The new issue of Pages Magazine consists entirely of plays and performance texts by Iranian women writers living in or outside of Iran. These writings, whether based on actual experiences, fictional, or drawn from archives, deal in one way or another with the question of the stage. They create a contested space of performance that is inevitably linked to the performer’s body, whose thresholds are stretched and contracted into potentially new forms of staging. This volume was edited with the idea of extending these writings to a series of performative readings on various occasions. Play reading is a particular form of engaging with a text: we listen to the written performance rather than watch it being performed. In a sense, the reading calls forth an audience before a stage that is there and not there. It highlights the pre-performed status of the text, nonetheless placing us, the audience, in a relation to the text as a contingent performance.

The presentation at daadgalerie will include two readings from the magazine. The first will be by poet and playwright Athena Farrokhzad, who will read from her poem Letter To A Warrior. This will be followed by the performance text The Possible by writer and theater-maker Naghmeh Manavi, which will be read by poet and performer Tanasgol Sabbagh. The evening will conclude with a conversation between Athena Farrokhzad, Naghmeh Manavi (online), Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi (artists and editors of Pages), moderated by writer Maxi Obexer.