The Secret of Laleh
Elahe Nouri
- Period
- 2025, an audio work without a fixed schedule
- Location
- Laleh Park, Tehran
Project Overview
The Secret of Laleh is a site-specific audio theatre piece — an audio walk — developed in collaboration with the Sayyareh app. It unfolds along a fifty-five-minute walking route through Tehran's Laleh Park. By listening to a recorded audio narrative while walking the designated path, the audience steps into a story where five children from a century in the future ask for help in uncovering a secret hidden within the park grounds. The project has no fixed schedule or runtime; anyone can download it and walk the route individually at any hour of the day or night.
Context & Site
Laleh Park is far more than a simple backdrop for this project; it serves as the literal text of the performance. The creators first mapped out the walking route within the park, and the narrative was then written around the physical features found along that path — specific trees, lawns, bends, and landmarks. This production sequence turns the physical space into a narrative map, embedding the pre-existing environment directly into the plot.
Choosing Laleh Park also ties into the artist's desire to anchor this space firmly within the city's collective memory. As one of Tehran's oldest urban parks and a multi-generational hub for social gathering, it enters the project as a piece of living heritage to be documented and passed on. Consequently, the artwork is entirely site-dependent: stripped of this specific route through Laleh Park, the performance completely loses its meaning.
Participation & Process
The project explicitly addresses children and young people between the ages of seven and thirteen, with accompanying adults. Participation occurs across two distinct layers, both of which were vital to forming the piece.
Layer One: Participation in Development
The project was built in collaboration with the creators of the Sayyareh app (Mina Bozorgmehr and Hadi Kamali Moghaddam) and a workshop group of children aged seven to thirteen. Since 2017, Elahe Nouri has centered her creative practice on the Theatre of the Oppressed and youth theatre education, meaning her work regularly grows out of collective workshops with specific social groups. The Secret of Laleh follows this model exactly: the actual voices, ideas, and presence of the children in the workshop are woven directly into the core fabric of the audio track.
Layer Two: Participation in Pushing the Narrative Forward
While listening, the audience members double as active participants. Along the route, they encounter puzzles and specific prompts — such as looking at a particular tree, finding a hidden path, sitting down to touch the grass, or solving a riddle. The audio path will not unlock and the story cannot progress unless these actions are taken. If the participant remains passive, the theatre piece cannot reach its conclusion. This interactive structure pulls the audience out of a traditional listening role, demanding their physical presence, focus, and choices to complete the work.
Motivations & Questions
The Secret of Laleh grew out of a convergence of several distinct interests: creating meaningful art for children and youth, fostering social responsibility toward the environment, and archiving urban memory. The fictional journey of five children traveling from a century ahead into the present day mirrors real-world anxieties surrounding environmental crises, posing a sharp question: what is our responsibility to future generations, and how will we act?
When discussing her turn toward social and urban art, Nouri points to the limitations of the formal performing arts landscape in Iran. She highlights the lack of professional unions protecting artists' rights, the deep disconnect between traditional playhouses and the general public, and a highly insulated institutional loop that rarely leaves room for new artists to grow. In this environment, taking art directly into urban and public spaces becomes the most effective way to engage with the artist's primary audience — the public. Turning to an audio format via the Sayyareh app frees the artwork from the rigid spatial and temporal constraints of traditional theatre buildings.
Conditions & Negotiations
The choice of medium was a deliberate strategy to navigate censorship and the restrictive structure of institutional art spaces. An app-based audio theatre walk inherently sidesteps the logistical and regulatory hurdles of stage performances: it can be accessed individually, at any time, without needing a physical venue, ticketing systems, or a set performance schedule. The core ethos of the Sayyareh platform is rooted precisely in this concept of liberating performances from external constraints.
Documentation
Collaborators & Support
The Secret of Laleh was developed alongside the Sayyareh app team (Mina Bozorgmehr and Hadi Kamali Moghaddam) and with the active participation of children aged seven to thirteen.
The project was produced entirely independently without any cultural institution's backing, and will be published soon. Funding was pulled from the artist's personal resources and financial contributions from the parents of the workshop participants.
Further Resources
About the Artist
Elahe Nouri is a writer, educator, and theatre director whose work regularly stems from collaborative workshops with community groups — a practice that The Secret of Laleh continues. She holds a degree in theatre directing and began working in environmental theatre in 2017. The Theatre of the Oppressed framework deeply influences her methodology, focusing specifically on projects designed for children, youth, and women. In 2025, she was awarded a writing fellowship at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Alongside her community workshops, she also publishes independent literary texts.
Instagram: @elaanourii
This entry was prepared based on documentation and texts provided by the artist.