When Creativity Becomes a Way of Breathing: Inside Arvand Dashtaray’s Philosophy of Living Through Design

Some episodes of Cozy Corner feel like conversations. Others feel like encounters. The episode with Arvand Dashtaray belongs to a rarer category. It feels like stepping into someone’s internal operating system. What unfolds is not a linear interview about theater, nor a retrospective of a career filled with titles and achievements. It is an exploration of how a human being chooses to stay alive, awake, and present in a world that constantly pushes people toward numbness.

Arvand Dashtaray is widely known as a director, actor, set designer, educator, and cultural entrepreneur. Yet throughout the conversation, he gently resists every label placed upon him. Instead, he returns again and again to a single word. Designer. Not as a profession, but as a stance toward life. For Dashtaray, design is not about aesthetics or objects. It is about responding creatively to problems that emerge from lived experience. Wherever there is friction, estrangement, or absence, design begins.

This episode of Cozy Corner becomes a meditation on that response. On why some people cannot ignore questions once they appear. On why creativity, for certain individuals, is not a choice but a form of survival.

From Discipline to Discomfort

Dashtaray’s formal education began in industrial design, a field rooted in structure, logic, and problem solving. Yet even early on, the boundaries of discipline felt insufficient. The questions he carried did not belong neatly to one domain. They leaked into theater, architecture, education, business, and everyday life. Rather than abandoning design, he expanded it until it could hold all of these experiences at once.

In his telling, the shift toward theater was not a romantic leap toward art. It was a physical necessity. As a child and adolescent, writing and literature became his first tools for breathing through emotional pressure. Later, theater offered something even more vital. A space where bodies shared air. Where presence could not be postponed. Where meaning could be rehearsed collectively.

For Dashtaray, theater was never about performance alone. It was about connection. About restoring something that felt lost in modern life. He describes theater as one of the last remaining non virtual spaces where human beings encounter each other without mediation. Where risk is real. Where failure is visible. Where the audience cannot be reduced to numbers or data points.

This understanding would shape everything that followed.

When a Question Refuses to Leave

Throughout the conversation, Dashtaray returns to a recurring pattern. Every project begins with a question. Not an abstract one, but a question born from irritation, absence, or disconnection. Why does theater feel so distant from everyday life. Why does Iranian food culture appear everywhere except in restaurants. Why are audiences trained to sit silently in the dark. Why are bodies taught to remain still.

These questions do not remain intellectual. They demand action.

When Dashtaray felt that theater no longer reflected contemporary lived experience, he did not attempt to fix it theoretically. He changed the conditions. He staged performances in galleries, parking lots, and public spaces. He invited painters, musicians, designers, and performers into shared environments. He dismantled the rigid separation between stage and audience.

Later, when he noticed that authentic home style Iranian food had disappeared from public life, he responded in the same way. The restaurant Khaneh was not a business idea driven by market analysis. It was a cultural response. A space without menus, without kebabs, without standardized distance between staff and guests. Eating became an act of interaction. Conversation mattered as much as food.

In both cases, the logic was identical. If a structure no longer serves human connection, redesign it.

Theater as a Site of Human Risk

One of the most striking dimensions of Dashtaray’s work is his commitment to interactivity. In many of his performances, the audience is not allowed to remain passive. Viewers vote, decide, speak, move, and sometimes directly shape the outcome of what unfolds on stage. In one early work, language itself became a control mechanism, guiding actors through space like a joystick. In another, the performance was structured as a game, complete with levels, objectives, and collective excitement.

These experiments were not playful diversions. They were deliberate attempts to return agency to the audience. To remind people that participation carries responsibility. That choice has consequences. That presence is not optional.

Perhaps the most radical example of this philosophy appears in Audition, a work created with Naghmeh Samini. The audience believed they were witnessing real couples competing for the chance to be selected for a funded theater project. They questioned, debated, and voted. Only at the end did they discover that everything had been scripted. The revelation was not a trick. It was the point. Do not believe everything presented to you. Question structures of representation. Notice how easily trust can be guided.

In a media landscape saturated with performance, Dashtaray uses theater to expose the mechanics of belief itself.

Building Spaces When None Exist

Dashtaray’s commitment to questions extends beyond artistic form into infrastructure. When existing theater spaces could not accommodate his ideas, he did not adapt the ideas to fit the space. He built new spaces. Hafez Hall emerged from a practical question about affordability and possibility. Lightweight structures replaced heavy institutional models. Constraints became invitations.

Similarly, his work on productions like Silence of the Dogs helped formalize new economic models for theater in Iran. The introduction of producers, new pricing strategies, and private funding marked a turning point. These moves were controversial. They attracted criticism. Yet they also expanded the field.

Importantly, Dashtaray does not romanticize these changes. He openly acknowledges the distortions that followed. Ticket prices rose too fast. Market logic began to dominate artistic decisions. Experimental work became harder to sustain. He insists that a healthy cultural ecosystem must hold multiple forms at once. Commercial theater has its place. So does theater that exists for ten people rather than a thousand.

Support for such work, he argues, is a civic responsibility. Governments, institutions, and private actors all play a role. Not everything meaningful can or should be profitable.

The Body as the First Creative Tool

One of the most intimate moments of the conversation arrives when Dashtaray speaks about the body. For him, creativity does not originate in the mind alone. It begins in physical awareness. In presence. In play.

In his workshops, he often starts with movement. Balloons are kept in the air. Bodies are invited to run, jump, and lose their composure. These exercises are not metaphors. They are interventions. A body trained only to sit still becomes closed. A closed body struggles to generate ideas.

Drawing on philosophical ideas about the happy body and the sad body, Dashtaray argues that repression limits imagination. Children understand the world by touching, experimenting, and risking. Adults lose this capacity not because it disappears, but because it is systematically discouraged. Creativity, in this sense, is not something to be learned. It is something to be remembered.

Even small acts matter. Picking up a cup differently. Answering a familiar question in an unfamiliar way. Disrupting routine just enough to become present again.

Collaboration Over Authorship

Another consistent theme in Dashtaray’s work is collaboration. He repeatedly emphasizes that nothing significant he has done was created alone. Writers, dramaturgs, performers, designers, and engineers all become co thinkers. What matters is not individual credit, but shared faith in the central question.

In projects like Audition or the Z axis stage experiments developed with Mohammad Charmshir, collaboration became a form of mutual risk. Ideas were not protected. They were tested, reshaped, and sometimes dismantled. Trust replaced hierarchy.

This collaborative ethic extends into education. When Dashtaray teaches creativity, his goal is not to transfer knowledge. It is to infect daily life. To help participants carry a questioning attitude into ordinary moments. Creativity, for him, only matters if it escapes the workshop.

Choosing Trouble Over Passivity

Near the end of the conversation, Dashtaray laughs about constantly getting himself into trouble. Each project feels impossible at the beginning. Each question demands resources that do not yet exist. Yet he insists that this trouble is preferable to passivity.

Waiting for permission, funding, or perfect conditions leads nowhere. His own life, from turning a storage room into a workspace at fifteen to building institutions and movements, has been defined by doing first and explaining later. If something needs to exist, build it. If no space is available, create one.

By conventional standards, this life may appear irrational. Dashtaray acknowledges that openly. He speaks of moments when peers measured success through property, income, or visibility. He does not deny the weight of those measures. He simply refuses to let them define the value of a human life.

What keeps him moving is not ambition, but curiosity. The bewildered part of being human that refuses to settle.

Conclusion

The Cozy Corner conversation with Arvand Dashtaray is not about theater alone. It is about how a person chooses to remain alive inside their own life. Through design, through questioning, through embodied presence, Dashtaray offers a model of creativity that resists commodification.

He reminds us that creativity is not a product. It is a posture. A way of standing inside uncertainty without retreating into routine. In a world that constantly invites us to become passive consumers, his work insists on participation.

Perhaps this is the deepest connection between Dashtaray and the spirit of Cozy Corner itself. Both are built on the belief that meaning does not arrive fully formed. It is created through attention, courage, and the willingness to stay human, even when it would be easier not to.