Powerpoint Performance
2016
Presented at Moj-e No Theater, Tehran
The idea for this work emerged after a viewer described Ophelia as a form of “modern pardeh-khani” (Persian picture
storytelling). This remark was taken as an operative model. At the same time, the experience of presenting projects in a
corporate setting through PowerPoint revealed another contemporary form of standing before a screen and narrating images.
These two situations — traditional storytelling and organizational presentation — converge in this work.
The performance takes the form of a lecture on “poetics,” though not an Aristotelian one. Instead of plot, hero, and catharsis,
the work focuses on situation, structure, and process. A performer stands before the screen and, by changing slides,
simultaneously explains a play and the theory underlying it.
Here, the act of explanation itself becomes the subject of performance. The authority of pedagogical speech, the gesture of the
professor, and the mechanisms of knowledge transmission become the performative material. Rather than inviting immersion,
the work constructs a situation in which meaning is shown as something produced through instructional language.