Resilience

Resilience is a subproject within Beyn Theater Group's Macbeth project, first performed in 2025. It is a participatory paratheatrical experience, developed in the wake of the Woman-Life-Freedom movement, exploring collective endurance through guided running, silence, and bodily presence.

There are moments when despair, exhaustion, and grief wrap themselves so tightly around a person that isolation begins to feel like the only possible shelter. Resilience begins precisely there — at that threshold.
Born in the wake of the Woman-Life-Freedom movement and the violence inflicted upon bodies that dared to resist, Resilience is a participatory performance and a subproject within Beyn Theatre Group's broader Macbeth project. It does not stage the political from a distance. Instead, it creates a space where psychological pain is given a bodily form, and where the act of enduring — together — becomes the performance itself.
Resilience is a paratheatrical experience, guided by facilitators but shaped equally by its participants. There are no spectators here; only those who arrive, enter the circle, and run. In a shared silence filled with breath, gaze, warmth, and motion, participants practice something quietly radical: attention to the other. Each movement exists only in relation to another body. Each moment of fatigue is met not with withdrawal, but with the collective network built through the running itself. When the circle begins to falter, someone rises to keep it alive — and this, each time, is resilience.
Where earlier works invited audiences to witness, this performance dissolves the boundary between witness and participant entirely. What has always been implicit in the group's understanding of theatre — that performance is a meeting between living bodies, not a transmission from stage to seat — here becomes the explicit structure of the work itself. Resilience is a collective declaration: for being together, against disappearing alone.

Cast and Crew:
Artistic Directors: Shahab Agahi and Narges Sardari
Performance Facilitators: Esmail Kamali Dehghan, Erfan Pishro, Mahak Hadisadegh, Shaghayegh Vahidi, Hoseyn Salehi, Arefeh Chamani, Hesam Nazari, Hirbod Sheykhi, Fateme Salehian, Parsa Sadeghi, Shayan Boostani, Ali Tahsiri, Niloofar Nedaei

Performance History

• Karestan Art Complex– Tehran– Iran– 2025– 13 times.
• Farvardin Institute– Tehran– Iran– 2025– 8 times.