Persian theatre traditions (Culture/History)

Taziyeh:

Dabashi: "Contrary to Aristotelian mimesis, in Taziyeh there does not exist a stage-based, one-to-one correspondence between reality and its dramatic representation. The mimetic act in Taziyeh, as a result, is not permanent. It is spontaneous and transitory. A Taziyeh actor can do his lines as Shemr or Imam Hos-sein, and then while still on "stage" turn around and chat with a friend in the "audience" about a business matter. A quintessential condition of this manner of mimesis is that in Taziyeh there is neither a stage nor a proscenium, as there is in Greek theater, nor, as a result, an audience distinct from the actors. The stage is where the audience is, and the audience is integral to the stage. Acting as a result is not stipulated as a permanent (for the duration of the play) representation of some other reality. In Aristotelian mimesis, no actor ever comes out of character to say anything. If you notice in European theater, even when the actors all come to stage to acknowledge the applause of the audience they remain absolutely silent and in costume, for they are still onstage, and as a result they cannot dissolve the mimetic illusion of their characters. Not so in Taziyeh, where acting is predicated entirely on a spontaneous, momentary, and transitory conception of representation. The actor says his line and then he is no longer Imam Hossein or Shemr (historically, no women were allowed to act in Taziyeh, and just like old-fashioned Shakespearean plays in Europe, all the female roles were played by male actors). This particular manner of mimesis might be attributed to the doctrinal prohibition of artistic representation in Islam, or it might be related to the absolute inimitability (for they have an exclusive claim to infallibility) of Imams and saints." ....{compare to Brechtian vs Aristotelian conventions...}

"My suggestion here is that the double-edged sword of icastic (Muhakah) and phantastic (Takhyil) mimesis in Persian aesthetics gives the character of our literary, visual, and performative representations an altogether different quality than a mimetic tradition that gives primacy to one and ignores the other.
The best place to see this dual mimesis in operation is in a Taziyeh performance, because this passion play is formally and stylistically the dramatic embodiment of this particular mimetic feature. The mise en scene, narrative conventions, performance techniques, staging, costume design, sound effects, dramaturgical tensions, musical accompaniment, and audience participation in Taziyeh are mimetic modes both icastic and phantastic—without the two being (except at an analytical level) overtly identifiable. The dialectic result of these two conflating modes of mimesis is a kind of realism that usually baffles an audience that is conditioned to Aristotelian mimesis."

Influential on the cinematic modes (reflexive, breaking the fourth wall, characters shifting out of mimesis, etc) of Beyzai, Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, Panahi especially with The Mirror, etc, and more generally of many of the traits of reflexivity in Iranian cinema in which fact and fiction merge.

http://iranian.com/Arts/Taziyeh/
http://asiasociety.org/time-out-memory-taziyeh-total-drama