Asia premier of Amir Reza Koohestani's 'Blind Runner' unveils at Sejong Center

On the stage of the S Theater at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, two actors stand on a simple stage set. Their conversation in Persian may sound unfamiliar to many here but as the play evolves, the premiere of “Blind Runner,” by Iranian playwright and director Amir Reza Koohestani, captivates the audience with unconventional directing techniques, such as using a live camera feed on a screen, and actors running through the stage.

Although “Blind Runner” was advertised as an example of documentary theater, the director chose to downplay this aspect.

The play was inspired by Niloofar Hamedi, an Iranian journalist who gained international attention for breaking the story about the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September 2022, sparking protests across the country and leading to her own arrest. Amini had died in police custody after being detained by Iran's morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab "improperly."

However, the director clarified that “Blind Runner” is not a documentary work, describing it instead as "just fictional conversation.”

Instead, he posed the question, "What is fiction and (what is) real?” adding that “everything we do is a selection of reality, and the selection of reality is not the reality."

Additionally, the development of the story further confirms that "Blind Runner" is not a documentary. The team indeed decided to create the production in 2021, before the protests in Iran began in 2022.

As they developed the story, they did try to find connections, writing in a “Persian tradition of storytelling,” or like Scheherazade of "One Thousand and One Nights," who tells a captivating, interwoven story for 1,001 days to avoid her execution by King Shahryar.

“It was the same case in ‘Blind Runner.’ When we started rehearsing it, we had five pages of text,” he said. Then, he discussed the material with the actors and other team members, which led him to write another five pages. After rehearsing those new pages, they reflected on their progress and deliberated about their next steps, he said.

As a result, the work, “Blind Runner,” which opened in May 2023 at the Kunsten Festival des Arts in Brussels, grabbed attention with its interweaving of the personal and the political and use of unique techniques.

With the use of live camera footage on a screen, Koohestani said he wanted to show “the possibility in theater to see reality and virtuality at the same time. At the same time, we can see how it's been mediatized, how it's been delivered through the media.”

"We don't have this chance in cinema, because in cinema everything is virtual, and we don't have it in any other form of art because we don't have a media form," he said. "So, in particular, in theater we have the possibility to compare the physical reality on the stage with the image that we projected."

The Asia premiere of “Blind Runner” opened on July 18 and will run through Sunday at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts. Koohestani is the first artist of foreign nationality invited to the program Sync Next.