etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

The exceptional narration of the clown in this story is built upon Iranian traditional theater. It is also based on the storytelling fundamentals of Scheherazade and the 1001 Nights. Its combination with the techniques  and  tunes of contemporary performance and dance adds to its bitter humor.

MonoTalkhak (The Clown and I) is a story about an eternal clown who is wandering around with the last king of the world, and tries to make a living and afford the king’s dialysis by performing shows. As the clown says, the last king of the world is now aged and vulnerable, and his skin cannot be exposed to the sun. He sits on a wheelchair and is covered by a sheet so that the audience would not see him.  The clown narrates the story of his bizarre, weird, funny, sad life during the play.

You are invited to a special auction at the end of this show! Elixir of life!

Nima Dehghani is a multidisciplinary artist and theater director whose work explores the relation between society, politics and audience interactions in public spaces. Born in Tehran, Iran in 1986, he studied architecture and worked as an architect for seven years but his focus has shifted more to theater and social arts since 2009. Now he is a pursuing a Master of Fine Arts with an emphasis on performance and new media at Carnegie Mellon University in United States. Nima works predominantly in the medium of theater and performance art. He strives to find the most effective way to influence his audience and society through new experiences in experimental media. Nima has published three books and writes for numerous Iranian papers. he has won several prizes in playwriting and was named the best young Iranian director of the year in 2011. Underlying most of his works he tries to reflect political and social realities of his surrounding environment. More recently, Nima’s “Netformances” represent a new direction for his art, as he combines performance art with the Internet and social networks such as Facebook.

Alireza Keymanesh is an Iranian actor and dancer. He is a member of the 84 theater group and theInteractive Theatre Group which has branches both in Iran and the Netherlands. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in the field of acting from the Art University of Tehran. He has performed numerous roles in theater and film. He is also an acting teacher who train actors and actresses in his own methodology which involves the whole body and mind. In 2011 he won the second prize of for best theater actor of the  year in Iran for the play MonoTalkhak directed by Nima Dehghani, in the annual Iran’s theater ceremony. He then moved to Netherlands to carry out his practical research at ArtEZ University. His research was on the subject of “society’s influence on the human body”, and the similarity of this subject with the influence of Samuel Beckett’s scripts on the performer’s body. He has conducted this research by participating in the courses’ Dance, Choreography, and DAI (Dutch Art Institute) and he performed two  plays of Samuel Beckett as a presentation of his research at ArtEZ.