Eight plays and performance texts by Iranian women writers together form the special issue of Pages Magazine Stage So Near So Far, supported by Kunstenfestivaldesarts. To mark the publication of this issue, we invite you to a reading and debate on 2 June 2023 at the festival centre (Les Brigittines).

Issue 11 of Pages Magazine gathers contributions by Iranian women writers in Iran and the diaspora, based on actual experience, fictional, or drawn from archives, deal in one way or another with the question of the stage. They produce a contested space of performance that is inevitably linked to the performer’s body, whose thresholds are stretched and contracted into a potentially new stage. The authors in this issue place their writing in performative relation to the specific historical and sociopolitical conditions in which they live and work.

This special issue has been published with the intention of extending the contributions into a series of public readings. Azade Shahmiri will present her performance text Grammar of Acts; a text in progress intended for a durational performance. It is borrowed from scene instructions and descriptions of movements for female roles in various Iranian plays from the past hundred years. The text intertwines theatre and autobiography through a series of distilled body gestures that navigate violence in language, on stage, and in social space. The reading will be followed by a conversation between Azade Shahmiri, Nasrin Tabatabai, and Babak Afrassiabi.

Reading and discussion, Pages Magazine special issue nr. 11

02.06.2023, 20:15 in Les Brigittines (foyer)
Free entrance, without registration
With Azade Shahmiri writer, theatre maker and contributor to Pages, Nasrin Tabatabai, Babak Afrassiabi, artists and editors of Pages.

Voicelessness by Azade Shahmiri was co-produced and premiered at Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2017. She was also part of Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2016 residency and reflection programme. Pages magazine issue 2, Play and Location was produced by Kunstenfestivaldesarts in 2004.