Here at Boston Experimental Theatre (BET) we are very excited to invite you to our new experimental workshop to help us to complete our work. We have five characters, a playwright, a director, and two producers that need your help to complete their work before our public performances in Fall.     

Our current workshop at Harvard University is an attempt to continue our study toward a Theatre of Unknown by creating an environment in the rehearsal room that encourages actors and designers to discover the relationship among their bodies, their imaginations, and the environment (space, light, sound, and others in the room) to create characters, designs, and even the text of the performance. On May 31 and June 1, we will have a workshop presentation and invite audience members to our work in progress. It is in our relationship with YOU, the audience members, that we learn the most. Your presence during the show and your feedback afterwards are the most crucial elements of our learning process.

The desire for communication and sharing has always been the fundamental impulse that inspires people to create art and language. Theatre, from its beginning, has been the most intimate form of art that requires the participation of artists and spectators alike. At the Boston Experimental Theatre Company (B.E.T.C.), we have been studying Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theatre in an effort to create an environment in which both artists and spectators alike can connect to their dreams and emotions at the deepest level. We have also been strongly inspired by Dr. Dariush Shayegan’s philosophy of ‘Dialogue Among Civilizations’, a set of ideals that encourage creating an environment for international artists and thinkers to explore dynamics of interplay between our cultures. This artistic and intellectual work serves as an attempt to spark global understanding and empathy for fostering a future of symbiotic cultural development and exchange. As a company of international artists living in the United States, we are strongly disturbed by new immigration laws and we feel the responsibility to share our own experiences with others. Our current production explores the psychological and social experience of “othering” endemic to troublesome discourse and action regarding immigration in contemporary America. We incorporate our individual experiences as Americans, Iranians, men, women, genderqueer people, lovers, and children of parents to create a theatrical world of cross-cultural communication.

Throughout our study of and work in theatre, one element has remained paramount to our art: the theatre must become a space where actors and spectators can connect meaningfully to their dreams and emotions at the deepest level. In BET’s productions, we want to foster meaningful communication between the actors and the audience, so that everyone involved can honestly explore feelings held captive in the body and in the unconscious. Such emotions are ordinarily ignored and eclipsed by social habits, fear, and distraction, but the unique qualities of theatre allow for a public space to explore them. The theatre we want to continue studying is one in which both actors and audience discover hidden parts of themselves before and after the curtain comes down.