The Ta'ziyeh of Hor, and: The Ta'ziyeh of the Children of Moslem, and: The Ta'ziyeh of Imam Hussein (review)

Ta'ziyeh (which means "mourning" or "consolation") is the only indigenous epic dramatic tradition in the Middle East. It has had a strong influence on Western avant-garde theatre as a result of visits made by Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski and Robert Wilson, among others, to the Shiraz Festival of Arts in the mid-1970s, where Ta'ziyeh was first presented to an international audience. Peter Brook in particular was deeply affected by Ta'ziyeh.

At that time, the director of the current production, Mohammad Bagher Ghaffari, was a young actor and director. He had grown up in Neishabur in north-eastern Iran, and received his first theatre training in the nearby metropolis of Mashhad. Hired by the Shiraz festival, he introduced Brook to Ta'ziyeh for the first time. Subsequently, he assembled the best Ta'ziyeh performers from around the nation to create memorable spectacles in Shiraz. He later brought Ta'ziyeh to the Festival d'Avignon in 1992, and the Festival d'Autonne and the Parma Festival in 2000. Thus it is fitting that Ghaffari should have been engaged by Lincoln Center to produce the first performances of this spectacular dramatic form in the United States. He is without a doubt the world's foremost expert on Ta'ziyeh productions.

Superficially, Ta'ziyeh is a religious drama dealing with the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Mohammad. Hussein was slaughtered in 680 CE along with all the male members of his family after a ten-day siege on the plains of Kerbala near present day Baghdad. The event was the culmination of a struggle between the Shi'a (partisans of the bloodline of the Prophet Mohammad) and the Sunni (traditionalist) factions of Islam, specifically the Umayyid caliphs, after the death of Mohammad in 632 CE. Ta'ziyeh is frequently described as arising from mourning ceremonies for Hussein, some of which were reported already in the ninth century, but which may have pre-Islamic roots. Those taking this perspective to explain the development of Ta'ziyeh point to other forms of ritual mourning surrounding Hussein's death, some of which involve display, procession and pageantry, but which stop short of fully dramatic production. The first fully dramatic Ta'ziyeh productions date from the late eighteenth century.

Director Ghaffari, however, rejects this evolutionary ritual theory of Ta'ziyeh. He points out that there are more than 250 known Ta'ziyeh dramas, most of which do not deal with the Hussein story as their main subject (although conventionally they all refer to it). Indeed, Ghaffari himself staged a mystical Sufi-inspired Ta'ziyeh, Moses and the Wandering Dervish, at Trinity College in Hartford in 1988. According to Ghaffari, to understand Ta'ziyeh primarily as the commemoration of the death of a single religious figure is to rob it of its originality and artistry. He sees the performance conventions in Ta'ziyeh as a unique product of Iranian aesthetic sensibility. These conventions are powerful, original and highly effective in conveying both comedy and tragedy, and their broad appeal transcends their cultural origin. Ghaffari theorizes that the development of the Hussein cycle only became a necessity for the artists seeking to practice this dramatic form in an atmosphere where all depictions of humans were seen as idolatry by religious conservatives. He would like to see Ta'ziyeh studied widely by scholars, directors and actors, with an eye toward adopting its performance conventions and philosophy for non-Iranian, non-religious subjects.

Though Ghaffari's attitude is understandable, one cannot deny that including the martyrdom of Imam Hussein has kept Ta'ziyeh alive in Iran. Performers of Ta'ziyeh exist at every level of professionalism, from rank amateur to highly skilled, frequently occurring in family clusters. Many view their...