Renowned Iranian theatre director Narges Hashempour gave a public lecture at the University on Tuesday, 28 February.
Entitled New Departures: new Iranian Theatre and Performance Art, the lecture was free and open to all. It took place in the Keynes Lecture Theatre Three at the University’s Canterbury campus.
In her lecture, Narges Hashempour compared two historical periods in Iran’s modern theatre history. The first, in the late 1960s-‘70s, saw major changes in the performing arts in the West as well as Iran. The second period covers contemporary theatre in Iran, including the growth of what she describes as a ‘performative turn’.
Narges Hashempour described a defining feature of this ‘turn’ as ‘the constant creation of a tension between the literal meanings of spoken texts and the effects and affects brought forth by the embodied acts of the performers’.
The lecture was organised by the University’s European Theatre Research Network, Directed by Professor Peter Boenisch at the School of Arts, with support from its Dean of Internationalisation, Dr Anthony Manning.