Indigenous Meets Postmodern in Tehran’s Theater District
Tehran’s arts scene has seen the re-emergence of a thriving theater scene in the last decade. Recent productions include Gonbadgah, combining choreographed indigenous dances, classical music and storytelling. The production is inspired by ruhowzi, the erstwhile cabaret theater of early twentieth-century Iran.
Gonbadgah aims to revisit the ruhowzi genre (one that much of today’s youth culture considers dated), and reframe it in a way that subverts distinctions between “high” and “low” art, thereby offering a postmodern — and fiercely egalitarian — take on traditional arts for contemporary audiences.
Gondbadgah (Da Theater).
The term ruhowzi refers to an informal, comic and improvised genre of musical theater that was performed at social gatherings in early twentieth-century Iran. Communal courtyards in public areas, and private courtyards in affluent homes typically housed a small pool of water.
During a ruhowzi performance, the pool would be covered with wooden boards, so that a performance could take place in the round ‘on the pool’ (lit., ru (on) and howzi (pool)) on a makeshift stage. Other colloquial terms for this informal theater practice include takhte-howzi (meaning ‘board on the pool’, referencing the temporarily erected wooden platforms on which artists performed).
The White Balloon (1995) is set in a traditional courtyard that would have served as a typical setting for ruhowzi performance in the 1920s.
Audience members, comprised of friends and family members in a community, or guests at a gathering, would sit or stand on rugs around the temporary stage, while artists engaged in traditional storytelling using witty rhyming narratives, music, singing and dancing. Traditional performances encompassed call-and-response motifs with the audience. Improvised narratives centered on the comic misadventures of several stock characters embodying—and generically referred to by—their social and cultural roles, such as ‘the bride’, ‘her lover’, ‘the thief’, and so on.
“It’s the kind of thing my grandparents would have been into. ”
Performances also typically included a folkloric clown character who inadvertently ridiculed the ‘elite’ characters of the ruhowzi narrative, spoke in asides and often acted as a comedic interlocutor between the audience and the story. This oral tradition curated colloquial rhymes about the everyday dynamics of social life (such as courtship), showcased various traditional and ethnic folk music and dances, and often offered implicit commentary on current affairs.
Night of the Hunchback (1965), featuring nested performances, centers around the comic misadventures of a ruhowzi troupe.
From the 1920s, ruhowzi performances often functioned as a type of popular entertainment at social gatherings like weddings. Ruhowzi saw another heyday as a form of public theater in the cabaret circles of 1950s Tehran, where it thrived in the coffeehouses and marketplaces (bazars) of downtown neighborhoods, before reemerging as nested performance in the Filmfarsi cinema genre.