The body language
Sohrab Hosseini: Albert Camus once said: "Whoever loves philosophy, will most likely love theater as well." How philosophy is related to tragedy is clear in ancient Greece. If we cannot classify the important dramatists of history among philosophers by the criteria of philosophical work, at least it is certain that important theatrical texts of the works of Sophocles Till Beckett have been the source of reflection of many known philosophers of history. Theater depends more than anything on language and more than language on the body. Of course, this claim itself can be considered a proposition - or a philosophical proposal. The life of tragedy is longer than that of theater. It goes back to a time where man was caught in the struggle between the primordial and eternal forces of good and evil.
Tragedy is older than theater, because man is older than theater. But the theater stage is the only place in the world where man gets close to the real limits of tragedy. Because the body has nowhere a real appearance as real as in the theater. Theater removes the mask from the human face. Man judges man. And in result of this judgement of the sufferings and the failures, the tricks and the stupidities, the absurdities and the filth, he presents an image of what is in essence closer to the nature of human being. Not that any of these are the mission of the theater; these are what tragedy has done to the theater.
This is the only scene where man faces himself. gasping with helplessness and insignificant desires. With unlikely horizons and shameful pasts. This is the place where man laughs at himself and cries at himself. From Aristophane's “the clouds” to Lorca's “yerma”, the theater is a cold, hard and scary stand that exposes the unspoken secrets in the baldest way possible and parades before us the bitter experiences of the failures of the rulers. For this reason, from ancient Jonah to General Franco's Spain, the theater, as it built civilization, shook the world of those in power. And in this way, the origin of no wise person can be known without theater. And this origin has two intertwined signs: "language" and "body". And what is derived from these; "The body language". Ever since Jean-Pierre changeux considered the body as the most important pillar of inspiration in modern art, almost all avant-garde artists in the world started paying attention to philosophical aspects of the body.
And in a natural way as I have explained before this text, people of theater were at the forefront of attacking the semantic and conceptual propositions of the body. I did not see many theater plays in Iran. Of course outside of Iran I haven’t seen any at all! But I have followed almost all the important branches and the masters of theater who have a unique style. I have seen at least one consequential work of each of them. What can be clearly testified is that Iran's theater is focused on language, probably due to its strong addiction to literature - which is the plague of all arts in Iran. Now, Jalal Tehrani has made a type of theater, in which the body in a serious dialectic is enlaced to the body of performance. In this type of theater, the body is a leading and ambitious component. On the other hand, the literature body of the work and the way dialogues are built are one of the examples of Foucault's "exhaustion of language" theory. Foucault claims that "playing" with the structure of language drains its meaning from the inside. In this way only a shell of the words remain that we can fill with new meanings . In this text, I have only numbered a few of specific topics that maybe will be discussed in the near future. For now, observe this interesting experience on stage, so that later, if we get a chance, we would explore its various dimensions together.