Mehr Theater Group will begin its winter tour by staging ‘Timeloss’, written and directed by Iranian playwright Amir Reza Koohestani, at the 25th Festival International Santiago a Mil in Santiago, Chile, on 3-5 January 2019.
‘Timeloss’ will go on stage for three nights in the Chilean capital alongside other productions from Germany, Belgium, Argentina, Colombia, Australia, etc.
The group will then stage ‘Summerless’, another play directed by Koohestani, at Les Vagamondes // Relais Culturel de Thann in Mulhous in France on 16-17 January. The play will be then staged in Kaserne in Basel, Switzerland from Jan. 16th to 17th, and the tour will be concluded with a performance of 'Summerless' at Théâtre populaire romand in the Swiss city of La Chaux-de-Fonds on 19-20 January.
Born in 1978 in Shiraz, Iran, Amir Reza Koohestani gained international recognition with his third play, 'Dance On Glasses' (2001), and found patronage from several European theatrical artistic directors and festivals.
In 2013, Festival actoral in Marseille (France) commissioned Koohestani to write and stage a new play, ‘Timeloss’ (based on his previous play ‘Dance on Glasses’), which was succesfully staged across Europe, as well as in New York and Los Angeles.
On May 22nd, 2018, he premiered ‘Summerless’ – third part of a trilogy – in Brussels as part of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts.
‘Timeloss’, according to the playwright himself, “is a play about self-denial. It deals with the past – it’s not about regretting it, but about rejecting it. More specifically, it doesn’t deal with the past, but with how the past is seen. So it doesn’t really matter if you’ve seen Dance on Glasses, which is just an object, a pretext for looking back. Like Orpheus who turns round and looks, knowing that doing so could dramatically alter his fate.”
Part of the synopsis for ‘Summerless’ reads: “Every day, an hour before school is out, a mother comes to sit on the merry-go-round in the yard, waiting for the bell to ring. She and the painter strike up a conversation that they carry on day by day. Until one day the mother discovers that the painter is painting her portrait on the wall.”
Mehr Theatre Group was created in 1996. The aim was to create a new type of theater — far from the traditional Iranian theater — based on new stage direction and a new acting style influenced by film.
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