ABSTRACT
By the second half of nineteenth century, Western academics began to travel to the Middle East to study plays, theatre and performances. Around the late 1960s notable public figures such as Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor and Canetti became familiar with Ta'ziyeh. This chapter explains how the Ta'ziyeh performance on the last day of the Muharram festival has the potential power to gather crowds, how the public sphere forms in Iran and where power lies. There are different studies of Ta'ziyeh, as a ritual performance in Iran, but all of them describe, more or less, the powerful emotional responses of its audience. By the fifth century before the Christian era, during the Achaemenid Empire, Zoroastrianism, was a defining element of Iranian culture, and introduced several novel ideas to Iranian society. The Karbala tragedy is recognised as the most important event in the Shi'ite religious calendar. Karbala is a city in Iraq, located to the southwest of Baghdad.
