Adaptation is based on a form of encounter with history

Charso Press: According to the public relations of Aframana Institute, in this meeting, after the screening of parts of the film-theater Moye Jam written and directed by Qutbuddin Sadeghi, Behzad Sedighi, playwright, director, university professor and as the secretary of the series of stage adaptation meetings, while giving a short explanation Among the goals of the new programs of the Saba Cultural and Art Research Institute and the stage adaptation meetings, he also expressed his gratitude to the directors of the Academy of Arts for paying attention to research topics in performing arts and this meeting. And many screenwriters from Iran and the world have made numerous and diverse adaptations based on literary, dramatic, historical works and even letters and biographies. There is definitely no accurate statistics of drama adaptations, but it can be said that there are as many drama adaptations as there are tastes and concerns of playwrights and directors of the past generation and the new generation.

Sediqi further reminded: one of the adaptation approaches is the historical approach of playwrights, and the era in which he lives is influential in his drama adaptation; Because the playwright cannot ignore the past and contemporary history and the time in which he lives in the work of adaptation, that is why he must connect history with the current concerns of the society.

According to this report, in the continuation of this meeting, Dr. Qutbuddin Sadeghi, playwright, director, theater researcher and university professor, in the beginning of his speech, referring to drama adaptations in ancient Greece and after returning from a trip to Iran in Paris, where he presented several foreign plays to took the stage and said: After the performances and directing of western texts, I decided to escape from intellectual crises and pay attention to national and Iranian works in playwriting and performance. I should have done something that made theater equal to other sciences. Because the playwright and director has the duty to depict high social values.

This dramatist further added: We can achieve a magnificent theater with formal and metaphysical values ​​in four ways: one, paying attention to social drama and literary resources, two, paying attention to mystical sources, and three, paying attention to lyrical sources. and four attention to historical sources and history books.

He added: By using these texts and paying attention to them, we can connect to the past and find the needs and concerns of today and be a bridge to the future so that generations do not get separated from each other.

In another part of his speech, this theater director and researcher also referred to his theatrical adaptations of epic, lyrical, mystical and historical sources and texts that led to the writing of dozens of plays such as Moye Ya Jam, Haft Khwan Rostam, Bahram Chubineh, Simorgh, Sahouri, Dakhmeh Shirin, Duran Beghani, Afshin and Bodolf are both dead and… he said: In the matter of adaptation, if we don’t update the works of the past and ignore their form and content, our work will remain a dead work. Adaptation should be based on our historical experiences.

Dr. Sadeghi further added: In the matter of adaptation, we should pay attention to five principles; First of all, the topic should have dramatic ability and we should not build the same topic from the work we are adapting. Present the needs and demands of the society today. We have to have a creative approach to the issue, that’s why we have to make a change in it.

This theater director then said: Paying attention to the theme is the theme of the second and other principle that should be considered in the matter of adaptation, and in fact, we should look for new themes in the adapted works. The third point of the adaptation, which is very important, is to pay attention to his character and his double-heartedness and doubts as the hero of the play. Paying attention to the inside of the character and his struggle with the outside and examining the conditions on his part is an important principle in creating heroic characters.

He called the fourth most important principle in the matter of adaptation as narration and said: All the texts of the past are in the form of narration, and in adaptation we must turn the narration into drama and dramatic action. The same narrative cannot be narrated in an adapted work. The combination of narrative with drama and drama is very important in adaptation. In fact, dramatizing the narrative is an important topic in adaptation and cannot be ignored.

At the end of his speech, Dr. Sadeghi named the category of language and paying attention to it as the most difficult task in the matter of drama adaptation and said about this: because the language in the play and adaptation work should lead to movement and dynamism on the stage, and the adaptor should be familiar with From the language of the adapted text, make the language of your play dynamic, up-to-date and fresh.

Dr. Fares Bagheri, a playwright, researcher and university professor, as the other speaker of this meeting, pointed out what history is, that is, history as a record of events that happened in the past, and said: since the writing of “Chronicles” Herodotus came up with something called history. In general, history is told as a narrative of events based on linear time, and a historian is a chronicler. This paradigm was changed in the 18th century by the term philosophy of history by Voltaire, and a form of historical thinking was born that deals with the reconstruction of what happened.

This faculty member of Tarbiat Modares University mentioned in another part of his speech: After Kant, and after the Great French Revolution, Hegel discussed the “Realization of Spirit in History” in “Lessons in the Philosophy of History” and “Reason in History” and It was believed that “intelligence in history” is about misrecognition of history. Because according to him, in our understanding of world history, history is only considered as something related to the past, but history deals with the present in addition to the past, because what is true always exists in itself and for itself, not It is from yesterday, not from tomorrow, but something that is present.

Dr. Bagheri further added: In the 20th century, with the emergence of social and global crises, the dark side of modernity emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, the philosophy of history. Contrary to the philosophy of history based on progress and progress which was put forward by people like Diderot, Voltaire and Herder in the Age of Enlightenment, and then the philosophy of evolutionary history formulated by people like Hegel, at the beginning of the 20th century in works such as “The Decline and Decline of the West” by Spengler or ” Toynbee’s “History of Civilization” presents us with a pessimistic view of the future.

He also said: It is in this era that we are facing different forms of theory about history. Because in this century, with the change in the way of reading and analyzing the past events, the change in the philosophy of time, the abundance of events such as revolutions and wars, the way of progress and relations between the state-nations, the relationship between power and people, etc. It underwent transformation and various methods of historiography were formed, including empiricism, social history, narrative approach and various other types of approaches.

By raising these two questions, whether this is history or history, he has become devoid of historicity. Our encounter with history is only in the form of history, or in facing it, we should approach a form of historicity, he said: the basis of adaptation is based on a form of encounter with history.

At the end of his speech, Bagheri, in a short analysis of Moye Yay Jam’s show, presented Jam’s personality as a character with two divisions and said: one is Jam who stands at the end of the world and the other is Jam who is seen as an overturned savior. In my opinion, in this work, the author has turned the internal conflict into a reading form. In this work, someone’s conversation with someone else is met with silence. In addition, the language in it is coherent, in a form of poetic language and order, but the language is in the form of prose. In fact, it has been worked very carefully on the syntactic and morphological structure of the language.

According to this report, at the end, Dr. Mohsen Soleimani, the head of the Saba Cultural and Artistic Research Institute, gave a plaque of appreciation to each of the guest speakers of this meeting.