A conversation with Shabnam Shirzadi
Research at the Academy of Theatre and Dance – we know it’s happening, but what does it actually involve? In this interview (part 31 in a series) ATD take a peek behind the scenes, in conversation with Iranian artist, researcher and educator Shabnam Shirzadi, who teaches Performance Analysis at the School for New Dance Development. In 2025–2026, she was awarded the ATD Teacher-Researcher Exploration: the counter-perspectives fellowship.
A State of Bewilderment | Poetry as a way of knowing
I noticed in my classes that analytical approaches move very quickly towards interpretation and clarity, and that students are rewarded for arriving there fast. They wanted to write a good analysis that followed the rules and demonstrated their insight. I could feel how limiting this was, how certain aspects of the work and the experience of it were being excluded. They were getting ‘lost in analysis’, so to speak. There was something overly deliberated about it all.
I grew up in Iran, where poetry suffuses everyday life – I grew up in poetry there, it’s all around you. And it isn’t restricted to artistic or intellectual circles; it goes right across the population, woven into ordinary speech: we use lines of poetry in everyday conversation, and many of them live in our memory.
Could you give an example?
Well if you help someone, for example, and they say thank you, you might respond by saying, ‘The children of Adam are each other’s limbs, for they were created from the same essence.’ In other words: I helped you because we are part of the same body. The quote comes from Golestan, by Sa’di.
In our literature studies we learned poems by heart and recited them in class. My mother would often challenge me to a game where we would exchange lines of poetry, with the last letter of one line having to be the first letter of the next. There’s a great deal of room for poeticism in Persian language and culture; for ambiguity and complexity. And I love that. It’s closely intertwined with how you understand and perceive the world.
It seemed to me that poetry could be a valuable epistemology to rethink performance analysis. So, when the ATD put out a call for a research fellowship on counter-perspectives in pedagogy, I wrote a research proposal. I should be honest, though, that my knowledge of Persian poetry is deep yet partial. I did not study it systematically; I grew up inside it. For a long time, I did not think that counted as research material. Deciding that this partiality could be the method rather than the problem is really where the project began.
A translation cannot fully carry a poem across; but you can convey something of the experience of it – the rhythm, the feeling, the bewilderment it evokes through the simultaneous presence of opposites and multiple possible meanings. This unsettling experience is comparable to what the students feel after the performances we see together. The pieces are highly diverse in nature and often made by artists from the global majority, in different languages and with a non-Western worldview.
The performances we engage with usually leave the students unsure of what to think. The works touch on multiple layers, and invisible threads from the spectators’ own lives play a part in the experience. Instead of asking about the meaning of a piece, I ask in what ways it affected them: did a particular line or scene stay with them? Did a particular image keep returning to them? Did a particular scene draw them in, or repel them? I was less curious about the things that fell into place than about what had been turned upside down in their world. What aspect of the piece haunted them when they went to sleep? What traces did they detect in the faces of their classmates as they left the theatre?
How did the students respond to this approach?
They found it very refreshing. It offered them a new way in.
Is that because the starting point was their own experience?
Yes, it was – but also that there was no ‘wrong’. Instead of having them write something that fit within a pre-set framework, I invited them to stay close to their own experience.
I was also keen to involve the body in the process, so before they put pen to paper, I gave them a series of physical exercises – and that’s where the poetry came in.
Before I describe them further, I should say what I mean by bewilderment. The Persian work Hayrat, or bewilderment is not the same as confusion. When confusion means something has gone wrong and needs to be resolved, bewilderment in Persian poetry tradition is a heightened state in which our usual categories stop working – and that collapse is where knowing begins. It is not a stage on the way to understanding. It is a kind of understanding.
In a poem by Rumi, the speaker keeps asking questions and is refused every time. They say: What is this? Tell me – I will be turned upside down. And the answer comes back: Stay like this, overturned, and say nothing. They try again: "This face, is it an angel or a human?" "Neither angel nor human – say nothing."
What I love is that the poem never says you will never know. It says: not through speech. Stay there. And the speaker doesn't grow calmer as it goes on – they come further undone, and the poem seems to treat that undoing as desired outcome. This is Rumi's way of inviting us to dwell, in silence, in not-knowing, in a state of bewilderment which is also dangerous.
Why dangerous? Because you lose your grip?
Because you don’t know what’s going to come your way. It’s unknown, undefinable. Like the sublime, it can be beautiful and frightening at the same time.
The physical exercises I gave the students also constantly pulled them in opposing directions, inviting them into the state of bewilderment:
Stand with your feet firmly on the ground, while feeling as though you are floating.
Smile with your mouth, but carry a deep sadness in your eyes.
Start to walk slowly. You are both the hunter and the prey. Your gaze is focused and searching, but your skin is hyper-aware that you are being pursued.
You are a mountain that has been eroded by the wind. Your footsteps are immense and leaden, while at the same time you are slowly being worn away.
Walk as though you are late and have all the time in the world.
I wanted them to arrive at a state of not knowing - a state that allows for bewilderment. Then I asked them to sit somewhere in the room and, in their minds, return to the performance we had seen together. I asked them to feel whether they wanted to write, or draw, or move—and to do that.
The fragments they create don't stay separate. We place them together and keep adding to them, so they become one shifting text that the whole group is writing; students go back and revise each other's lines. That unlocks a conversation which was absent when we sat at the table approaching the work intellectually. What comes out is a collective voice rather than various individual readings, and that matters to me, because I don't think meaning is something each person makes privately and then reports. In the poet Attar's Conference of the Birds, thirty birds cross seven valleys to find their king, the Simorgh, and when they finally arrive there is no king waiting. But there is a reflection of themselves, together, as Si morgh, which means thirty birds in Persian.
The students told me that this approach helped them out of a writer’s block, that they were able to enter other territories and make new discoveries. Some of them made a collage, others a movement score, and some of it stayed in those forms. Writing was one outcome among several rather than the destination.
A line by Hafez became our compass in this research:
افسوس که شد دلبر و در دیدهٔ گریان
تحریرِ خیالِ خطِّ او نقشِ بر آب است
“Alas, the beloved is gone, and in my weeping eye, the inscription of the imagined line of her face is a writing on water.”
It says that what remains of someone who has left is an image written on water. I told students that you can see a performance as something written on water – it moves, it shimmers and then disappears. The only thing you can say anything about is the traces it leaves behind.
Via Academy of Theatre and Dance
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