First Persian Female Poet Comes Alive in ‘Khun-Negar’

Date: 13 October 2025 - 21:28

News ID: ۱۴۴۶۰۱

TEHRAN — In a bold, genre‑bending move, Khun‑Negar (“Blood‑Inscriber”) premieres at Vahdat Hall as a hybrid of music, dance, projection, and ritualistic drama.
Conceived by writer Mihammad Rahmanian and directed by Mahyar Alizadeh, the production reimagines the life of the first known female Persian poet Rabia Balkhi (Rābia bint Ka‘b), as less a biopic than a meditation on language, erasure, and resistance.
Unlike traditional period drama, Khun‑Negar skirts literal realism in favor of an atmospheric, often fog‑shrouded mise‑en‑scène. Semi-transparent drapes and persistent haze create a suspended temporal zone where past and present bleed into one another. Projections of calligraphy and fragmented portraits hover behind actors, dissolving the boundary between embodiment and image.
The star turn belongs to Sogol Khaligh, whose restrained, almost spectral presence conjures Rabia’s internal world of longing and silence. With minimal speech but charged gestures and stillness, she inhabits a figure caught between myth and memory. Enriching the experience is the live musical fabric, in which vocalists Sina Saa‘i and Saghar Rajabi fold in modal lines and ambient tones that act as counterpoint to the visual drama. The score doesn’t underscore the action — it is a co‑narrator.
Director Alizadeh’s strongest choices lie in visual rhythm and spatial layering, even as pacing occasionally drifts toward overextended stasis in the second half. The persistent fog, while metaphorically potent, risks diluting movement and visual clarity when overused. And though Khun‑Negar intentionally eschews narrative momentum for poetic suspension, some audience members may yearn for more structural anchoring.
Still, Khun‑Negar represents a daring approach to theatre in Iran today: not an excavation of a forgotten poet but an act of reclamation of voice, especially female voice, in a culture where historical memory is often selective. As the performance ends, the question isn’t what has been told — but what remains unsaid, and what must continue to be spoken in the shifting light.