The Game We Knew but Didn’t Play

A performance examining censorship as a power struggle that intervenes in artistic processes, relationships and everyday encounters. It comes from Rebel-IST-hah!, a performance and research collective founded in Tehran in 2006 by Azadeh Ganjeh and Foad Esfahani and based in Berlin since 2022. The work draws on Ganjeh's research into German theatre productions staged after the 1979 revolution in state-controlled venues of the Islamic Republic of Iran, asking how censorship determines what can be said and shown. Each performance opens a space for questions about how our lives, decisions and actions become entangled in systems of censorship.