Dāb, After Dāb: Re-reading a Participatory Experience Through Dialogue

Daab was a performance that took shape within the context of the "New Voices" festival in September 2019 over a six-month process. It was a project that began with games, improvisation, and exchange among groups, ultimately making its way to the stage to present the narrative of a group's collapse. At a decisive moment, it asked the audience to enter the stage and prevent the group's rupture.

Seven years later, a conversation was held with Mahsa Asghari and Helia Mirshekar (two of the teenage actors at the time and members of the Phoenix theater group), Navid Ghavidel (the group's supervisor and facilitator), and Sahar Saba (from the New Voices festival organizing team). Seven years is enough distance for memory to fill in the empty spaces and empty the full spaces. The narratives sometimes overlap and sometimes diverge from one another. Navid remembers something of which Helia has no memory; Mahsa speaks of a moment that Navid doubts; Sahar points to a structure that, after a few years, each of them can now evaluate from a distance. These non-overlaps created a space to reflect on how instability, conflict, and the inability to make decisions became the very material of the performance.

1.

"Nobody in that group trusted anybody," Mahsa says this, when discussing the decision-making process, specifically about who made the decisions in the group and how. However, her statement reveals broader dimensions of the decision-making process. She explains that before every rehearsal, she would prepare her mind for confrontation—not for acting or practicing, but for the possibility of tension: "When I came to rehearsal, I had to prepare my mind for what to do if an argument was going to happen".

This narrative strays far from the common idealized conception of participatory work. The idealized image of "participation" is a space where agency and power are distributed, voices are heard, and collective creativity is made possible. Mahsa's account, however, stands on the opposite end. Here, power is neither distributed nor fixed; it is suspended. Any decision could be made and immediately canceled; voting took place, but its outcome did not necessarily endure.

Helia explains this same situation differently: "We lacked acceptance". She speaks of perfectionism, of how they couldn't accept someone's idea if they felt not enough time had been dedicated to it. This was not merely a difference in taste; it was a kind of resistance against surrendering part of the journey to someone else. From the narratives, it seems that participation here, rather than meaning sharing, turned into a testing ground: who has worked more, who is more serious, who has the right to determine the path?.

Navid also recounts the same instability. He says ideas were proposed, they would vote, but regret followed regret. Decisions wouldn't stick. "Generally, decision-making was a challenge for us, because we wouldn't say 'yes' to each other's ideas, and everything would get canceled". "Meaning we would move forward a bit, and the very decision we had made would be canceled again". "And that's how it happened that until the very last days before the performance, we had no plan". He admits that he, too, played a part in this instability: "I also didn't accept many of the kids' ideas". He even believes that perhaps he should have said "yes" more often; perhaps he should have allowed the path to proceed, even if it wasn't quite ideal. The phrase "the process is more important than the result" is more understandable to him now, but realizing it in practice at the time was difficult.

In the midst of this, power is neither completely horizontal nor entirely centralized. In calm moments, it disperses; in a crisis, it returns to Navid. Mahsa remembers this same duality: where things were calmer, decisions were more collective, but when they reached a dead end, the final decision came from elsewhere.

Sahar stands one step back. She says that when teenagers are treated with absolute seriousness and the adult logic of democracy, the work becomes more complicated. "You have to accept the spirit of kids that age, sometimes you even have to have personal chats with them to establish a comfortable and open environment". "In some cases, a professional approach actually ruins the atmosphere." In this narrative, the issue isn't just the management style, but the relationship between age and power; the fact that professional language cannot always be translated into the teenage experience.

Mahsa arrives at the same point from a different position: "The facilitation style was completely adult-like to me". This sentence is more of a retrospective reading than a protest. She is a facilitator herself now and sees a gap that was invisible back then: the gap between the precise, disciplined expectations of a guide and the irregular rhythm of a teenage group.

Here, participation is neither the negation of power nor its full realization. It is more like a suspension. The group wants to be horizontal but lacks the tools to solidify a decision. It wants to dialogue but lacks the capacity for acceptance. It wants to distribute, but in sensitive moments, it reverts to centralization. Trust in this situation is neither a premise nor an outcome; it is an issue that constantly shifts and is never fully resolved, and perhaps it is this very instability that later manifests itself as the core idea in the performance's structure.

2.

Navid brings up a memory regarding decision-making that changes the tone of the conversation. He says one day he was asked to leave the rehearsal room, and the girls made a decision together. After that day, the three boys in the group never came back.

Helia explains from a different angle: the boys were sending private messages, expressing affections that were uncomfortable for the girls. When they shared those messages with each other, it became clear it was a shared experience—" he told me this too," "oh, he told me this too". The decision made in the room that day was a reaction to this overlap of experiences; an effort to stop a situation that had disrupted the focus of the rehearsal.

Navid, however, narrates the story from another perspective, citing their reason for leaving as a "lack of focus on theater". If we place these two narratives side by side, a gap emerges: for the girls, the issue was insecurity and personal boundaries; for Navid, the issue was a disruption in the workflow and finding the right path to address that unsafe environment. These two narratives are not just two different interpretations of a single event; rather, they show how a single incident was experienced by some at the level of security and personal boundaries, while for others, in addition to this insecurity, it was seen as a level of disruption in the work process.

Sahar views this situation within a larger social context, noting that in a society where the interaction between girls and boys is constantly fraught with tension and educational and public structures are segregated, these events were "not unexpected". But this very "not unexpectedness" raises a question that remains unanswered in the conversation: how should a project aiming to be a space for dialogue and participation make decisions when faced with the issue of gender boundaries and emotional safety?.

Mahsa does not remember this part of the story. This discrepancy in memory itself, without immediately assigning a definitive meaning to it, reveals something about the fragmented nature of the collective memory of that period. Perhaps what is painful is not the event itself, but the contradiction hidden within it: a group that was supposed to be formed based on participation had to make the space safe for itself through boundary-setting, exclusion, and pushing certain people aside. Drawing boundaries becomes not a contradiction to participation, but a condition for its continuation.

3.

Until two weeks before the initial performance at Cafe Jess in Tehran, there was still no performance plan. Six or seven months of rehearsal had passed. Mahsa remembers this situation vividly: "All that we had were a set of friendships we had built over the course of these months". "We had no performance plan".

Navid says one of the main problems was that the group was not transforming the games into a design. They stayed within the game. "Playing had become just for the sake of playing." On one hand, this meant enjoyment, but on the other, a gap remained between the experience and shaping that experience, which was never bridged.

In the urgency of the final weeks before the festival, Navid and one of his colleagues, Saba Memar, who was aware of the group's events, stayed up one night until five in the morning to brainstorm. Navid says the question raised that night was simple: "What do we have?". The answer, according to him, was just as simple but decisive: "We ourselves are a story". A group that has reached a dead end in decision-making, that has gone to the edge of collapse, can take exactly that to the stage.

The structure became clear: the first twenty minutes of the performance is the narrative of a group on the verge of collapse, and from then on, to save this group, the performance transitions to audience intervention through improvisation.

Mahsa remembers this moment in detail. One morning, Navid arrived with a rolled-up piece of paper. He said Saba had come to him last night, they stayed up until five in the morning, and now they had a performance. He unrolled the paper and started explaining. Mahsa says what was on that paper was not foreign. Navid and Saba had pulled things from the heart of those very months. From those same rehearsals, those same games, that same group that was falling apart. This was not a plan imposed from the outside telling them to execute it; it contained familiar elements that had been shaped over those six or seven months.

Sahar, looking from the outside, says this choice was "unparalleled" given the circumstances, with the group still lacking a specific plan in its final days. She notes that almost all 4 teenage groups she directly interacted with at the festival experienced this turbulence, and the groups that took the games more seriously "reached a result faster, or more easily, or happier". But she goes on to say that participatory theater is heavy work, not just because of the performance itself, but because of what must exist before it: managing the moment, awareness of the audience's atmosphere, and the rules by which the actor knows how far they can go. She points out that Augusto Boal—to whom participatory theater owes its existence—himself became a political character. This comparison might seem distant in scale, but the idea hidden within it transcends scale: participatory theater is never neutral. It always exists within a context of power, age, gender, and institution, and Daab, with all the simplicity and incompleteness of its first experience, was no exception to this rule.

4.

The discussion reaches the days of the performance; first in the cafe space and then at the festival. What was most interesting in Mahsa's account of the performance is this sentence: "For the first time in the process, I believed in my teammates". After six months of distrust, tension, and arguing over rehearsals, belief in the group's skill was born right at the moment when they were supposed to continue the work with improvisation. Why that moment? Mahsa has her own answer: "I knew we all had the skill and we could summon it". She means improvisation, something they had practiced together for two years in theater classes. She says: "Even if we knew nothing else, we knew improv".

One can guess that something beyond just skill was also at play. In that moment, all the protective structures that existed during rehearsals—the ability to argue, the ability to regret, the ability to cancel a decision—were gone. The performance had to move forward with all its uncertainty. During the performance, the audience was seated. It was as if there was no longer any room for doubt, and precisely in this shared vulnerability and from the heart of believing in the experience of a shared language, something formed that hadn't materialized in months of guided conversation.

Perhaps this is one of the paradoxes of participation: trust is sometimes not built through dialogue and conscious agreement. Sometimes it is built in the moment when there is no turning back, and you must lean on a shared point.

Helia narrates this moment from the perspective of being an actor and her responsibilities. She says when the audience was asked for help in the second part of the performance, everyone was anxious: "Well, what if they don't help now?. What if we are left unanswered?" And when someone did come up: "We would literally heave a sigh of relief... we felt a sense of power". This image—the held breath, the released breath—clarifies something for me. A performance that narrated a group's collapse gave the group a feeling of unity for a moment. Not because the problems had been solved, but because they were all taking a shared risk, the risk of making a request that might remain unanswered.

5.

Mahsa remembers a specific moment from the festival performance. A girl raised her hand and said she had seen an audience member dance at the cafe performance, and that she herself was a dancer but had nowhere to dance, asking if she could come up and dance. Mahsa says that moment was complicated for her: "I knew the festival itself had some limitations... and I was also responsible for selecting and managing the audience's intervention". She explains that she looked at Navid in the control room, asking him to help her. Navid said "no," or something that meant no.

Navid adds: "What I remember is that we needed music, and we didn't have music". "I remember this from the performance video. You tell her to come dance, but it required music and we didn't have it". This moment shows that improvised participation always occurs within the objective limits of the space, facilities, and the rules of the context.

Sahar says there hadn't been any specific conversation with Navid regarding the limitations and rules of participation prior to the performance, and the reason was clear: it was a domestic festival. The audience wasn't coming from the outside, the space was familiar, and even if something didn't go right, "it was a form of living itself". She says they were mostly looking at each other and learning from each other's experiences, rather than presenting a thoroughly tested performance.

But the very fact that there was less pre-planning highlighted the difficulty of the work in the moment. Sahar says one step beyond acting is "living in the moment". Making a decision at the exact moment you are facing a living being, not beforehand, and evaluating it afterward. This means the actor must know how far the audience can enter and how far they themselves should go, not based on a pre-written rule, but based on an awareness that is active in that very moment. For a group that was just experiencing this form of work, this was perhaps the heaviest thing asked of them.

6.

Seven years later, no one speaks of a "completely successful" or "completely failed" experience. What remains is a complex lived experience: participation as something unfinished, contradictory, sometimes exhausting, and sometimes enabling. If it began as a question about decision-making mechanisms and the distribution of power, one could now say that what occurred was an exercise in living right within the heart of this instability.

In this narrative, participation is neither an ideal model nor merely an execution method; it is an experience that is still being redefined in the language of the narrators. It is as if Daab was an experience in which participation was lived not as an idea, but as a struggle.