Workshop
Castle Building: Witnessing, Performing and Writing Invisible Archives in Documentary Theatre-Making
With Maryam Hashempour
About the workshop
How could nightmares, deliriums, dreams, pillow talk, hallucinations and rambles become testimonies? How could invisible and closeted histories be investigated through performative writing? This online workshop welcomes anyone working on, or contemplating, a performative documentary project. Participants will revisit their ideas through a combination of amateur forensic investigation and professional delirium / castle-building. Drawing on her own practice in socially engaged docufiction theatre-making, Iranian playwright and theatre-maker Maryam Hashempour explores speculative writing for interactive documentary performances, introducing participants to a selection of her own works. Target participants: Playwrights and theatre-makers working with documentary projects. Having an existing project or a developed idea is not a requirement.
About the facilitator
Maryam Hashempour
Facilitator
Maryam Hashempour (she/her, b. 1998) is an emerging Iranian playwright and theatre-maker working across the artistic landscapes of Tehran and London. In her work, she pries into ruins, cold cases, invisible archives, and closeted histories, seeking to force them into the present for reconfiguration. She approaches these forgotten territories by combining docufiction and forensic investigation in her writing. Her passion for interactive playwriting has led her to experiment with site-specific, digital, and object theatre as a writer since the early years of her practice in Tehran. There, she studied Dramatic Literature at Tehran University and developed a practice deeply rooted in Iran's experimental and informal theatre scene. Since 2023, she has been presenting works in Sweden and Denmark while completing an MA in Performing Arts as Critical Practice at Lund University. Maryam is also a member of CyberShakespeare, a diaspora-based performance collective operating primarily in digital spaces. Utilizing the technological fluency honed under censorship, CyberShakespeare creates accessible performances for spect-actors and develops projects that challenge censorship and the silencing of marginalized voices. She is currently a PhD candidate and Teaching Assistant at Queen Mary University of London.