Tableau

The celebration is approaching. The big family gathering designed to celebrate community and hopeful new beginnings in an annual replicate. But how should it be celebrated? At home with mother, sister and a ritualised conflict? In a big ballroom with all those who are missing a certain past? Or is it better to close the door, turn up the music and wait for the next year?

Suddenly the grandmother is standing in front of the door. She took the polite invitation seriously, packed her suitcase, for the first time, and has come to Germany to visit her divorced daughter and these two unfamiliar women that her granddaughters have grown up to become in Europe. Ready to celebrate. Everything could be so wonderful.

Except that our closest relationships are also the ones in which we will strike out the hardest. When do emergency lies expire? How do you wear out discarded lifelong dreams? Does there always have to be a catastrophe first before family ties offer security instead of being restrictive? And why for that matter didn’t the much-loved grandfather come along?

Too much of what has not been said for too long suddenly erupts, and during the week leading up to the celebration, Grand, Mother, Daugh and Ter get caught in the fragile layers of hurt and yearning that one generation passes on to the next.

Tableaux are opulently framed paintings, carpets or family portraits, dust-proof behind glass, which can be admired in imposing living rooms. Based on interviews, Reihaneh Youzbashi Dizaji brings a poetically reduced experimental set-up onto the stage, focusing on complex relationships between generations of women with diverse desires and attitudes and letting them unfold in dissonance.

Tableau is an acrimonious family portrait of three generations of women, balancing along the threshold of discomfort with delightful absurdity.