Daab

Project Overview

Daab (داب) — a Persian word meaning habit, custom, or disposition — was an interactive theater performance developed over six months by Ghoghnoos, a youth theater group of high-school and first-year university students aged fifteen to twenty. The piece grew out of weekly rehearsals, improvisation, and dialogue, and was made within the non-competitive New Voices (صداهای نو) theater festival, which paired participating groups for extended exchange-based collaboration.

The performance staged the story of six young people brought together by a talent competition to make a collective work, whose collaboration begins to break down under the pressures of rivalry. At a critical moment, just before the rupture becomes final, one of the performers stops the narrative and turns to the audience, inviting them to intervene and to help find a shared way through. From that point on, the line between performance and process is held deliberately open, and the audience becomes a participant in the work.

Context & Site

Daab moved across three kinds of space. Weekly rehearsals of three to four hours began in a rented rehearsal studio, but financial constraints soon pushed parts of the work outdoors, to the open-air amphitheatre in Laleh Park. When the piece was ready for an audience, the group made a deliberate choice not to debut it at the festival's gallery venue. They presented it first at Café Jes, a small cafe in central Tehran — partly as an experimental test bed, and partly to encounter the audience at closer range before stepping into the more formal context.

The final presentation took place at Darbast Gallery, as the official output of the New Voices festival. The two venues produced different audiences and different qualities of encounter, and the group has reflected since that the cafe performance was, in their experience, the more successful of the two. The physical and symbolic distance between performer and spectator was smaller there, and audiences felt more able to step in.

A circular staging held the work across both sites: performers in the centre, audience seated in a ring around them. The setup reduced the boundary between stage and seat and made each spectator visible to the rest of the room, which became part of the project's argument about how a public might come together to think aloud.

Motivations & Questions

Daab was Navid Ghavidel's first serious work as an artist, educator, and facilitator of creative processes, and it ran alongside his graduate research on forum theater and actor-training systems. The project was, in part, an effort to test in practice what the research had been thinking through. The group worked from a principle Ghavidel repeated at the start of each rehearsal — every rehearsal is a performance, every performance is a rehearsal — and from the conviction that the participatory process of making theater can function as a microcosm: a safe, experimental scale on which other ways of being together can be practised.

The concerns Ghavidel returns to in his account of Daab might be set out as questions:

How can fifteen-to-twenty-year-olds, growing up inside competitive and hierarchical structures, learn through art a shared language and the experience of participation? And what would it mean to place the audience as an interlocutor rather than as someone to be admired or persuaded?

The decision to work outside the proscenium frame was not only practical; it was political. The group felt that a society in which everything at home, at school, and in the city is dictated top-down required a theater that did not stage "the right thing" for an audience to receive, but opened questions for the audience to enter. They wanted critical and questioning work without the posture of knowing better, and without messages or moral lessons. The Boalian tradition of forum theater offered a method for designing an invitation to intervention; Ghoghnoos did not reproduce all of its classical techniques, but took from it the core proposition that the audience can change the scene.

The work was made within New Voices, a non-competitive festival for fifteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds that draws on Noël Greig's methods for intercultural artistic exchange. Each participating group was paired with another and obliged to move through several stages of exchange and dialogue, and Ghoghnoos was paired with Group 84. The festival's exchange structure shaped the work's content as much as its frame.

Conditions & Negotiations

Time was a constant condition. School workloads meant the group could not hold multi-day rehearsals; the practical rhythm was a single weekly session of three to four hours, and during exam seasons in June, rehearsals stopped almost entirely. The festival's informal frame and the cafe run protected the project from direct state oversight, though other forms of pressure surfaced anyway. Scenes that included rap performed by one of the young women, and others that included dancing, shaped the group's sense of what they could risk, even if they did not name these pressures as censorship at the time.

The most demanding condition, however, was internal. The group had begun with seven young women and three young men. Two of the women left in the first month, citing family pressures and internal tensions. Later, the remaining five women asked the three men to leave, feeling that the men's commitment to the work was uneven and that their behavior compromised the group's sense of psychological safety. But a young man was invited in the final weeks as a supporting actor.

The group's response was to fold the difficulty back into the method. The common theatrical slogan the show must go on was rewritten as the performer must go on: the wellbeing and learning of the people in the group were placed above the success of any final product. Rather than masking the conflicts and the fragility of collaboration, the group made these conditions the subject of the work itself, staging a collective project breaking down and asking the audience to help find a way through.

Documentation

Collaborators & Support

Daab was made by the Ghoghnoos (ققنوس) Theater Group, led and facilitated by Navid Ghavidel, with Saba Memar as writer and group members Mahsa Mohammad Asghari, Yasamin Ardabili, Nika Seyedi, Ava Faghihi, Helia Mirshekar, and Farshid Rashidi. The work was made within the New Voices theater festival, curated by Ali-Akbar Alizad, in which Ghoghnoos was paired with Group 84. The cafe run was hosted by Café Jes, and the final festival presentation by Darbast Gallery / Darbast Platform.

Daab was carried out without external funding. Rental costs for the rehearsal studio were divided equally among the group's members, and the teenagers' families were, in the group's own framing, the largest supporters of the project. Set and props were chosen against the group's actual means — cans of gouache, glue, coloured paper — and performers' costumes came from their own wardrobes. Income from ticket sales at the cafe was split between the cafe and the group, the group's share then divided equally among its members.

Further Resources

Full video recording of Dāb, archived on YouTube (in Persian)

About the Artist

Navid Ghavidel is an artist, facilitator, and designer of participatory processes based in Rasht, with an MA in the Philosophy of Art from Tehran University of Art. His work sits at the intersection of theater, arts pedagogy, documentary, and dialogue-driven collective creation, often with teenagers and marginalised groups. Across projects, he combines performance, improvisation, narrative, collective writing, archiving, and fieldwork to turn lived experience, memory, conflict, and participation into artistic material. His focus is on the processes through which the relationship between art, education, institutions, and social life can be opened to question, rather than on a finished product.

Phoenix Theater Group was a collective of teenagers and young adults active from Esfand 1397 to Shahrivar 1398 (March – September 2019). Most members had met in theater classes at the Arasbaran Cultural Center and had practised together for about a year before the group was formally constituted. Their work moved through group exercises, improvisation, dialogue, and collective creation, under the working principle that theater is a rehearsal for life. Daab was the group's most extended undertaking, developed without a pre-written script through practice, exchange, trial and error, and the group's own internal tensions.