Biography

Trans Performance: The Success of Theatre

 

          I enjoy going to the theatre and was glad that my high school English teacher would take us to see a play each year. I also always participated in some form or another in the school production plays we would put on. I found the art form highly engaging and quite interesting. While somewhat connected to the American theatre scene, I have of course encountered the stereotype of theatre kids and how a lot of them were gay. What I did not think about is how this comfortability of expressing sexual orientation might translate to other international stages. So, when I found myself reading an article on performing trans in Iran, that to me felt like it came completely out of nowhere. Keeping in mind my own Catholic and Western viewpoint, and this situation is not impossible perhaps for others similar to me as well.

          Knowing nothing about the LGBTQ community in Iran, O’Dell’s article that talks about performing trans in a theatre setting also gives some helpful background on the trans community in general. According to O’Dell’s article, “transsexuals are legally and religiously legible and legitimate in Iran” (O’Dell 130). From what we have learned in class about Iran and its government, I would have assumed they would be wholly opposed to the idea of trans people in regard to religion. However, O’Dell explains that transsexuality is not banned in the Qur’an and can therefore be justified and legally supported (Ibid). Although the government allows sex reassignment surgery and is accepting of trans individuals, the “general public is generally not as tolerant or supportive” (Ibid).

          When discussed in class, we went over themes and topics that are recurring in the theatre scene in Iran. Scenes of private life and troublesome relationships, female sexual liberation, tensions faced by women, issues of drugs and unemployment among youth, religious ambivalence and so much more are popular topics in Iran. The idea of exploring trans identity follows scenes of private life, sexual liberation, and religious ambivalence all to some extent. All of this to say, trans theatre pushes the limits on what is socially accepted by the government and by the general population, those who would be casual observers of theatre performances. I will look at plays by Sanaz Bayan and Saman Arastou, specifically Pinkish Blue by Sanaz Bayan first performed in 2018, You All Know Me and Be Who You’re Not first performed in 2015, and Autopsy by Saman Arastou first performed in 2019. Within these plays I argue that theatre is more effective in using and incorporating playfulness, embodiment, the underground, and censorship in performances than film or documentaries in expressing the trans experience.

          Playfulness is a bit hard to define, and there are a few different kinds of play and playfulness that are interconnected and overlap. For this essay I want to focus on play in general, with play being an essential part of being human. Play comes from an openness and flexibility to experience and observe new things. Play is less serious; it tests boundaries and limits in new and exciting ways. Play can be incorporated by a director, improvised by actors, and experienced and joined in by audience members. In the case of trans theatre, a lot of playfulness comes from the directors’ want “to play with the theme of transsexuality” (Ibid 151). As you can see, play has a bit of an ambiguous definition, but my hope is by looking at a specific case study it will all be a bit clearer.

          The performances of the play, Autopsy, offer great insight into how theatre can incorporate playfulness. The play, Autopsy, was “performed solely on improvisation,” and as such “the dialogues are fresh, and the actors do not feel jaded or exhausted after a few showings” (Kavianifar). It is necessary to have immense flexibility as a director and actor to do improvisation, which is pretty much the epitome of playfulness in the performance arts scene. Arastou, in helping his actors prepare for such roles as those in Autopsy, hosted “’transsexual workshops’ or ‘self-awareness workshops’, which offered a platform to explore not only one’s sexuality but also one’s individuality and innate nature” (Ibid). Allowing one to play with their identity before performing it in front of an audience. Film and documentaries lose this playfulness as they are scripted and often manipulate messages about transsexuality to their audience (O’Dell 137).

Embodiment is the mental and physical experiences of the performer or audience members that use the body as a tool. “Embodiment is described as ‘the physical and mental experience of existence’. It is ‘the condition of possibility for our relating to other people and to the world’ (Cregan 2006:3)” (Serafini 11). The mind and body work together to convey experiences and feelings and more.

          This is the aspect of theatre that I believe attracts me to it the most. As an audience member who could essentially reach out and touch the performer, the meaning and experience of embodiment becomes so much more heightened. This connects emotions to embodiment, and “emotions are embodied because ‘they entail some combination of sensation, behavior and disposition […] Emotion thus entails an articulation of bodily activity and worldly social context’ (Crossley 2001:45)” (Ibid. 14).

Saman Arastou, in talking on his play, You All Know Me, goes deeper into the connection between theatre, emotions, and embodiment. Arastou states: “theatre always can be more effective, because it involves the five senses of the audiences in the moment. And it shows bitter realities in front of their eyes” (Arastou qtd. in O’Dell 142). This heightened experience is so powerful and cannot be understated. Imagine watching a film where the protagonist dies in the final scene, sure it is powerful, but we are desensitized to such violence on our screens that it does not faze us as much. However, if you were to sit in a room with a hundred other people watching a real person seemingly get shot in front of your eyes and there is nothing you can do to stop it—it packs a much more powerful punch.

          In contrast to the natural embodiment of theatre, films and “documentaries have turned [trans people] into objects of pity and scorn due to their sensationalist tone, focus on the negative, and misguided assumptions” (Ibid 137). Theatre provides a medium where the audience and actors are able to feel and affect each other’s emotions and create a deeper connection and understanding between the two. Theatre allows the body to be “reclaimed from a state of commodification and rationalization through the parallel embodied experiences of creativity and political action, which allow instances of agency, creativity, and freedom” to stand out (Serafini 172).

          The underground has a literal meaning of “forcing many cultural producers to practice in the dark, literally underground,” though within art spaces the definition can become more abstract (Varzi 105). Under the Islamic Republic of Iran, many art styles have been banned, censored, and heavily monitored as a result of being deemed inappropriate, leading artists and the public to use “informal and unofficial spaces” (Karimi 3). It is in these informal spaces that the underground is alive in, more specifically it is “a third space that brings together public and private pursuits, sometimes forcefully but more often casual” (Ibid 4). In the theater scene in Iran, any performance that is not state-approved is usually labeled as underground, though underground theatre can be broadened to include ambiguous messages as well, where the message and intentions of the play remain intentionally obscure. The ambiguousness of the underground typically incorporates ideas of subversiveness, as the underground tries to avoid the spotlight of authority and the regulated.

Director and playwright, Saman Arastou, found that “it was really difficult and took a long time to get permission from the government to perform” the play, You All Know Me, as well as others for their subject matter (Arastou qtd. in O’Dell, 143). Continuing from this, “the play [Be Who You’re Not] continued to evolve and transform as it was performed in different venues” (O’Dell 146). Nothing was set in stone, and everything was subject to change at a moment’s notice. This allowed for a more subversive technique used mostly to evade government censorship, while general audiences were expected by directors to experience trans performances directly. It is theatre that “allows for transgender narratives and voices to be witnessed and heard in order to encourage minds to open and change…it is theatre that is the medium that effectively gets the ‘message’ out on transsexuality to the public, not the religious fatwas that permit it” (Ibid 143-4).

O’Dell also notes that the type of transsexual transition one is, whether male to female or female to male, also plays a large role in theatre performances. It is stated that “female-to-male trans characters are more prevalent in Iranian theatre and film due to the fact that MtF trans people in Iran are often misread as homosexuals, and thus the social stigma towards them is greater than towards FtM trans people” (Ibid 135). As such, there are more female-to-male characters explored in both theatre and film. Sanaz Bayan and Saman Arastou utilize the more accepting version of female to male in their works, whether happily or not, to reach a wider audience.

          Further, Arastou in his play, Autopsy, does not use “The words ‘bisexual’ or ‘transsexual’” as “the provided symbols are enough to deliver the message of the discussion” (Arastou qtd. in Kavianifar). This is Arastou utilizing symbols to be more subversive and stick more to the underground. Where in films these subversive techniques might be intentionally difficult for the general audience member to pick up on, or the censors might stop it before it is released.

          Censorship builds off of the ideas presented in the underground but is differentiated in the way that it is used. Artists use and play with censorship to give their work a different quality to it despite censorship’s inherent constraints. “While censorship can be a barrier to creative expression, it can also be a portal to creativity,” forcing the artist to come up with creative and ingenuitive ways of getting around the censors (O’Dell 144).

          Arastou, one of the directors we have been looking at says: “I use the obstacles and welcome them because they make challenges, then you must improve your creativity and be stronger … I learned the rules of their game after over 30 years” (Arastou qtd. in O’Dell 144). For trans theatre and censorship there are certain special circumstances such as “no physical intimacy occurs between [certain transsexuals] due to censorship rules on touching and certain Islamic legal parameters on transsexual sexual relationships” (O’Dell 160). Meaning that female to male transgendered who have not undergone surgery can legally live as a man but cannot get married and in turn be physically intimate, as intimacy is only allowed within marriage. Legally speaking, trans people do not need to go through hormonal or surgical changes to be considered their gender, but they do have to go through procedures if they want to be officially recognized in a legal relationship with someone of the opposite sex (Ibid 160). This has consequences in the theatre scene when actors who have not undergone surgery are working along with others and they cannot make physical contact during their performance.

          There are other censorship issues besides physical intimacy in the theatre scene. According to Bayan about her play, Pinkish Blue: “’Talking about the trans issue is a cultural taboo,’ and a number of actors rejected invitations to participate in the project because they did not want to be branded with stigma or shame for being a part of it” (Ibid 140). Many actors are worried that being associated with cultural taboos may lead them to being censored and pushed out of future projects. Despite this there are still plenty of actors willing to sustain the stigma and disregard censors.

The issue of censorship in relation to films is important as well. As for films to be distributed in Iran they need to be approved by certain government organizations, and many of the films approved have a “sensationalist tone, focus on the negative, and misguided assumptions” about the trans characters being portrayed in them (Ibid 137). While theatre directors still need permits and such to put on their plays, there is a lot more room for improvisation and play to take place during a live performance. Bypassing censors that more than likely would not have given a permit to such performances, such as “participatory responses from the audience,” that are seen as transgressive (Varzi 110). Women taking off their hijabs, people shouting opinions from their seats, and even storming the stage to intervene “forces the audience to contemplate their own positionality” on the subjects addressed (O’Dell 150). Overall, for censorship, it is “an artist [who] is responsible for crossing the boundaries of censorship and limitations in the best possible fashion without losing that which he wants to voice in his work” (Aristou qtd. in Kavianifar).

          The four elements we have gone over—playfulness, embodiment, the underground, and censorship—are best put to use in theatre to describe and get the meaning of transsexuality out to audiences. The directors Sanaz Bayan and Saman Arastou use these elements throughout their works in very engaging ways. Though one of the pitfalls of theatre is its relatively small number of audience members, the impact that theatre makes on these few people is too great to disregard in favor of more popular forms of art. Films and documentaries and such can utilize the elements we have talked about in beneficial ways, but theatre can utilize them all at once. The effectiveness of theatre cannot be understated, and I hope more people come to enjoy this beautiful art form and what it can offer.