Learning to Ask Why: Dramaturgy as Cultural Pedagogy in the Study of Persian Plays

About the Talk: This presentation proposes a dramaturgical approach to teaching Persian play scripts and recorded performances at the advanced language level. As both a method and a mindset, dramaturgy revolves around a key dramaturgical question: Why this, here, now, in this way? To develop my students’ “dramaturgical sensibility,” I invite them to critically engage with the arrangements, relationships, and creative decisions that shape a work’s structure, meaning, and address to its audience. Dramaturgy, in this context, becomes a cultural pedagogy that teaches us to analyze how meaning is constructed through form, rhythm, dialogue, and interaction; to question the sociopolitical and aesthetic logic of those choices; and to articulate their insights through contextual materials such as audience guides and program notes. We complete a sequence of assignments and classroom activities including scene analysis, collaborative reimagining, and digital curation that activate the three core dramaturgical modes of engagement: analyzing, questioning, and mediating.

About the Speaker: Marjan Moosavi is a scholar of theatre and performance studies and the Roshan assistant clinical professor at the University of Maryland. She has published articles on topics, including dissident theatre and dramaturgy in Iran, feminist historiography of theatre, and decolonial approaches in the dramaturgy of Middle Eastern theatre. Her research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright program, the Mellon Foundation at Harvard, and Canada’s SSHRC award. Marjan also collaborates as a research dramaturg and cultural consultant with theatre companies across the U.S. and Canada. She is a Regional Managing Editor for The Theatre Times.com.