ali Akbar. The actor who had played the role of Imam Hussein came and stood in the middle and called for blessings on both the audience and the performers, and especially on those who had sponsored the production.
THE STAGE
The stage in the Taʹziyeh is always a round or square empty space, whether it is inside or outside a takiyeh (Figure 33). Sometimes this empty space is a simple platform, and sometimes it is just the ground itself. However, in all cases, the mise en scène and the stage directions all dictate that the performance is required to be in the form of a circle. This ‘theatre-in-the round’ reminds us of the Taʹziyeh’s origin in ritual. This round empty space creates a sense of holiness for the Taʹziyeh that cannot be achieved in a formal space that divides the audience from the performers. This holy emptiness has probably been created in the Taʹziyeh to reflect the atmosphere and the architecture of the Islamic mosques, which, unlike Christian churches, have very little decorative embellishment. In a mosque nothing takes the attention of a worshiper away from the supreme being, nothing exists but the spirit of Allah, the Almighty God.
In some performances there is sometimes only a rug on the ground to delineate the stage area, and the spectators sit or stand around it. The audience is so close to the performers that the division between the two groups seems almost non-existent. This form of staging, which is called by Peter Brook the ‘carpet show’, creates an extremely powerful actor-audience relationship. Many scholars and critics of the theatre believe that one of the major strengths of the Greek theatre and Elizabethean theatre was the existence of a close and interactive relationship between the spectators and the performers. This vital element was weakened later by the introduction of the proscenium arch and the advent of realism in the theatre. A call for the reestablishment of such an interactive relationship has been a major part of the artistic credos of major twentieth-century theatre artists including Artaud, Grotowski, Brook, Mnouchkine and Barba.14 All these artists have tried to bring back to the theatre just such a close relationship between the spectators and the players.
33. The battlefield of the Karbala plain in The Martyrdom of Imam Hussein, 1975.
The empty space of the Taʹziyeh is filled with the creativity and imagination of both the players and the spectators, and this in turn reflects the sacred nature of the Taʹziyeh. Just as a Catholic can imaginatively transform a wafer of unleavened bread into the body of Jesus Christ, so a spectator of a Taʹziyeh play can imaginatively transform a pot of water on the stage into a roaring river. However, this kind of transformation is not possible unless the holy empty space is filled by emotion and faith so that players and spectators move hand in hand and use their imagination in harmony. In the production of Ali Akbar that I witnessed I observed how effectively this close relationship worked. On one occasion I saw one of the actors, who was not feeling comfortable with his shoes, exchange them with the shoes of a spectator and then continue playing. It would be hard to think of any other form of theatre that exhibits such a oneness between its performers and spectators.
MISE EN SCÈNE
The mise en scène employed in a Taʹziyeh performance eschews the conventions of stage realism. The Taʹziyeh is a stylized form of theatre that exhibits many Islamic ritualistic features. It employs a simple technique of performance that places emphasis on the player. Scenery, walls and make-up are all dispensed with, and the player is given the most important position on the stage. The Taʹziyeh is an example of actors’ rather than directors’ theatre. There is a high degree of improvisation in the actors’ performances (Figure 34). Consequently, the whole performance of a Taʹziyeh is like a floating vessel that, with no anchor, could go in any direction. It is because of this improvisatory quality that every single performance of a play is different. I watched two performances of the Taʹziyeh of Ali Akbar on two consecutive days and noticed that, while the first one took three and half hours, the second performance lasted only two and half hours. One of the actors explained why this had happened. ‘We realised’, he said, ‘that the first performance was too long, especially for the children. So we just cut some of our lines and moved a little faster.’ I asked if this had been decided upon before the performance by a director or producer. The answer was ‘no’. This improvisatory style of performance liberates the actors from the directors. In a similar way the directors are liberated from the authors or the texts, and feel free to change the texts and make them more theatrical and more visual.
34. The Taʹziyeh of The Wandering Dervish and Moses, 1975.
Despi
te this sense of artistic freedom, there are conventions and symbols that are usually observed in the Taʹziyeh. However, even established conventions and symbols, such as using certain colours for certain characters, can be changed if, for some reason, any of them cannot be used. This flexibility applies even to the casting of characters in the Taʹziyeh. For example, Shimr, the killer of Imam Hussein, has a fixed characterization: he is a murderer with a thoroughly unlikable character. As make-up is not used in the Taʹziyeh, he is usually played by a bulky middle-aged actor with a rough voice. However, in the Taʹziyeh of Ali Akbar that I witnessed, this character was played by a very young player with a well-proportioned body. What he did to show himself as dreadful was to speak in a strong stentorian tone and to make himself larger by standing on tiptoe and stretching his hands out sideways and pushing his chest forward. This flexible attitude applies not only to the acting, but to all aspects of the performance. Peter Brook, after he had attended a performance of a Taʹziyeh at the 1991 Festival of Avignon in France, described what he saw as the mystical nature of the Taʹziyeh and related that mystical religious element to the simple, yet totally effective, mise en scène:
One of the most important experiences of my voyage was to see a Taʹziyeh performance in a village near the holy city of Mashad. It was then that I understood the correct meaning of the theatre … The play was about the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. The idea of martyrdom was demonstrated by a very simple style of theatre. The fire of life between actors and spectators is not produced unless the relationship between these two is the right one… There were three hundred people there who were deeply involved with the death of Imam Hussein. When he overcame his enemies, they were all overjoyed as if they were really fighting themselves. And when he was targeted by the unjust arrows of the enemy, they began to cry together… I have always been in search of such theatre, and I think everyone else has been searching for it in the theatre. It is interesting to note that when all the elements are placed in the right position, there is no need for the assistance of realism and technical elements such as setting. There the theatre becomes ‘the mirror of the invisible’.*15
There is no doubt that in the creation of this ‘mirror of the invisible’, the Master of the Taʹziyeh or Moin al-Boka has a very important role to play, as he is the person who puts the production together and influences the style of the performance.
In the golden days of the Taʹziyeh during the Qajar period, the Master of the Taʹziyeh was a kind of manager-director who produced the texts, trained and guided the actors, stood on the stage during the performance and spoke both to the audience and to the actors. He explained the story and the highlights of the performance to the spectators as well as telling the actors where to go and what to do on the stage. Some evidence has survived from the Qajar period about the role of the Master of the Taʹziyeh. The earliest record is provided byS. G.W.Benjamin, who witnessed a few Taʹziyeh productions in 1882 and 1883 in the Takiyeh Dowlat. He writes:
The entire performance was directed by a prompter who walked unconcernedly on the stage, and gave hints to the players or placed the younger actors in their position. At the proper moment also, by a motion of hand, he gave orders for the music to strike up or stop. But it was curious how soon I ceased to notice him at all; indeed, after a short time I was scarcely aware of his presence.16
Among his many functions, the Master of the Taʹziyeh was also the composer of the music and songs and trained the actors to sing. He was also responsible for making decisions about the costumes and the movements of the actors on the stage, even though those movements were not totally fixed.
Both Abdollah Mostofi17 and the Comte de Gobineau18 mention in their books that it was Mirza Taghi, the Master of the Taʹziyeh, who made significant changes to the Taʹ ziyeh and made it more of a ‘spectacle’ and more ‘colourful’. We also know that his son, Moin al-Boka, made more changes and raised the Taʹziyeh to its highest level of perfection. It was he who added the comic elements to the drama and made it possible to create a comic genre19 in the Taʹziyeh. The Taʹziyeh group of Moin al-Boka became the most important and the largest group of Taʹziyeh performers ever known. There were more than one hundred actors of all types who performed in Moin al-Boka’s group (Figure 35). Gobineau writes:
The Master has an absolute control over the group. He never leaves the stage. He looks after everything and is involved in all aspects. He assists his players. Off the stage, he teaches them how to sing and to play and to speak… During the performance this Master stands on the platform with a script in his hands, moving and telling the actors what to say. When a hero is going on to the battlefield, from where there is no return, the hero has to wear a Kafan (a white robe) according to the Oriental tradition. The Master comes with the Kafan and helps him to put it on. If the hero is supposed to have a sword in his hand, it is the Master who draws the sword and gives it to the player during the action. He also holds the stirrup so the actor can mount his horse. He takes the hands of the youngest players and takes them to where they are supposed to be standing and singing. Thus, he is interacting, openly, in everything and has an essential role in moving the drama along… The Master of the Taʹziyeh in Iran, as was his colleague, Choregus,20 is a very holy and respectful man… He is not only the financial manager of the play, but he is the composer, and sometimes, the writer of the songs too. Occasionally during the performance, he addresses the fearful audience and explains what they see and asks them to show their sympathy and shed tears and they always do so… Thus, the Master of the group is not only a manager but a sacred poet too.21
35. A Taʹziyeh group in the Qajar period. The man in black with a manuscript in his hand is Moin al-Boka, the Master of the Taʹziyeh.
36. Bazaar Sham in Shiraz, 1975.
The complex nature of the role of the Master of the Taʹziyeh described by Mostofi and Gobineau has changed to a certain extent in recent years, as I witnessed, between 1970 and 1997, when I saw more than a hundred performances. In most of those productions, the Master himself appeared on the stage not as the stage manager but as one of the leading actors. His former managerial duties had been transferred to a couple of assistants. Apart from this change, the Master was still responsible for providing the texts and training the actors, and for the management of the group. Among the most important Masters of the Taʹziyeh in recent years are Hasham Fayaz from Tehran, and Ahmad Jasbi from the holy city of Qum.
Mirza Mohammad Ahmad, known as Ahamad Jasbi, is a veteran Master of the Taʹ ziyeh who has protected his profession for more than sixty years. In an interview with Namayesh, a monthly theatre review, he says:
I was only three years old when I began to play the role of children in the productions of the Taʹziyeh that were performed by my father. My grandfather, Mirza Abolghasim, was the Master of the Taʹziyeh in the Takiyeh Dowlat. I must say, if you do not take it as an act of self-praising, that I am the only person in this country who is the heir to this precious and original art. I have memorized more than forty plays by heart. I also know the traditional Persian music and all its divisions. I have many manuscripts from the Nassaredin Shah era in my possession and faithfully learned many conventions and techniques of the Taʹ ziyeh by heart.*22
As Jasbi notes, the art of performing the Taʹziyeh is often part of a family tradition. Even the position of Master of the Taʹziyeh is often passed on from one generation to another in families that are part of the Taʹziyeh profession. In his interview, Jasbi also reveals how every group has its own texts and techniques, which they are careful to protect from falling into the hands of outsiders. ‘The Master’, whom Jasbi identifies as the ‘writer and performer’, must have a variety skills and have a wide range of knowledge:
The writer and performer of the Taʹziyeh should be familiar with mythical and historical events, and know well the Qurʹanic tales and hagiology; from Solomon, Queen of Sheba, and from John the Baptist to the tragedies of the Karbala. He should also know the psychology and typol
ogy of every single character of the martyrs and other heroes who have parts in the Taʹziyeh… The writer of the Taʹziyeh should know the traditional music so that he can compose the texts based on the musical divisions. He must be skilful enough in poetry and be himself a strong story-teller and historian.*23
Hasham Fayaz is another recent outstanding Master of the Taʹziyeh. He participated with his group in the 1991 Festival of Avignon in France and presented four productions of the Taʹziyeh, including Hurr and Imam Hussein. Among those who attended every night were two well-known names: Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carriere. After the performance of Hurr, Peter Brook was asked by a journalist about the production. His response was short, simple and clear: ‘Heart…heart, it wins the heart of every one.’24
The Islamic Drama Page 12