Glocal Bodies: Dancers in Exile and Politics of Place: A Critical Study of Contemporary Iranian Dance 9783839460801

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Background, Objective, and Methodology
Chapter 1. Dance: A Dilemma in Iranian Art
Chapter 2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran
Chapter 3. Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland
Chapter 4. Change of Perspective: Becoming Contemporary through Tradition and Experiment
Chapter 5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home
Conclusion
List of Figures
Works Cited
Online Resources

Citation preview

Elaheh Hatami Glocal Bodies

Critical Dance Studies  | Volume 62

The series is edited by Gabriele Brandstetter and Gabriele Klein.

Elaheh Hatami (Dr. phil.), born in 1979, studied dance studies at Freie Universität Berlin, where she also received her doctorate. For her Ph.D she was awarded with a scholarship from the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation. Her research focuses on the contemporaneity and transformation of dance forms at the time of digitalization.

Elaheh Hatami

Glocal Bodies Dancers in Exile and Politics of Place: A Critical Study of Contemporary Iranian Dance

Freie Universität Berlin, dissertation, 2021

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de © 2022 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Nicholas Korkos, Identity Theft Dance Theatre. Concept, music, and video: Linda Bouchard. Collaborators: Aisan Hoss, choreographer, Kyle Bruckmann, oboe/English Horn, James Fusco, actor/cameraman and David Coll, technical director and surveillance system. Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-6080-7 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-6080-1 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839460801 ISSN of series: 2747-3120 eISSN of series: 2747-3139 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Contents

Acknowledgements ................................................................ 7 Introduction: Background, Objective, and Methodology ............................. 11 Chapter 1. Dance: A Dilemma in Iranian Art ........................................ 23 Chapter 2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran ................................................. 45 Chapter 3. Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland.............................................................. 87 Chapter 4. Change of Perspective: Becoming Contemporary through Tradition and Experiment .................................................113 Chapter 5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home........................................................................... 133 Conclusion ....................................................................... 183 List of Figures ................................................................... 191 Works Cited ...................................................................... 193 Online Resources ................................................................. 201

Acknowledgements

The development of a doctoral thesis is a not a solitary process. I sincerely appreciate the generous support that helped me in the formation, development, and completion of the thesis. Foremost, my sincere thanks go to Professor Gabriele Brandstetter, who has supported my work with much understanding since I was a master’s student. I am grateful for her support and her many inspiring ideas, which aided my critical understanding of this topic. Our numerous discussions on an intellectual and personal level will always be remembered as enriching and constructive exchanges. I have always found our dialogue to be encouraging and motivating. Thanks for her comments, her constructive suggestions, and her support after the completion of each section, and thanks for giving me the confidence to continue on this journey. I would also like to thank Professor Matthias Warstat, my second supervisor, who cordially and optimistically provided me with valuable ideas and feedback. The development and composition of this book would not have been possible without generous funding, including financial and in-kind support of the Friedrich Ebert Organization. Furthermore, I would not have been able to afford expenses for research field trips, participation in conferences, proofreading and publication without the support of the Friedrich Ebert Organization. My gratitude extends as well to the interviewees and researchers in California, especially Aisan Hoss, Shahrzad Khorsandi and Banafsheh Sayyad, whom I was honored to meet personally. Thanks for sharing the stories of their lives, their experiences, and their materials, including videos and photos, and for providing me with the opportunity to participate in workshops and rehearsals.

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I thank Professor Jacqueline Shea Murphy from the University of California Riverside, with whom I had a chance to talk and exchange ideas while she stayed as a fellow at the International Research Center Interweaving Performance Cultures of Free University of Berlin. Her feedback and questions concerning the subject of the research were inspirational for Chapter 4. I am furthermore thankful to Professor Anurima Banerji from UCLA and Dr. Heather Rastovac Akbarzadeh, for their warm welcome and scientific exchange during my stay in California. I’d like to thank the all other dancers, choreographers, and dance instructors in Los Angeles, Berkeley, and San Francisco, whom I was honored to meet either in their homes, in cafés, and in dance studios. Listening to them and their experiences was influential in affording me a more objective understanding of the performance spaces of Iranian dance and its status in the diaspora. I am sincerely grateful to Kathrein Hölscher and Beate Eckstein, my referees and consultants for PhD students in the international scholarship holders team. Their commitment, cordiality, and readiness for consultation via telephone or email or in person deserve a separate and emphatic expression of gratitude. In Tehran, my thanks go to Gholi Amani, the ex-head of the Harekat-eMowzoon (rhythmic movements) society, who welcomed me and generously provided me with his valuable archive. To Mr. Hossein Taghavi, who from thousands of books and magazines patiently and enthusiastically found and provided me with the resources I needed. I will always be grateful to Professor Oliver Charles Mechcatie, who helped me in the first step in the formation of the idea of the thesis. I thank my fellow students at colloquium for helping my thesis to become more mature with their critiques and suggestions. I also have benefitted from the support of friends and contacts who have not been directly involved in this research: I thank Parvin Hadinia, Mohammad Abbasi, and Ashkan Afsharian in Tehran for their conversation and for introducing me to the contemporary dance scene inside Iran. Thank you to transcript publishing house for including the book in the TanzScripte series. I would like to thank the staff of transcript publishing for their friendly help during the process of publication. I am grateful to the proofreader Shane Bryson for his accurate work and critical comments.

Acknowledgements

My extended family deserves special acknowledgment. Their enthusiasm for dance and music and for sharing it at our parties and gatherings has inspired me since I was a child. I am very much grateful to my late father, Ghasem, and to my late mother, Sedigheh, who always encouraged me to learn and experience new things. Without their devotion and tolerance of the suffering of being away from me, it would definitely be impossible for me to continue this path. To my son, Hamun, who joined us in the middle of my writing the thesis, I am thankful to him for lightening our lives and changing my view of the life. These acknowledgments would not be complete without mentioning Mehdi, my husband and friend, who encouraged me to pursue a master’s degree in dance studies and continued to support me along the way. His attention, encouragement, humor, flexibility, innovative ideas, and constructive criticism were very helpful to complete my doctoral thesis. With sincerity and love, I dedicate this book to him.

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Introduction: Background, Objective, and Methodology

This book is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation that I submitted in March 2020 at the Free University of Berlin. The research is a deepened continuation of a part of my master dissertation entitled Covered Bodies: Embodiment and Expression of Female Body and Emotion in Iranian Dance. In my master thesis, I have addressed the reaction of the Iranian women dancers to 1979 Revolution and the prohibition of dance, due to that. Migration and self-exile have been the reactions imposed upon Iranian women dancers who have wanted to pursue dance professionally, since they need a free environment without censorship to pursue these activities. Movement in dance and movement for dance are their strategy and approach to this pursuit. Surpassing physical and mental barriers and struggling with new challenges that arose during relocation, as well as efforts to become established in their new settings, are some of the factors that have affected the practices of these women dancers. Analyzing the current situation of these dancers is impossible without pausing to consider the history of dance in Iran and raising critical questions: What is Iranian Dance, and how has it transformed to its current form? What kinds of complexities in Iranian dance and its ambiguous and tumultuous history have led to current situation of it? By whom and with what intentions has this dance been defined? By answering these questions, which are mostly related to the history of dance in Iran, this study will provide an understanding of the current situation of Iranian dance and its performers. The objective of research is not to iterate a narrative history of Iranian dance, but to address the key moments in that history which prompted the current situation, with reference to Walter Benjamin’s theses on the concept of history. My hypothesis is that the Iranian dance and women dancers have been in exile from the beginning of their time performing on stage, and this exile has appeared in the different forms, both material and metaphorical.

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The subjects of study in this book are Iranian-American women dancers, having immigrated to America in their adolescence or leaving for the US after being established professional dancers in Iran. They are trained in Western dance techniques and have integrated the Iranian dance aesthetic into their choreography. This qualitative research design is based on grounded theory. The lack of academic literature on and documentation of Iranian dance was the reason for the decision to conduct research based on interviews to collect the firsthand lived experiences from dancers. The findings are based on the analysis of one-on-one interviews, review of videos of their choreographies, and observations during the dancers’ training courses. The interviews were completed in a standardized and open-ended format in Persian and English. These interviews were conducted with ten Iranian–American dancers and choreographers in Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay area in the homes of the dancers, or at studios or cafés in February/March 2015 and November 2016. The purpose of the interviews was to gain insight into the approach and work of the Iranian–American women dancers and to examine the influence of being in the exile on their dances. The interviews were semi-structured. The criteria by which the questions were included the experience of immigration or exile, obstacles, and opportunities as an immigrant artist, the meaning of being a female dancer in the Iranian–American market, the performance space, the reaction of the audience, and the role of non-Iranian choreographers and institutions. The interviewees belonged to the first and second generation of immigrants. A point of emphasis for all interviewees was the experience of being away from “home.” In addition, all of the interviewed dancers were active in the realm of Iranian dance. I transcribed recorded interviews to over 80 pages in Berlin. After reading the text of the interviews several times, I derived several themes from them. In order to draw accurate conclusions and ensure enough space to examine and analyze the videos, the number of dancers considered in the interview analysis was limited to three. The primary characteristic shared by these three dancers is their training and background in Western and modern dance and the integration of Iranian dance vocabulary in their choreographies. Written references and interviews also form an important part of the book. In addition, visual resources including videos, photographs, program notes, private archives, pre-Revolution art and cultural magazines, were used

Introduction: Background, Objective, and Methodolgoy

to develop the structure of this study, as well as conversations with ex-dancers who were active before the 1979 Revolution and with dancers who are currently active in a limited capacity in Iran. California, as the first destination for Iranian immigrants, hosts the largest population of Iranian diaspora. The four decades of tense relations between Iran and America after the 1979 Revolution and dancers’ exile to a country with a hostile attitude towards their homeland have made the case of Iranian-Americans peculiar in comparison to that of Iranian immigrants in other Western countries. Due to this uniqueness, Iranian dancers in America have taken a different approach than have their counterparts in Europe. The differences in art, culture and cultural policies between America and Europe have undoubtedly influenced these differences in the diaspora. Beyond the national context, this research’s focus on the work of diasporic dancers centers on Iranian-American women dancers in the more localized context of California. The quality and concepts of their choreography are influenced largely by the tastes and expectations of the audience, who are mostly Iranians living in California. As a result, being in California has itself created a unique situation for the performance of Iranian dance and for their dancers. California and its cultural hybridity are reflected in the choreography of women dancers and create a style whose main characteristic is that it is interwoven and personal. Aisan Hoss, Shahrzad Khorsandi, and Banafsheh Sayyad, the three dancers discussed in book, were chosen among ten women dancers interviewed; these three were selected not for their fame but for their attitudes towards Iranian dance and their integration of it in their choreography. Their continuousness, consistency, and efforts in presenting a contemporary version of Iranian dance are factors based on which one can consider them drivers of the transformation of Iranian dance. I regard the dancers taken into account in this research as contemporary women dancers who apply and integrate Iranian dance aesthetics in their choreographies. By interweaving different dance techniques, which seem to be confusing at first glance, these dancers have established themselves as glocal dancers, I suggest.

Research Questions Dance cannot be separated from migration; many dances were born or evolved in the process of migration, during a journey, and in the contexts of other

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places and times. Migration, per se, is related to political, economic, social, and cultural elements that must necessarily be considered in a review of their impact on the formation, transformation, and evolution of dance. For instance, one cannot ignore the role of European immigrants—who brought their cultural achievements with them—in the creation of Tango in Argentina, which subsequently spread around the globe with the massive migration of Tango dancers from Latin America. Flamenco would likely not be practiced in today’s form without borrowing from and being influenced by different cultures, including those of slaves, North African Muslims, and Moors. The influence of the music, dance and costumes of expelled Persian immigrants on Indian Kathak, furthermore, cannot be ignored. These examples suggest both the role of migration in the development of dance in different historical periods and how dance is affected by religious, cultural, economic, and colonial policies of power relations. Iranian Dance and Dance in Iran are no exception. Silk Road cultural exchanges, historical attacks on Iran in different periods, the widespread migration of Iranians, Iranians’ travels and encounters in the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and colonial policies have undeniably shaped dance in the country. This book follows the evolution and transformation of Iranian Dance in the process of modernization and later, during the main wave of Iranian migration after the 1979 Revolution, at which point dancers were exiled. I will argue that dance in Iran has been colonized. It suffers from the condition of exile not only outside Iran but also inside the country. This study could not have been completed without tracing the role of women dancers and performers. Their devotion, resistance, and continuity in preserving dance and keeping it alive are crucial to consider. To fulfill this goal and in order to understand the process of the transformations of Iranian dance, this work centers on Iranian women dancers settled in California. California is the largest and most populous Iranian diaspora in the world and is home to most Iranian political dissidents and opponents of the 1979 Revolution. As such, it is not possible for most of them to return to Iran. As the years passed and the number of immigrants increased, these immigrants believed that they could not easily return to Iran. They started to become rooted in American society; therefore, they began to establish various television stations and produce cultural goods inside California. 1 In this way, 1

The number of satellite channels broadcasting programs from California have been more than the number of state television channels in Iran.

Introduction: Background, Objective, and Methodolgoy

they were fighting with the governing cultural policies of the new political regime in Iran by expressing their dissatisfaction and by preserving their connections with their country and the Iranians inside Iran. Pop music and dance have become the center of attention for migrants’ cultural activities. This attention can be justified with reference to the immediate ban on these two art forms by the new political regime inside Iran, mostly under the pressure of religious institutions. Hence, Iranians in Iran had almost no access to cultural products in dance and music, other than those being produced in California; however, getting access to them was also extremely difficult, due to the strict punishments. Therefore, the image of dance for the post-Revolutionary generation of Iranians inside the country is that of Californian-based dancers. This kind of dance, which of course has numerous fans, can be classified as entertainment is often known as social dance or Iranian dance. This study studies that type of stage dance, which tries to differentiate itself from Iranian dance as “vulgar art” in aesthetics and style and to represent itself as a form of “sublime art.” This effort has faced various challenges and complexities, such that a clear distinction between these two concepts for the Iranian audience inside and outside Iran remains absent; accordingly, it is hard to draw a line between dance as entertainment and dance as a performing art in Iranian culture. Like arts in all traditions, the vitality of the dance depends upon continuous reinterpretation and re-embodiment by contemporary artists. Dance is also continuously updated to reflect its immediate context, which changes over time. My research does not aim to study the aesthetics changes as progress, but more based on the hypothesis that the new changes and dance styles are resulted from being in an exiled situation: a condition, which despite all challenges has created a space for self-awareness, resistance and transformation by relying on capabilities and potentials. Iranian dance raises provocative questions. Do contemporary choreographies differ from the past ones? Why, in choreographing Iranian dance, should one look to the past for inspiration? What does modernizing ancient Iranian myths mean to contemporary Iranian dance or dancers? As the issue of Westernization remains relevant, what kind of choreographies are we observing? In addition, the emphasis of American dance institutions on “authenticity” in dance and being “sublime” poses more questions: What does the “authenticity” mean, and what elements comprise such authenticity in the Iranian dance? Finally, why has dance always been troubled among the arts in Iranian society and culture? And why is it important to revise and rethink the

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history of Iranian stage dance and to view it through a critical lens? Central to this discussion is the study of women’s bodily presence and performativity, along with how these parameters have changed and evolved in the process of migration and relocation in the contemporary era. Concepts such as exile, tradition, modernity, exoticism, Orientalism, body politics, and performativity, as well as their dependence on colonial and postcolonial discourses, are crucial to answer above-mentioned questions. On this account, studying and understanding critical discourses related to colonial, post-colonial, and hegemonic practices of American cultural actors and institutions and their influence on contemporary Iranian dance appears to be inevitable in answering this study’s research questions. Reflecting on the above-mentioned questions and researching the current situation of Iranian dance and dancers depends undoubtedly on understanding the past. Iranian dance has an ambiguous past, and this lack of clarity is aggravated by a further lack of written sources; furthermore, the limited sources that are available have mostly failed to deal with this issue in a critical way.

Content and Structure of Research In order to understand the history of Iranian dance and trace the process of its transformation, time and place must be considered. By applying the theses of Walter Benjamin regarding the importance of reviewing a historical topic’s past to understand its present significance, it is argued that the present time represents a turning point in the history of Iranian dance and is essential to consider and examine in order to understand the past. Moreover, in reviewing the role of migration and displacement as crucial factors in contemporary Iranian dance, it is inevitable to rethink, revision and rework Iranian dance and to approach it from a new perspective. In this book, I raise the issue that dance and Iranian women dancers are in a condition exile. Exile does not manifest only in physical separation; it metaphorically and literally means “marginalized” and “strange” where class, gender, religion, and politics have been playing an influential role in the emergence of exile and subsequent developments. This study aims not to investigate the history of Iranian dance in a linear way, but instead to determine the timescales and foci around which shifts and changes in exile type have emerged. The study outlines what exile means and how this meaning changes in each historical period under study. The relevant historical periods are as follows:

Introduction: Background, Objective, and Methodolgoy

• •

• •

the end of nineteenth and beginning of twentieth centuries, the time of encounter the West and acquaintance with ballet outside Iran; middle of the twentieth century and the beginning of modernization and Westernization of dance by US actors through the introduction of ballet to Iran; the mass migration of Iranians to the US after 1979 Revolution and ban on dance in the country; and the contemporary era, accompanied with experimental approach of Iranian-American dancers to Iranian dance.

Since twentieth century is a critical period in this history, due to confrontations of Iran with the West and the introduction of modernity, with Westernization and the establishment of dance as an identifiable phenomenon, this study first engages with the process of such development in this period and addresses the challenges posed to dance in this historical era. Following that, the state of body as a corporeal medium, which does not hold a high position in the Islamic-Iranian culture, is discussed. Consequently, and according to the literature, the body’s existence and value are defined in relation to the soul: A body is valuable that is celestial and mystic. Based on that conception of the body, the production of a disciplined and female chaste body in the twentieth century is outlined independently, through the ratification of the unveiling law and the imitation of Western dress. The sudden physical exposure of female bodies to the public places, where women were rarely present and where gender segregation has played a significant role, triggered both praise and critique. These topics are discussed in Chapter 1 Dance: A Dilemma in Iranian Art. Chapter 2 Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran addresses the important theme of exile in its metaphorical meaning. It will be argued that since its inception in Iran, stage dance, and the women dancers have been in exile. Various aspects of this exile are investigated. Motrebs and the disparaging attitude to them are here outlined. Drawing on Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque and, later, on Mary Russo, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva, it is argued that the grotesque and abject bodies of women Motrebs, through performing exaggerated movements not in harmony with social norms, subvert patriarchal norms that suppress femininity and idealize women’s bodies. Marginalization is therefore the punishment of these grotesque bodies. Reviewing and juxtaposing the historical literature of Sasan Fatemi, Jafar Shahri, and Ruhollah Khaleghi on Women Motreb dancers offers a detailed insight into their sta-

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tus. Through the Westernization of Iran and the institutionalization of ballet as a symbol of modernization, Motreb dancers were marginalized, and some even lost their original functions in order to comply with cultural and political changes. The professionals became café and cabaret dancers, and the amateurs vanished from public view. Ballet, as Western phenomena, has formed the dance stage in Iran, which remains relevant in contemporary times. Due to the inevitable influence of ballet, I track the very first encounters of Qajar princes and noblemen with ballet in Europe in the nineteenth century. Studying the travel books and reports of men travelers and focusing on their confrontations with the stage and ballet illustrates that dance has strongly feminine connotations related to grace and sin, and the stage is seen as a place of lust, pleasure, and entertainment for patriarchal Iranian society. The conclusion of such reports and observations reflects the misinterpretations of the men travelers concerning the cultural motivations for the performance of dance in Western countries. This chapter further discusses how the confrontation of the structurally traditional Iranian society with ballet, a Western import to Iran, influenced Iranian stage dance and the representation of women dancers. Colonial modernity generated institutionalized but ambiguous authenticity in Iranian dance, which I call ‘pseudo-authentic dance’. Focusing on the transnational practices of American colonialism and Orientalism discourse will also pave the way to discuss how such hegemonic practices drew a line between “sublime” and “vulgar” dance and between dancer as “artist” and as “prostitute” in the twentieth century. Moreover, to demonstrate how dance was used both as a form of embodied royals propaganda and indoctrination.2 These issues are detailed in Chapter 2 Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran. Despite the turbulent political relations between the US and Iran since 1979, resulting traveling restrictions, and the absence of direct cultural exchange, Iranian dance and dancers in the US have deeply influenced the people in Iran to connect them to dance again. For instance, one can refer to the period of the Iran–Iraq war from 1980 to 1988. During these years—in which Iranian society was deeply depressed, as a result of the political suppression and under shock of devastation resulting from war and economic 2

My usage of “embodied propaganda and indoctrination” is inspired from Jens Richard Giersdorf, The Body of the People: East German Dance since 1945, The University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, 2013.

Introduction: Background, Objective, and Methodolgoy

sanctions, when socio-cultural restrictions in the form of strict censorship were at their peak—collections of videocassettes from dance courses and performances were smuggled into Iran and copied and distributed widely among families. These videocassettes were the only references available for learning Iranian dance in the absence of any other resources or archives. This wave also encouraged those dancers who were forcefully marginalized after the 1979 Revolution and were under the shock of a dance ban in the country. Therefore, they felt confident that they could also return and hold underground courses with minimal facilities and a limited number of trainees. In contrast, Iranian women dancers and choreographers in California preserved their contact with their home country despite their physical absence. They utilized the cultural products and motifs of Iran, including its music, textiles, poetry, and literature; they engaged in the socio-political development of the country and its religion to enrich their art, to present a non-clichéd picture of Iranian dance, and to attract a broader audience in the Iranian community. These efforts were all in order to gain ground to establish their art in exile as “sublime.” My focus is thus to determine the parameters, which push dancers to adopt such approaches in exile, and to figure out the reasons behind the struggle between tradition and modernity, despite that most of the dancers have been trained in the West and currently perform there. Furthermore, to investigate the methods that selected dancers apply to move from the ‘past’ toward ‘contemporary’ choreography, while preserving their past heritage; and to extract the features of Iranian dance that makes it attractive to American dancers and choreographers, and to study if the interest of American institutions play any role in forcing Iranian dance to remain in exile. The shift in the geographical space of the performance of the dance, due to its prohibition after the 1979 Revolution and the mass migration of Iranians to the US, are outlined in Chapter 3 Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland. In order to understand the situation of exile, a theory of exile from Edward Said and the state that it creates for the Oriental artist are first discussed. Similarly, Hamid Naficy’s analysis of the emergence of exile culture and its impact on Iranian televisions in Los Angeles is reviewed. It is also argued that the exile space of dance and Iranian dancers is located within diverse dichotomies and In-betweenness: tradition versus modernity, East versus West, old versus new homeland, self versus others, inclusion versus exclusion, and localization versus globalization. The controversial US-Iranian relations in the last four decades and its impact on transformation of Iranian dance into a medium to represent a posi-

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tive image of Iran in the US in order to mitigate the negative attitude toward US-Iranians are picked out as a central theme in this part. Accordingly, the activities of US dance institutes Ballet Afsaneh in Berkeley (Northern California) as one of decisive institutions to rediscover the Iranian dance and bring it on the stage outside Iran are discussed. I demonstrate the characteristics of its productions and its policy to attract Iranian audience and how such institutions established an image of Iranian dance, which complicate the individual Iranian dancers to present other image and form of dance. In this chapter, the crucial concept of world dance is also reviewed and the status of Iranian dance in America is examined. The role of American Institutions and the meaning of post-colonial notions such as Orientalism to Iranian dance are also investigated. One of the main challenges that Iranian dance and Iranian women dancers in the US face is the imposition of stereotypes associated with Orientalism and exoticism, a factor related to these dancers’ geographical location. Two issues are discussed in this regard: Firstly, the interest of US dancers and choreographers in the exotic and fusion, placed in line with the approach followed by twentieth-century American dancers like Ruth St. Denis and La Meri. Secondly, by referring to the Orientalist literature of authors such as Flaubert and Curtis in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the stereotypes related to the images of Oriental female dancers’ bodies are outlined, which remain relevant to contemporary Iranian female dancers. In Chapter 4 Change of Perspective: Becoming Contemporary through Tradition and Experiment, I change the perspective and examine the Iranian dance and the work of Iranian women dancers in the US from a new angle. Considering Iranian dance as a dynamic phenomenon, I argue that this type of dance has the potential to be updated and presented in a contemporary format. Among other reasons that Iranian dance has remained unknown is the lack of literature and documentation of it. The sparse literature on the subject has been mostly written by US writers, who are interested in regarding Iranian dance as traditional, static, unprofessional, ethnic, or folk dance. Hence, its transformation and contemporaneity are mostly ignored. A separate section is dedicated to the review of such literature and the way in which it engages with Iranian dance both in theory and in practice. Moreover, examples make clear that the role and presence of women dancers has been overlooked not only on the stage, but also in the text. Summarizing such reasons and evidence, a clear picture can be given according to which the meaning of exiled dance and its appearance in different formats is defined. Despite all

Introduction: Background, Objective, and Methodolgoy

challenges, being in the US has provided Iranian women dancers with a free environment in which to work, away from the restrictive regulations one has to deal with inside Iran. Therefore, it gives an introduction what approach they are following in the free capitalist and customer-oriented atmosphere of the US that is always seeking innovation and newness. Drawing on liminality theory of Victor Turner and referring to cultural theorists like Homi Bhabha and Hamid Naficy, who argue that the diaspora produces and reproduces new identities through transformation and difference, the section Dancing in Liminality: The Experimentation of Women Dancers in Exile outlines that dancers are presenting a new image of Iranian dance in a threshold space. In supporting this hypothesis, a range of theories on experimental dance from perspective of Mark Franko and Cynthia Novack, are reviewed and referred to. These theories enable one to examine the term “tradition” from a different angle: tradition as an experiment and an innovation, capable of expanding into the US by passing through the experimental phase. If the women dancers succeed in such a tradition of experimentation, a new genre of Iranian dance may be distinguished. These matters are discussed in Chapter 4. In order to present a holistic overview of the current status of Iranian dance and generate novel insight into the work of women dancers in exile, I completed two research stays in California, one in 2015 and one in 2016. During my stay in California (specifically, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Berkeley), I met with and interviewed Iranian-American scholars and dancers. To determine the role of Iranian dance techniques and to understand these dancers’ training targets and methods, their trainees’ skill levels, and the motivations and audiences (target group) of the selected dancers, I met and interviewed ten women Iranian-American dancers and choreographers in Northern (Bay Area) and Southern California (Los Angeles). After hours of talking, transliterating and summarizing interviews, I selected the works of Aisan Hoss, Shahrzad Khorsandi, and Banafsheh Sayyad, among others. I participated in their workshops and observed their methods of training and choreography. These three dancers and choreographers are those who have been persisting in their work as individuals, and they succeeded in establishing their style. Although each of them has their own method and approach, however, innovation, experimentation, and a state of exile are common among them. Moreover, all of them have been trained in Western dance techniques and applying Iranian dance aesthetics in their choreographies. In Chapter 5 Transformation and Reconnection to Home I deal with the life and work of Aisan

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Hoss, Shahrzad Khorsandi, and Banafsheh Sayyad. Based on the interviews, I elucidate the challenges and opportunities, discussed in previous chapters and the result of being in the exile. Furthermore, parts of their selected dances and choreographies are discussed and analyzed, based on factors such as movement, stage, costume, and music. I also define the meaning of the experimentation in the work of these three dancers. Moreover, the in-between situation, between modernity and tradition, the local and the global, is studied. And the movement methods are explained, thorough which the IranianAmerican women dancers bridge old and new homelands and establish themselves as glocal dancers.3

3

The word “glocalization” is a combination of two terms; globalization and localization. According to sociologist Roland Robertson, who significantly influenced the concept of globalization, the word glocalization comes from the Japanese word “dochaku,” which means, “living on one’s own land.” The term indicated “originally the agricultural principle of adapting one’s farming techniques to local conditions.” The word “localization,” according to Robertson, has also been adopted “in Japanese business for global localization” and means the adaptation of “a global outlook to local conditions.” Roland Robertson: Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity. In: Featherstone, M., Lash, S. and Robertson, R., Eds., Global Modernities, Sage Publications, London, 1995, p. 28.

Chapter 1. Dance: A Dilemma in Iranian Art

This chapter addresses the determinative concepts in the study: history, exile, tradition, and modernity, as well as the Iranian female body. As has been pointed out, understanding the current situation of Iranian dance is impossible without knowledge and analysis of its past: a scrupulous and critical historical study, not in the form of a mass of data, but with a derivation of the determinative points and a focus on them. Therefore, this analysis relies on Walter Benjamin’s thesis regarding the necessity critically viewing historical studies, the importance of knowing the past in order to understanding the current situation, and the necessity of studying historical phenomenon with contemporary attitudes. It is argued in 1.1. Rethinking Contemporary Iranian Dance, based on this thesis, that the subject of Iranian dance is complicated, and the history of Iranian dance needs to be studied critically. The chapter also explains why the history of Iranian dance should not be studied linearly or be limited to the dichotomy of developed versus backward nations. Section 1.2. The Concept of Exile in Dance is dedicated to the subject of exile and its effects in the domain of dance in Iran. This part also briefly points to the limitations and opportunities to which exile has led for Iranian dance and dancers. A study of Iranian dance is necessarily incomplete without consideration of the subject of tradition and modernity. Therefore, section 1.3. Swinging between Tradition and Modernity is dedicated to the role of modernity and its accession with the Iran’s traditional and religious society. Modernity entered at once into Iran’s dance setting, changing its content and form. Another topic argued in this chapter regards attitudes toward the body and, following that, toward dance. The body (the main medium for creating dance) and attitudes toward it automatically affect the interpretation of dance. Section 1.4. Undesired Body, Dishonored Dance: The Placement of Women’s Bodies in Iranian Public Life, with reference to religious sources and Iranian classical literature, presents an image of the place of the body, especially the

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female body, in Iranian society. Following that, the complicated situation of Iranian female dancers and the disparaging their work are addressed. The female body emerged from confined spaces and the coverage of hijab with access to modernity in the twentieth century: a presence and freedom that apparently provided a more open setting for female dancers, but brought another sort of limitation, which are discussed under 1.5. The Production of Disciplined and Chaste Bodies in the Process of Modernization.

1.1

Rethinking Contemporary Iranian Dance

In this section, Benjamin’s historical-philosophical theory on the concept of history serves as the basis on which to confront history and the historical aspects of Iranian dance progress. Benjamin rejects historical interpretations in a linear process. According to him, “classical historiography was the strongest narcotic of the century.”1 The linear events and narratives together constitute progressive and continuous motion. Progress has, in Benjamin’s definition, “its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but in its interferences—where the truly new makes itself felt for the first time.”2 Progress is constituted in the structure of its history and not in its continuity. Assertions of progress in history reflect the personal experience of the observer. Benjamin criticizes the understanding of history as “a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time”3 in his theses on the concept of history to reflect a gapless historical continuum without crack or occurrence. From this point of view, in order to find their place in the historical continuum, the historical events shall be recognized “as they really were”4 and not “fill by now-time [Jetztzeit].”5 History,

1

2 3

4

5

Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project, Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Prepared on the basis of the German volume. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2002, p. 463. Ibid. p. 474. Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History in Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt, translated from German by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, New York, 1969, p. 262. Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project, Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2002, p. 863. Ibid. p. 942.

1. Dance: A Dilemma in Iranian Art

according Benjamin, is not merely an object of contemplation; instead, it is a medium of construction: A “Construction presupposes destruction.”6 Merely putting historical events next to each other and presenting a unified picture does not fulfill the objectives of this study. In addition to attending to historical sources, this study examines why Iranian dance is an ambiguous and indefinable phenomenon and explains why the unified and globally accepted definition for Iranian dance not exist. The origin of contemporary Iranian dance emerges from dances invented in the twentieth century. To understand today’s Iranian dance, genealogical research is necessary. A genealogy is focused on discovering and criticizing the ‘present’ instead of the ‘past.’ The philosopher Babak Ahmadi states: It is insufficient to regard the past as pretext for the present; rather, to step back and stay at the point where we passed without any critical scrutiny. This means that, to understand the distinction between “present” and “past” and then making them unfamiliar. Logically, a chain of occurrences leading to present time shall not be discussed, but instead one must determine how each occurrence look likes. This process means studying differences in observation and the special way in which each event unfolds.7 The necessity of following the genealogy of Iranian dance and its re-thinking can be discovered in of Benjamin’s fifth thesis: “the true picture of the past flits by. […]. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”8 Thus, one must acquire a holistic view of these historic discontinuities, their characteristics, and the discourses attached to historical occasions to be able to revise and analyze the transformation of Iranian dance. This strategy is central to Iranian dance, as re-vision is “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.”9 In order to have an objective understanding, one shall forget what happened after that period. In 6 7 8

9

Ibid. p. 470. Babak Ahmadi: Modernity and Critical Thought (Modernite va Andisheye Entheghadi), Markaz Publishers, Tehran, 1995, p. 227. (My translation) Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History in Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt, translated from German by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, New York, 1969, p. 255. Adrienne Rich quoted in Ann Cooper Albright: Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, 1997, pp. 155–156.

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other words, the current, to-some-extent critical condition of Iranian dance shall not lead to overvaluation of the past and ignorance of its shortcomings. Relevant to this approach, Benjamin asserts in his sixth thesis, “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”10 To him, understanding history as it exactly happened is not an issue; instead, the interweaving of truth and history shall be primarily considered. He does not regard history as a collection of narrations but rather a mass of ephemeral images that can be captured only in their understanding in the present. This moment is bound to the socio-political circumstances and demands of the present time. From the other side, the understandability of history depends on a moment of crisis: a moment fraught with danger, in which the situation for the historical subject becomes alarming. In this way, it halts the eternal repetition of tradition as a heritage. Benjamin emphasizes the discontinuity of history: “the continuum of history is that of the oppressor.”11 History does not follow a progressive path; returning and applying similar methods are among its main characteristics. He also regards tradition as the live presence of the past in the present time and asserts that certain elements of the past remain the same. Benjamin’s “angle of history” looks toward the past, and the “storm of progress” moves it forward, while unsolved challenges remain. Therefore, historical salvation is meaningless, and discovering the past by no means amount to its revitalization, but rather to having sympathy with past generations. He argues that history alone does not have a meaning, as it can be interpreted only in its connection with the present time and in the manner that the present time frames the past. History, as an uninterpretable concept, is not employed to clarify the ambiguities of present, but to cover them with a mysterious veil. In this regard, the past makes the present ambiguous. In the realm of dance studies, Susan Foster reinforces the necessity of observing history as the “study of change or process through time.” Studying the past to examine the present is inevitable, as Foster maintains: “It’s this present that for dance demands a past to be wrought through the making of

10

11

Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History in Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt, translated from German by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, New York, 1969, p. 255. Quoted in Peter Osborne (ed), Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations on Cultural Theory, Routledge, New York, 2005, p. 157.

1. Dance: A Dilemma in Iranian Art

histories. Dance must consider its construction, its changes through time, its presents.”12 There is no continuity in the history of Iranian dance, which does not entail that Iranian dance does exist as a genre. The history does witness gaps and discontinuities, but remains continuous. The collection of previous occurrences in individual and collective life commune with and shape the current time. In order to recognize such occurrences and pass through the past to reach the present, one must study the modernity–tradition dichotomy and their struggle and interaction, which Iranian society has faced within the past 150 years. Modernity in Iran, as a non-Western country, is deeply rooted in national and local traditions and history.

1.2

The Concept of Exile in Dance

Iran has never accommodated the long-term physical presence of Western values and norms within the country’s borders. Such encounters have been had mainly by young Iranians—mostly students—who spent some years in the West and adopted part of its culture. Immigrants who went to Western countries before 1979 were attracted by its civilization without having enough contact with local people. Modernity entered Iran mostly through the imitation of those who were in the West, and it could not be institutionalized; hence, the modernization of Iran is an incomplete process. Direct encounters with the modern world took place through a wave of migrations and exiles after the Revolution of 1979. Such direct encounters and individual experiences of modernity, put forth by theorists as a solution to modernization, cannot be very helpful for exiled dancers in new environments. The challenges of exile and concepts such as Orientalism and exoticism are obstacles being experienced by dancers in exile. Exiled identity is defined entirely by its traditions, where the insistence on utilizing tradition becomes cliché. This clichéd status is optimal for both the host and the exiled: It verifies the host’s the perception of the exiled from one side, and the exiled, from the other side, can perform their own identity, being distinguished, visible and becoming a subject. Foucault “sees identity [in the present time] as a form of subjugation and a way of exercising power over people and preventing them from moving

12

Susan Leigh Foster (ed): Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power. Routledge, London, 1996, introduction, xii, xiii.

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outside fixed boundaries.”13 Human beings have recognized of their identity that their knowledge of the present time defines that time through various common narratives of racial, cultural, national, gender, and class categories imposed upon them. They involve themselves, unknowingly or without conscious will, in issues generating such definitions. In this way, they become subjects, and in the process of becoming subjects, they remain mostly prisoners of older viewpoints. If human beings want to refuse to be subjects, they can only position themselves against the present time and take the risk of change. Foucault maintains that we have “to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political “double bind,” which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures.”14 We have to refrain from what we are and to think differently and live different lives as well as to become people whom we are not at the moment. In other words, Foucault urges, the “homogenization,” “naturalization,” and “integration” resulting from modern structures must be fought, though the fight be hard and challenging for the exiled person, generally faced with frustration and failure. Iranian Dance within Iran appeared a strange and inventive art, combining ballet and folklore. After the Revolution, it had no space to develop, and when it was declared a forbidden art, all choreographers and dancers were banned from their work. Western dancers and choreographers left the country, along with some Iranians, and the rest had to give up. As a result, the movement that had begun toward the “flourishing of dance” in Iran was halted abruptly. Since then, the Iranian dance has faced a dual exile: an external exile and a metaphorical and internal one. This dual exile captures not only the excluded and marginalized dances within the homeland, but also all kinds of dance, including invented “national” and “classical” dances.15 In the current study, exile has two meanings: first, far away and expelled from a homeland. By this definition, the transformation of Iranian dance is studied in the exiled Iranian diaspora in California. Second, the study deals 13 14

15

Clare O'Farrell: Michel Foucault, SAGE Publications, London, 2005, p. 140. Michel Foucault: “The Subject and Power” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow University of Chicago Press, 1982–1983, p. 216. Except folklore dances, which are not the topic of this study, wherever Iranian dance is referred to in the text, the reference is to dance that emerged out of the combination of ballet and Iranian folklore dance and that official cultural institutions have called national or classic dance. Such dance was the basis of other dances invented in exile.

1. Dance: A Dilemma in Iranian Art

with that kind of metaphorical exile that relates to being “cast away” and to “strangeness,” “the unknown,” and “marginalization” in Iranian culture; this sense of exile is most relevant to the formation of stage dance in Iran.16 Exile is unwanted and awkward. In his essay Reflections on Exile, Edward Said addresses the unpleasant nature of exile. He describes our age as an “age of the refugee,” “displaced person” and “mass immigration.” Despite the scientific, cultural, and literary achievements of which exile has been driver, it is “unbearably historical,” and according to Said, “has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography.”17 On another point, Said defines exile as a jealous state […]. Exiles look at non-exiles with resentment […]. No matter how well they may do, exiles are always eccentrics who feel their difference […] as a kind of orphanhood. […] Willfulness, exaggeration, overstatement: these are characteristic styles of being an exile […]. Artists in exile are decidedly unpleasant.18 As uninvited guests, the exiled have no relationship with the culture, beliefs, traditions, and social behaviors of exile. They are being regarded as strangers and Others. Said’s concern in expressing these feelings is identity. Exile keeps the exiled person from identity, wherein the feeling of alienation and being cast away deprives them of traditions and makes them homesick. This external exile penetrates unconsciously into their character and makes them isolated. Despite the restrictions and crises that exile engenders, it has played (and plays) an undeniable role in creation of contemporary Iranian dance. Dance in exile is of significant importance for the exiled and its function in exile is different than that at home. The meaning that Iranian dance and its representational field have taken on a different character in exile. Dancers in exile do what they do not do at home. Dancers at home do not need to prove their nationality; in exile, because of their physical distance from the homeland the impossibility of having direct relationships with their cultural and social roots, the desire to return to those roots and to emphasize them

16

17 18

Exile does not here mean only being expelled physically from one’s homeland, but also to “strangeness” (Biganegi) and “marginalization” (Mahjouri), according to the Dehkhoda Iranian Dictionary. Edward Said: Reflections On Exile: And Other Literary and Cultural Essays, Granta Books, London, 2001 pp. 137–138. Ibid.pp. 141–145.  

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increases. The exiled Iranian dancers apply dance as a non-verbal medium to represent their national identity. Such a representation, mostly related to Orientalism and exoticism, captures the threat of endangered dance, as this threat relates directly to their experiences of their homeland. These notions refer merely to the geographical origin of the exiled, however. In exile, the value of dance and its performers’ bodies are estimated by modern criteria. As a result, choreographies are born that distinguish bodies from each other; the dancers’ own bodies, which can move freely, and bodies possessed by others, whose behavior is therefore disciplined. The qualities of these choreographies differ, based on gender, ethnicity, race, and social class.

1.3

Swinging between Tradition and Modernity

The confrontation of Iran with the achievements of the modern world has always been mixed, either with modernity being forcibly imposed or being imitated. Although its impact can be found in the Iranian society, the results of this confrontation are yet to be defined. Iranians who have been affected by the values and ideologies of Iranian civilization are neither fully traditional nor fully modern. They tend to belong both to the modern world and to the traditional one; in fact, however, they belong to none. They try to be modern; nevertheless, they are traditional, as they believe in their traditional norms and reproduce them unconsciously. Most Iranians seek the progress associated with the modern world and evade contemplation of the progression of their traditions. Therefore, they have no way but to remain between tradition and modernity. Interweaving tradition and modernity has been a solution to bridge this divide in the recent decades. Philosophers and critics, however, believe that this link has less to do with a deep understanding of the challenge. For example, the philosopher Morad Farhadpoor believes that “We just carry the several thousand years of old tradition that we inherited from our forefathers on our shoulders without putting it down, and look at, study, and analyze it.”19 Dariush Shayegan, a cultural theorist and comparative philosopher, sees the shortage of deep understanding in the work of Iranian intellectuals. According to Shayegan, the intellectuals transform “tradition into ideology” 19

Morad Farhadpoor: Walter Benjamin: Philosophy of History–Philosophy of Language, DVD Series 3–4, Porsesh Institute of Political Studies, Tehran, 2014. (My translation)

1. Dance: A Dilemma in Iranian Art

to revive tradition in face of the new circumstances of modern life, without having a sufficient understanding of modern values. They regard any effort to imbue the society with modernity as a form of “Westernization” and therefore a “cultural decadence.” Modern Iran, according to Shayegan, never witnessed “Aufhebung” in its’ Hegelian interpretation. Instead, the tradition has evolved through religious thinking and was unable to absorb the concept of modernity. Its relationship with modernity was a marginal one: a relationship more defined as a chain of paradoxical and unnatural alliances and not necessarily as structural compatibility with modern soul. It is not astonishing that Iranian modern society has been trapped between two or—as some intellectuals put forth—three antithetical cultures: Western modernity, Shiite Islam, and Iranian nationalism. The conflict between tradition and modernity causes a surreal situation, which can also be tracked in Iran and Iranian diasporic communities. Here, modernity and tradition have been torn apart: “Tradition is ambiguous and no longer functional. Modernity in Iran, in contrast, is not modern, as it has not yet been institutionalized in the individual, and social life and appears only in various styles. In such a situation, critical analysis is the most vital responsibility of researchers in the arts and humanities.”20 Iranian dance has faced conceptual transformations of content and form in the course of modernization progress. Such progress is more evident once modernity is mixed with traditional, archaic subjectivity and engenders a contradiction, which is neither in favor of tradition nor leads to the successful establishment of modernity. When a discourse has to deal simultaneously with tradition and a constantly evolving modernity, the definitions are being changed, the principals are being challenged, and nothing remains but hybridization, which takes control of cultural policies. Therefore, the reason for the contradictions and challenges of contemporary Iranian dance cannot be confined only to a certain period, without considering the country’s progress and evolution in the twentieth century. Iranian stage dance has suffered from the progression of modernity, as is discussed in this book.

20

Ramin Jahanbegloo: Iran and Modernity, Goftar Publishers, Tehran, 2001, p. 24. (My translation)

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1.4

Undesired Body, Dishonored Dance: The Placement of Women’s Bodies in Iranian Public Life

Women’s bodies have always been controversial in Iran, due to gender segregation and specifically to veiling. Nevertheless, attitudes towards women’s bodies have been disputed and presented differently in various eras. Studying the impact of power relations in shaping the body as a historical, cultural, and political entity paves the way for understanding discourses related to the Iranian female body in confrontation with modernity and its impact on space, audience, and performance type. Such studies demonstrate whether in the complicated and interwoven relations of power structures, the dancers and performers can rule their bodies and utilize the existing facilities in that certain time and space, or move beyond restrictions and imposed structures towards creating alternative spaces. The body is the main carrier of daily experiences and interactions. It is the major medium by which to produce, participate, and perform. In the course of a woman’s bodily evolution in the history of Iran, religion and politics were among the main parameters shaping body culture and determining its different norms. Changes in bodily behaviors and habits in Iran have been shaped mostly due to social segregation and not bottom-up procedures. Such changes have mostly been formulated in accordance with modernity and in confrontation with Western culture, influenced directly or indirectly by it. The bodily behaviors of women have been less evolved in the historical procedure based on the appropriate structural developments of a traditional society. The traditional body in Iran has also a comprehensive connection to the natural and social surroundings in the country, and men’ perceived superiority is evident in such connections. In the history of Iran, no other external phenomenon such as modernity has so deeply impact on daily life. The experience of modernity is a lively and immediate one that above all involves the body. Zokaee and Farzaneh write, “Modernity in Iran is a period which is characterized by rethinking and involving the body in the reflexive organization of the social life.”21 Bodily discourses involve narrating historical characteristics and parameters shaping the body and reviewing voices that did not have the chance to be presented 21

Mohammad Saeed Zokaee and Hamideh Farzaneh: Women and Culture of Body in Quarterly Magazine of Iranian Association of Cultural and Communication Studies, Tehran, 2008, p. 45. (My translation)

1. Dance: A Dilemma in Iranian Art

and have therefore been marginalized. This discourse identifies who, in which period and through which authority, has the right to speak about the body and to determine the meaning of the body. Power produces and reproduces the body in each period of history. Foucault elucidates that the body is an “object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body–to the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces.”22 The body is a corporal entity, bound to the time and space. The determination, perception, and understanding of the body without considering the contexts is not plausible, as the body is shaped not in a vacuum, but in relationship with its places and its actions and interactions with its surrounding space. Experiencing the special space and perception of the body provides the possibility of a particular type of body to appear and interactions and meaningful relationships to be shaped. Furthermore, time and space allow for bodies to interact and to produce and exchange meanings. Such spaces are not blank spaces; there are spaces wherein human interactions are structured based on the norms and values imposed upon them in the form of a system of orders on bodies. These are spaces in which the actors who occupied them pass through, reside in, experience and give meaning to, according to their experiences, reproducing these spaces and intervening in them to produce new spaces or to extend already existing ones. Foucault states that the space in which we live is “a heterogeneous space.” This space “draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us.”23 He adds, “We live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.”24 The fact that we live in a set of relations that shape our spaces designates that the relationship between the body and its surrounding spaces is not that of a static and one-way nature, but is a dynamic, interwoven, and two-way one. Space and time are regarded as human products and cultural codes, while space and time surrounding human-being that transforms meaningless bodies into meaningful ones. In other words, the body is regarded as a socio-cultural phenomenon that promotes the abstract order of

22 23 24

Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Penguin Books, London, 1991, p. 136. Michel Foucault: Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec, October 1984, p. 3. Ibid.

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existing spaces and is interpreted and understood based on its positioning in social spaces, where it is also considered a center of creation, production, reproduction, and transformation in social structures and spaces. In dance as a bodily and non-verbal phenomenon, space, time, and objects have an influential presence and a determining role in the transmission of a message and the interpretation of meaning. Coding and decoding movement in dance are incomplete without considering the elements of context in which dance is shaped. It is possible that dance is interpreted in a way not necessarily intended. On this basis, dance is a mode of communication that is heavily context-based, whose performance and perception depends on elements that consist in its context. Therefore, only in the historical and cultural context of a dance can the signs and codes be understood as symbolic reflections of a given movement. In other words, dances are influenced by biopolitical parameters that are shaped within power relations. They promote similar value systems according to desire of power relations by creating and transmitting signs and symbols. They are also able to generate a specific pattern of attitudes and movements and marginalize other patterns by labeling them “unsocial,” “rebellious,” “obsolete,” or “retrogressive.” One of the reasons behind the strangeness of dance within Iranian society is that the body is regarded as something strange. The connection of dance with the body has an inherent nature, and the way in which one understands one’s body has a direct impact on one’s perception of dance. The body does not enjoy a position of value in Iran, and its existence is not recognized as an independent object. This attitude has its roots in both religious and traditional beliefs. As Janet Afary—Iranian-American author and researcher—maintains, in Shiite Islam, the body is a source of shame and pollution, similar to the treatment it receives in some other religions, such as Judaism and Zoroastrianism.25 Julia Kristeva also refers to numerous cultural and religious rituals according to which the body is regarded as impure and abject.26

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Janet Afary: Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2009, p. 142. Defecation, fresh blood, spit, vomit, and infection are all indications of the filthiness and dirtiness of body. Kristeva believes that such perspectives on the impurity of body are reproduced traditionally and mythically: from the bath immediately after birth and the washing of the baby after birth to taking a bath after sexual intercourse. Those perspectives on impurity are more significant in relation to a woman’s body, as suggested by the prohibition of her entrance to the holy sites and rituals during the time of men-

1. Dance: A Dilemma in Iranian Art

Moreover, studying the literature as a mirror to the cultural identity of a nation certifies that in Iranian culture, in deciding between physical body and spiritual entity, the soul has been superior to body. The body has only a spiritual value, where it serves the soul as a medium for accomplishing rituals. Hence, the body itself has no considerable value, not only in religion, but also in literature. All dignity it has depends to the soul it carries. Saadi Shirazi, the prominent and major Persian poet of the medieval writes: Man’s body is ennobled by his soul, And this fine garment is not a sign of humanity If man were known by his eyes, nose, mouth and ears, What difference would there be between a picture on the wall and humanity? Based on mystical literature, the body imprisons the soul, and its existence blocks the soul from becoming free to ascend: I am a bird of the heavenly garden, I belong not to the earthly sphere, They have made for two or three days, A cage of my body. (Rumi) In classical Iranian literature, the body is mostly regarded as worldly. All its physical value lays in its natural function, and its spiritual value depends on in its ritual function: O joyous day, when I depart from this abode of desolation Seeking the repose of my soul and setting out in search of my Beloved. (Hafis) Although no explicit reference is made to dance in Afary or Kristeva’s analyses or in classical poems, one can infer that dance is not an accepted and respected phenomenon in a society in which life is based on pillars of religion.27 When such a hostile attitude towards the body is combined with

27

struation. (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Translated by Leon s. Roudiz, Columbia University press, New York, 1982. pp. 53–59.) The relationship between religious beliefs and dance and body is very close. For instance, Motrebs followed a smart policy to legitimize their performances by stationing their work offices in teahouses within the courtyards of holy shrines or their adjacent corridors. Shahri maintains that these locations were selected to evade the ultra-religious people who had banned the dances and because the dancers knew people’s religious beliefs: In the closed religious society of that time, everything that came out

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the fact that dance is considered a feminine activity in a society in which an ideal woman is a motionless one, it is clearly justifiable that dance cannot be recognized as an artistic act for women. It is mainly accompanied by a feeling of shame and filthiness in a religious and traditional context in which even modernity cannot influence much in following respects: Considering the medium of dance—the body—as an impure object, consequently results in attributing filthiness to the dance and the dancer. Since dance in Iran has a feminine nature, this view is mostly related to female dancers. Accordingly, a female dancer is considered to have an “evil” and “seductive” nature. The less a woman moves, the more she is perceived to be chaste and dignified. A good and dignified woman is one who rarely speaks and seldom moves. Hence, dance, with its dynamic and free nature and its presentation of the body, precludes such dignity and transforms the owner of such a free body into an “unchaste,” “dishonored,” and “indecent” one.

1.5

The Production of Disciplined and Chaste Bodies in the Process of Modernization

The condition of Iranian female dancers is a paradoxical one. The nature of dance and motion for a woman in the framework of a patriarchal culture is that of a modern act. The female dancer transcends traditional boundaries and breaks the rules in spite of disagreements and negative attitudes by moving and presenting her body on the stage in front of the strangers. In contrast, however, she remains bound to traditions even after many years of resistance and presence on the stage; paradoxically, her dance embodies Iranian or Oriental modesty and chastity. In such a circumstance, the Iranian female dancer becomes a contradiction. She is in-between. She insists on the embodiment of tradition, yet she violates its basic principles; she pursues modernity, while she hesitates to escape tradition and continues to feel ashamed on stage. Such a complex and vague situation may seem difficult to explain. These women spare hardly effort to represent their real selves despite the freedoms resulting from modernity. It remains questionable that freedoms—above all un-

of religious and holy sites, even songs and dances of Motrebs, was holy and brought fortune and luck. (Jafar Shahri: Tārīkḫ-i iǧtimāʿī-i Tihrān dar qarn-i sīzdahum(Social History of Tehran in the Twentieth Century), Rasa Publisher, Tehran, 1990, Vol 5/6, pp. 614–615.) (My translation)

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veiling—have not had a meaningful impact in presenting these dancers’ real selves. Modernity in Iran brought women’s body into view by controlling and staging their bodies and preparing society for performing in a relative free sphere that was created afterwards. Afsaneh Najmabadi—gender theorist— criticizes the project of modernization that affected voice and language of the Iranian women: When the female voice found a public audience, it became a veiled voice, a disciplined voice. […]. In the homosocial female space, language and body could be sexually overt; stepping into the heterosocial world of modernity was coterminous with the construction of a disciplined female language and body.28 From this perspective, modernity worked as a control system in Iran. The opportunity of appearing in the public place limited the Iranian women in another form, rather provided them with emancipation. This theory is also relevant to body of the Iranian women. Assuming that, in its most general sense, “performance makes visible,”29 the presence of women made modernity visible. This visibility was accompanied by a disciplinary reconstruction of female body. In this era, through the appearance of women in the society, their disciplined female bodies and gestures were defined as identity-building factors for women. Before the time of appearing woman in the public place, women’s engagement was limited to working at home, taking care of the children, and farming crops and livestock. Women played no role in society, and the public place was nearly a masculine one, where if the woman is present, she is fully covered. An Iranian woman would have no sense of ownership over her body in any historical periods. Patriarchal society violates this bodily autonomy and considers the female body to be private property, which is owned by it. Until beginning of the twentieth century, in Iran it was among the characteristics of a good woman to be rather silent, to speak quietly, and to walk such that nobody would notice her—avoiding movement of her hands and taking care to minimize her physical gestures. She possessed a specific set of bodily gestures and behaviors in which the lack of free movement played

28 29

Afsaneh Najmabadi: Veiled Discourse- Unveiled Bodies, In Feminist Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1993, p. 489. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003. p. 143.

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a primary role. Freedom of movement and the right to present in the public place belonged only to men, and women were imprisoned inside their homes. This central restriction deprived these women of many other freedoms such as the freedom to flourish in the arts. Upon the primary introduction of modernity to Iran, imitating Europeans’ gestures and behavior, following new dress codes, and Western makeup symbolized socio-cultural progress and intellectualism. Hence, in addition to Iranian men Iranian women were encouraged to follow and imitate Western bodily behaviors, although without enjoying the freedom of Western women. They were modern and up-to-date, but had to preserve their “dignity” and “chastity.” The Iranian woman was told to “strictly consider the way she walks and moves. She has to avoid moving hands very much, but also not keeping arms in both sides like a piece of wood; she moves them as little as possible.”30 The emergence of modernity in Iran brought the body and its related notions into central focus. The crucial issue was the point that the body of ‘I’ as an Iranian could not come to agree with the definition of ‘I’ based on Western modern philosophy: an ‘I’ with all historical, philosophical, mystical, and religious complexities and layers.

Figure 1: Women covered in chadors at the beginning of the twentieth century (Photo: Antoin Sevruguin)

30

Unknown Writer in Tadib Al Nesvan (Discipline of Women), Around 1951–1953 www.q ajarwomen.org/find/item/512 (Retrieved November 10, 2015) (My translation)

1. Dance: A Dilemma in Iranian Art

The strangeness imputed to female bodies and the restriction of their free presentation in public spaces relate directly to women’s dress codes. Women’s dress was among the most controversial issues of the Pahlavi era (1925–1979) and has undoubtedly had a direct impact on women’s attitudes toward dance. The zenith of putting women’s bodies at the center of politics began with the Pahlavi era, when women and their bodies became visible. In 1925, Reza Khan took power in a military coup in Tehran and established the new dynasty of Pahlavi. As he came to power, through the emergence of modernity combined with nationalism, the women could attend in hetero-social sphere that subsequently resulted in the public visibility of women. At the center of his ratified policies to ease restrictions on women was Kashfe Hijab (unveiling law) in 1936. Reza Shah’s aim was to establish a progressive and modern Iran and to reconstruct Iran based on the picture he had from the West.31 Following the policies of Mustafa Ataturk in Turkey, as the first Islamic country in which the Hijab was banned, Reza Shah ordered public unveiling across the entire country. Unveiling not only profoundly changed the situation for women and regulated their bodies, but also transformed the social and performing spaces of women. Iranian girls dancing in the schools in the face of this law were amongst the first reactions to this policy through dance. In some cities, the girls unveiled themselves on the stages in the schools while they were dancing and singing together.32 This joy resulted from the creation of a space for free movement and the possibility of showing the body free of the veil as a sign of emancipation, which had not before existed for these women.33 Unveiling law lasted seven years, until Mohammad Reza Shah nullified it. The primary goal was to unveil the Iranian woman, bring her to the public, and westernize her. Iranian women, who were for centuries covered, could suddenly enjoy advantages such as education, occupation, and public participation, and those who refused to put the veil aside, were deprived of such advantages. It seems that the political regime wanted to convey the assumption that unveiling is 31 32

33

Abrahamian, Ervand, Iran between Two Revolutions, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1982, p. 128. Based on Memories of Ali Asghar Hekmat, Minister of Culture in the First Pahlavi Era, http://af.samta.ir/atlas/index.php?title=‫( سراف_ناتسا_رد_لوا_یولهپ_هرود‬Retrieved June 21, 2015)(My translation) Reza Shah says in his official speech on the anniversary of unveiling: “17th of Dey is the day that we entered civilization. Progress and civilization have spilled over across the country. I am glad to witness that the women found their stance in the society. Half of the society was excluded and now it entered again in the society.” (My translation)

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a symbol of progress, and a key to entering modernity. This transformation happened in a period at which taking off chador the (veil) and appearing in a public place were equal to nudity for many other women. Based on this law, “putting on the chador in public places such as streets, public buildings, cinemas, buses, and coaches was banned, and the men citizens were ordered to bring their wives without their veils to public ceremonies.”34 Foucault defines, “modern liberties have always been accompanied by new administrative and disciplinary mechanisms and obligations.”35 These regulations resulted by modernity work on bodies and manipulate them. The same result applied to the unveiling law, which has been controversially disputed in recent decades. Pro-Pahlavi resources claim that unveiling law provided women with freedom and consequently active public, social, and political participation, whereas others have criticized them as incomprehensive, incomplete, restrictive, and more “cosmetic” than “substantive,” only helping a limited number of women from certain social classes.36 In addition to the unveiling, in this period, the attraction of West and Western women appeared in political debates and changed the content of political and identity discourses: “the state expected urban women to conform to a Western aesthetics of the body. [….] [and] were told to follow a Western European dress code. […]. Newly unveiled women were also expected to walk, talk, and interact in a modern Western way and elite society enforced these new norms.”37 Unveiling law, from this point of view, does not merely have an emancipatory function for women, but is based mostly on modernization and Westernization. One argument of criticizers is the negligence of the colorful clothes of rural regions of Iran that not get used or replaced the chador as the official dress code. Those who obeyed the law were mostly from the elite and upper classes, and those who could not afford it resisted it. Veiling was a symbol of backwardness for modernists, and unveiling was inevitable, especially 34 35 36

37

Ervand Abrahamian: A History of Modern Iran, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008, p. 176. Foucault quoted in Janet Afary: Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom, 2009, p. 172. Afsaneh Najmabadi: Hazards of Modernity and Morality: Women, State and Ideology in Contemporary Iran. In: Kandiyoti D. (eds) Women, Islam and the State, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1991, pp. 49-50. Janet Afary: Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom, 2009, p.157.

1. Dance: A Dilemma in Iranian Art

for people to distance themselves from Arab or Islamic culture. Mohammad Tavakoli Targhi, a professor of history, posits, For Iranian modernists, viewing European women as educated and cultured, the veil became a symbol of backwardness. Its removal, in their view, was essential to the advancement of Iran and its dissociation from Arab—Islamic culture. For the counter-modernists who wanted to uphold the Islamic social and gender orders, the European woman became a scapegoat and a symbol of corruption, immorality, Westernization, and feminization of power.38

Figure 2: Womenʼs dress code after unveiling law39

Najmabadi also criticizes unveiling law as a symbol of the modernization of women. She believes it is responsible for the classification of tradition and backwardness as feminized:

38 39

Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography, Palgrave, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York, 2001, p. 54. (https://www.irna.ir/news/83623867/--------) (Retrieved August 10, 2021).

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“‘the traditional woman’ became the most visible symbol of backwardness. Correspondingly the journey into modernity was defined as one of educating and unveiling this backward subject.”40 Finally, unveiling creates an obvious sign of difference between self and other, and the body of a woman and its presence in public places became disciplined and chaste. Both Pahlavi kings, namely Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza Shah, followed the policy of producing a disciplined and chaste body; however, a difference lie between them in terms of their political intentions: Reza Shah wanted to control and to systematize women’s bodies in order to train a new generation of mothers for the purpose of nationalism and nation building, while Mohammad Reza Shah tried to present a free and modern Iranian woman as the symbol and representation of the modern nation to the world.41 Unveiling, despite claims of its progressiveness, did not lead to the emancipation of women, as both those with and those without veils faced problems in public places. The chadors of veiled women were forcefully lifted by police, which scared these women, while unveiled women were confronted in the street by sexual harassment, as many men regarded public appearance without the veil as immoral, and therefore an invitation to have sex.42 Between 1941 and 1979, women’s skirts became shorter and tighter, and décolleté and sleeveless dresses came to the fashion market. However, chador was still regarded as appropriate dress for many women. Unveiling for women and ties for men symbolized the well-educated and urban society, which were seen by other parts of the society as symbols of Westernization and nonMuslimness. The force to put on Western clothes imposed a sort of humiliation on this part of society, with a strong potential to trigger anti-governmental protests and mobilize the masses against the regime. From the perspective of colonialism, however, as long as Islamic societies did not go through fundamental reforms in political and technological fields and in women issues, tearing apart the chain of backwardness would not be possible; unveiling was, naturally, among the main reforms. At the center of this thought were intellectual Iranians. Through the institutionalization of colonial discourse, they 40

41 42

Afsaneh Najmabadi: Hazards of Modernity and Morality: Women, State and Ideology in Contemporary Iran. In: Kandiyoti D. (eds) Women, Islam and the State, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1991, p. 51. Ibid. pp. 51- 63. Janet Afary: Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom, 2009, p. 160.

1. Dance: A Dilemma in Iranian Art

regarded veiling as a main factor of backwardness, and at the same time a symbol of the preservation of “traditional” and “native” identity. However, in most cases, what has been called “native,” “traditional,” or “authentic” has had little to do with them. Referring to tradition and authenticity was to some extent the justification for accepting the new dress codes. In this dilemma, the women were assigned a responsibility, in direct relation to their bodies, appearances, and gestures. As Afary asserts, modernity produces new notions of femininity in terms of appearance and gesture. She divides modernity practices into three categories: those that aimed to produce of a certain size and configuration; those that demanded from this body a “specific repertoire of gestures, postures and movements”; and those that transformed the body into a new “ornamental surface.”43 Women were supposed to be “modern,” as Western women, and to participate in society; at the same time, through their placidity and convenient behavior, they were to preserve their “dignity” and their “tradition.” For instance, they were not to speak loudly, and they had to exhibit “feminine” and “graceful” behavior. According to Najmabadi, these notions and performances of dignity and modesty have been institutionalized by a metaphoric veil of chastity over women’s body and consequently produced a chaste, disciplined, and unfree body. Hence, Najmabadi does not regard physical unveiling as an emancipatory factor for women: As woman moved from a homosocial female world into a heterosocial public space, before the physical veil could be discarded it was replaced by an invisible metaphoric veil, or hijab-i íffat (veil of chastity). Not an object external to the female body, the veil of chastity was to be acquired through modern education, as an internal quality of the self. The body of modern woman was to contain its own unruly sexuality and shy away from its own public presence. The newly conceived woman with […], a disciplined body, […] could claim a place in the public space; she could be imagined as a citizen.44

43 44

Quoted in Janet Afary: Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom, 2009, p. 119. Afsaneh Najmabadi: Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005. p. 152. According to Najamabadi, unveiling women in public was an experience at once disciplinary yet significantly emancipator. She believes that before unveiling, the bodies of women were covered with a metaphoric hijab or “Veil of Chastity” which was not a

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The unveiling law was nullified in 1944 during second Pahlavi era by a fatwa of a clergy member who demanded such nullification. Some women started to wear the chador again, since they did not believe in a modern understanding of women’s ideal perceptions of beauty; others, mostly belonging to middle and upper classes, remained unveiled. Therefore, dress could signify and classify social and cultural class and economic welfare and attitudes toward modernity. Unveiling, as a symbol of modernity in the Pahlavi era, provided women with an opportunity to step into public life in society and to make their body and movements visible, in spite of the related controversy. In such a relatively free atmosphere, women dancers could exit their closed circles and perform in public spaces for broader audiences and with musicians.

piece of cloth to cover the body, but a kind of veil that was acquired because of new education and had produced the disciplined body. Afsaneh Najmabadi: Veiled Discourse-Unveiled Bodies, In Feminist Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1993, pp. 489–513.

Chapter 2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran All nationalism in their early stages develop from a condition of estrangement. (Edward Said)

Chapter 2, as its title suggests, covers the subject of exile and how it has appeared in the context of dance in Iran. This chapter addresses the turning points of the mid-nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century, during which attitudes toward dance changed. Politics, modernity, encounters with West, the presence of American cultural ambassadors, and the introduction of ballet are unavoidable factors that have affected the complicated situation and exile of dance within Iran. Therefore, this chapter details the encounters of Qajar princes and noblemen with dance in Europe in the nineteenth century, entrance of ballet as a symbol of modernism, the invention of the national dance, the training of the selected dancers, and the standardization of female bodies. This chapter also discusses the process of marginalization of female dancers by applying of the grotesque theory, the emphasis on rejecting the “other” and “lower class” bodies, the appearance of the first signs of Orientalism and exoticism, and the pseudo-authenticity that resulted from the colonized choreographies. Analysis and summary of these subjects can offer a clear image of the concept of exile of Iranian dance and dancers inside Iran.

2.1

Stage Dance: The Creation of an Ambivalent Space for the Male Gaze

The gaze has been cast mostly from a man’s point of view, usually resting on a woman. Not only do Westerners stare at and evaluate Easterners, but

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Easterners also stare at and evaluate Westerners. If the Oriental woman is a criterion for Westerners to evaluate Easterners, the Western woman is also an important criterion for Easterners—with her costume and behavior—to evaluate the West. For the patriarchal and religious society of Iran, the dance stage is a heterotopia: a place of gaze, desire, joy, and excitation of the sexual imagination and at the same time a stage to look for the “erotic” and “ideal woman” and the “perfect body.” Such heterotopias are produced in the travel books of the Qajar princes and noblemen who traveled to the West, and they were reproduced on the stage of Iranian dance. Therefore, the image of the Iranian female dancer has mostly remained erotic and romantic. The Iranian dance stage, and the performances of female dancers in the later so-called Film Farsi movies, created a heterotopic space in which one could watch the “ideal erotic” Western woman, an image that mainly resulted from the misinterpretation of the Western woman. In the Qajar era—the beginning of Iranian writing about the West—strict gender segregation existed in Iran. Women were in an even worse situation than they were before this era, as they were long confined to a secluded domestic environment. In the household, women entertained female visitors. Segregation was not limited to the household, however. In the busy streets of Tehran, men and women had to walk on separate sides of the streets.1 A good woman was recognized as passive, invisible, and silent, remaining at home. From such space, emptied of women and female bodies, where the women of Qajar kings were hidden deep in harems, Iranian kings and noblemen stepped into the Western world and culture. That new context was a world in which the men and women were seen in public spaces, talking, taking each other’s hands, and dancing together. In describing these scenes, the Western woman, and her presence in the society were in central focus for Iranian men travelers to Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A Western woman represents the ideal woman for a beholder, who is deprived of such scenes in his own country. Tavakoli- Targhi interprets the gaze of the Iranian male travelers on European women: with the political hegemony of Europe, a woman’s body served as an important marker of identity and difference and as a terrain of cultural and po-

1

Eliz Sanasarian, The women’s rights movement in Iran: mutiny, appeasement, and repression from 1900 to Khomeini, Praeger Publishers, New York, 1982, pp. 14–19.

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

litical contestations. The eroticized depiction of European women by male travelers engendered a desire for that “heaven on earth” and its uninhibited and fairy-like residents who displayed their beauty and mingled with men.2 For these men travelers, “The attraction of Europe masqueraded the attraction to “houri-like” (hurvash), “fairy-countenanced” (hurpaykar), and “fairymannered” (frishtah khuy) women of Europe,”3 and in this way, European women enchanted these men travelers. Since then, a beautiful, smiley, slim, and charming woman represented the ideal Iranian woman and resembled the image of the Western woman described in these travel books. Apart from describing the Western woman, the travelers portrayed the dances and theaters of Europe. Their focus, however, laid on their physical attraction of the women dancers and not to the performance itself. Reza Gholi Mirza, a local ruler on a mission in Great Britain, outlines his observations of the theater halls in London in 1836 and offers a utopian and paradisiacal explanation of the atmosphere, including the pretty girls, musicians, and actors, who sang and danced. He was impressed by the elegance of their movements and the grace of their gestures, which brought him spiritual ecstasy. Elsewhere, he refers to the composition of their prettiness, the levity, dances, and songs, engendering purification of the physical body from the evil spirit.4 He describes dream-like scenes but emphasizes that such scenes cannot even be dreamed. Notably, in his description he tries to link the “physical” and “bodily” joys that are shameful and deeply rejected by Iranian society to “celestial” and “spiritual” values in an effort to give a religious and legitimate dimension to the occasion he describes. Thereby, he acquits himself of sin and justifies to the reader his presence in that setting. What is also significant in this text is his usage of “actor” (Bazigar) instead of “dancer” (Raqas), which signals the absence of an exact term for those practicing the profession of dance in this period. In the text, where he writes about dancers, he refers to Motrebs or describes dance as “strange plays” with “odd movements.” He mentions that he is unable to describe those “fairy-mannered” and “paradisiacal nymphs” who are “playing and seducing” on the stage. He suggests that one 2 3 4

Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography, Palgrave, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York, 2001, p. 54. Ibid. pp. 54–55. Safar Nameh (Travel Book) by Reza Gholi Mirza grandson of Fath Ali shah: Notes about Me, My Uncles and Brothers in Iran and Europe and Occasions in First Years of Mohammad Shah’ Monarchy, University of Tehran, Tehran, 1967, p. 360. (My translation)

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must see them personally to figure out what he means. After describing the first act, in which a city is shown as a setting, he outlines the second act, in which young men and women are dancing and drinking in “strange costume” and in a paradisiacal setting. 5 For him, the costumes of the women dancers are highly interesting. In addition, the free relationship between men and women, who take their hands while dancing and the ignorance of the others, is astonishing. For the local ruler, it is appealing to see that while dance and music are happening, great delight without fear and concern is seen among the audience.6 He lives in a society in which such ceremony in a public place is considered an unforgivable sin. On this account, he refuses the dance request of a woman, under the pretext of not knowing a particular dance. He describes the situation: “Thanks God, we have never danced so far and may God protect us to do so from now on,”7 as dance is a sin that shall not be committed and its refusal is a sign of wisdom and good will. Attitudes toward dance, theater, opera, and dance halls can also be extracted from the image, which is presented through this kind of travel books: Mirza Aboul Hassan was a statesman and ambassador to Imperial Russia and Great Britain. He traveled to Europe in the nineteenth century and recalled jokingly the ballet dance of the Russian Emperor and Empress in a ceremony in Great Britain as an effort at deception and trickery organized by the British government to deviate and cheat him in front of the Russians as enemies of the Persian king, whom Mirza represented there. He continues to define the ballet dance of Peter the Great and his Empress as follows: “how absurd! how out of nature! how perfectly ridiculous.”8 In another case, a nobleman and agent of the king, Mirza Fattah Garmrudi visited Great Britain in 1839. He called theaters and entertainment events “the gathering places of whores and adulteresses and rendezvous of well-experienced pimps,” and “the intermission between performances” he considered “to be an occasion for sex between the performers and their customers.”9 What is gained by studying such travel books is a perception of an ambivalent feeling towards dance. 5 6

7 8 9

Ibid. p. 364. (My translation) Safar Nameh (Travel Book) by Reza Gholi Mirza, grandson of Fath Ali shah: Notes about Me, My Uncles and Brothers in Iran and Europe and Occasions in First Years of Mohammad Shah’ Monarchy, University of Tehran, Tehran, 1967, p. 371. (My translation) Ibid. p. 395. (My translation) Quoted in Tavakoli- Targhi: Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography, Palgrave, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York, 2001, pp. 59–60. Ibid. p. 60.

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

Opera houses, theaters, and playhouses are representing a heterotopic space, which differs from everyday life and can be found only in West. Dance is a practice that is related to lust, grace, beauty, and eroticism, but brings about unforgivable sin. The woman and her presence are, of course, significant and central in such practices. Such assumptions and misinterpretations concerning playhouses, dancers, and performers directly influenced an understanding of Iranian society whereby women dancers were seen as “marginal” and “disrespectful,” existing to fulfill sexual desires and the dance halls seen as brothels. Those pictures depicted in travel books were written by high-ranking men, making them more available and reliable for future decades. This misogynistic perspective persists even after two centuries and consecutive changes of political systems in Iranian society and culture.

2.2

Marginalization and the Grotesque in Theory

By applying the concept of the grotesque body introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin in his study of FrançoisRabelais’ work and the resulting discourses generated by feminist theorists such as Mary Russo, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler, I will address in this section the potential of marginalized performing bodies in both individual and collective expressions. I also outline how grotesque female bodies can deconstruct and present their real selves. In addition, I examine to what extent this body can challenge and subvert governing norms by means of repetition and exaggeration, despite widespread ignorance of the official institutions. The function of the grotesque body has been well defined in Mikhail Bakhtin’s book on carnival entitled Rabelais and His World. The grotesque body, according to Bakhtin, is a body that refers to humanistic and terrestrial factors in the face of transcendental and spiritual ones; “exaggeration” and “excessiveness” are its fundamental attributes. He declares that the grotesque is a commemoration of the changes in the life, with positive aspects of reproduction and the birth and negative elements of death and decadence. From this point of view, the grotesque body, with all the activities attached to it—such as defecation, sex, and eating—stands against the abstract, ideal, spiritual, and sublime characteristics of the body. This grotesque body in the

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patriarchal system has mostly been linked to femininity from historical and epical points of view.10 Bakhtin asserts that grotesqueness is a means to subvert truth and to create figures with marginal identities. If part of this body can transcends its natural borders, break through its limits, and manage to commit excesses and exaggeration, such a body can be regard as a grotesque body.11 As the grotesque has much to do with the “imminent corporeal,” the human body that culturally provides a platform to create cultural norms related to gender and aesthetics trespasses these borders in the grotesque. Grotesque discourse has also been at the center of Butler’s interest, as well as that of Kristeva. Like Bakhtin, Kristeva and Butler consider Otherness, abjection, and subjectivity in their theoretical approach to the bodily grotesque. These bodies, both as subjects and as objects, are parts of the self and the Others and challenge concepts such as Otherness and subjectivity. Kristeva conceives the concept of grotesque bodies in the framework of abjection. In her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, she describes the abject body as a medium that generates fear and disgust by devastating the body and reminding one of death, which relates to women. She speaks of the fundamental role of abjection in the formation of subjects and maintains that we utilize abjection to draw a line between ourselves and what we are not. In relation to femininity, abjection refers to what is ugly, detestable, and bounded to the female body. As soon as a woman rejects that body, she defines her feminine identity. The abject and grotesque body is a body that refrains from following the dominant norms, and Bakhtin defines such a body converse to the modern body: “the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits.”12 The concept of abjection for Kristeva, which is in fact understood as a “danger and explosion of others,” can be related to the theory of Butler’s theory, who suggests “all social systems are vulnerable at their margins, and that all margins are accordingly considered

10 11 12

From among them, one could refer to “monstrous women” and “women witches,” who have been recognized in literature and paintings as “abject” and “freak.” Mikhail Bakhtin: Rabelais and his World translated by Helene Iswolsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968, p. 35. Mikhail Bakhtin: Rabelais and his World translated by Helene Iswolsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968, p. 26.

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

dangerous.”13 In this way, abjection is considered a process, due to which the subject can gain representation and identity. Abjection—just as is the case for Bakhtin’s grotesque—is accompanied by corporeal elements like sex and death, which are common among human beings regardless of their genders, social classes, and races. They represent common values and signify the artificiality of the systems that justify the marginalization and exclusion of certain groups. 14 In her book The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, Mary Russo analyzes gaps in the feminine grotesque discourse of Bakhtin in the literature of feminist theory and argues that such feminine grotesqueness is highly capable of subversion. Regarding the political impact of carnival and its heterogenic nature, Russo declares, It sets carnival apart from the merely oppositional and reactive. Carnival and the carnivalesque suggest a redeployment or counter-production of culture, knowledge, and pleasure. In its multivalent oppositional play, carnival refuses to surrender the critical and cultural tools of the dominant class, and in this sense, carnival can be seen, above all, as a site of insurgency.15 Similarly, Butler refers to the performative nature of gender in her famous book Gender Trouble. She argues that subversion of embodied norms by a different performing agency is possible: Perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities. Although the gender meanings taken up in these parodic styles are clearly part of hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalized and mobilized through their parodic

13

14

15

Judith Butler: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 2010, p. 180. (Judith Butler outlines her thesis based on writings of the Social Anthropologist Mary Douglas.) Michel Foucault refers in Discipline and Punish to how in the Victorian era, the grotesque body was defined by both prostitutes and ill bodies and was mostly identical to both. This approach was influenced by enlightenment-associated categorization and classification. Mary Russo: The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, Routledge, New York and London, 1995, p. 62.

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recontextualization. As imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself.16 This form of imitation has significant transgressive consequences, once it is combined with satire, irony, and gender expressions. Therefore, the grotesque expression of the female body and its abjection can subvert the norms of suppressive governing systems. Given that the body of women Motreb dancers illustrates the exaggeration and embodiment of female satire, these dancers may challenge the feminine-related restrictions of a patriarchal and cultural chaotic society. The approach that was employed by the apparently “modern” system against this “dangerous” movement, which contradicted its norms, is not the complete exclusion, but marginalization and ignorance by misallocating socio-cultural credits.

2.3

The Classical vs. the Grotesque Body

In his theory, Bakhtin distinguishes between the classical and grotesque body: The classical body is the upper body, and the grotesque body is the lower body. The classical body is ideal and spiritual, while the grotesque body is terrestrial and vulgar. The classical body is well developed, harmonic, and coherent, while the grotesque body is unfinished, open, and ongoing. Contrary to the classical body, the grotesque body is not an individual and cast away, but more a collective body.17 In her discussion of carnival, Mary Russo divides the body into two parts of classic and grotesque, based on Bakhtin’ theory, and describes the associated attributes to these two concepts as follow: The grotesque body is the open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process, and change. The grotesque body is opposed to the classical body, which is monumental, static, closed, and sleek, corresponding to the aspirations of bourgeois individualism; the grotesque body is connected to the rest of the world.18

16 17 18

Judith Butler: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 2010, p. 176. Mikhail Bakhtin: Rabelais and his World translated by Helene Iswolsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968, pp. 19–21. Mary Russo: The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, Routledge, New York and London, 1995, p. 62.

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

The grotesque body, for Russo, is a body that extends its borders, wherein outbursts and uncertainties are witnessed: a clumsy body, which stands in contrast to the classical body. Such a revealed body gains its power through deconstruction and abnormality and has the ability to trespass defined borders. The grotesque body, therefore, provides the possibility of overcoming the standard and expressing itself. It deconstructs the idea that the woman is the object of the male gaze and replaces this idea with self-reflection by the women. In classical or national dance, the upper torso stands in the focus of dance. Dance is reduced to the graceful movements of the hands, shoulders, fingers, head, and neck. Lower torso movements are extremely rare.19 In Motreb and cabaret dance, however, rotational, side-to-side, and transgressive movements of the belly, waist, and hips are vital parts of the choreography. By appropriating Bakhtin and Russo regarding the difference between classical and grotesque body, one can argue that the body of female dancers in women’s gatherings, as well as those of Motreb dancers, can be regarded as grotesque, since the movement of the lower torso stands at the center of their dances. Whether knowingly or unintentionally, dancers in women’s gatherings, Motreb dancers, and later cabaret dancers represent the female grotesque.20 Russo asserts that the grotesque representation of such grotesque bodies is extremely ambivalent: “Women and their bodies, certain bodies, in certain public framings, […] are always already transgressive––dangerous, and in danger.”21 The grotesque does not necessarily depend on the physical body, yet there is another grotesque that she calls “ucanny,” which emphasizes the “reception of the grotesque as an alien experience.” From this point of view, the grotesque becomes the performance and expression of a foreign and other world. As such, the familiar world is seen from a perspective that makes it suddenly able to be perceived as alien and strange. The experience of such strangeness with the surrounding world is a process that can be tracked in acceptance of Motreb dancers in a society based on class: a society

19 20

21

Under the section 2.6. Colonialized Choreography: Pseudo-Authenticity and the Emergence of a Representative Body this point will be discussed. Such a representation, however, does not mean that those exaggerating dance styles are a ‘real’ grotesque, but the way they are reflected and the approach toward them creates such image. Mary Russo: The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, Routledge, New York and London, 1995, p. 60.

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that profoundly intends to modernize itself, is disgusted with its traditions, and searches for ways to distance itself from them, forcing them to fall into obsolescence.

2.4

The Emergence of Otherness: On the Marginalization of Women Motreb Dancers

Khaleghi, a researcher and musician, cautiously refers to dancers in his famous book On The History of Music in Iran, in spite of the fact that he is interested in dance and dancers. He elucidates, “some may believe that (dancers) are not worth being named; nevertheless my mission here is to deal with the arts.”22 Such a point of view, recorded at the zenith of modernity in Iran, is proof that dancers were exiled and discriminated against even in the booming era of arts and culture. He verifies the negative attitudes toward dancers and the hostile approach towards dance itself. This section discusses why speaking about dance is unpleasant and is in most cases done implicitly. It also considers why researchers such as Khaleghi, refers to the “artistic” nature of the subject to justify himself and make his discussion to readers. The goal of this part is to study the appearance of female dancers and performers in the process of modernization: those women who are named by Khaleghi, in low numbers, in spite of restrictions and negative connotations. I consider who these dancers are, why they dance, the characteristics of their dance, and how their relationship is defined within Iranian contemporary dance. I further analyze how their dance was transformed through the process of modernization. The Iranian ethnomusicologist Sasan Fatemi addresses common categories of music in his book Festivity and Music in Iranian Urban Cultures, outlining under which circumstances classical and folklore music have merged to create a new genre of popular music in twentieth-century Iran. He criticizes the act of distinguishing between different styles of music with labels such as “simple” and “trivial” compared to “complex” and “serious.” Although music is the focus of his book, the inseparability of music and dance in Iranian dance culture made it inevitable for him to illustrate some of the work of Motreb bands and the transformations of the dancers who were active. Fatemi believes that studying Motrebs is like solving a complex puzzle. 22

Ruhollah Khalghi: Sargozasht–e– Musighye Iran (History of Music in Iran), Tehran, 1956, p. 370. (My translation)

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

The more documents and versions are studied; the more paradoxes and ambiguities appear. Nevertheless, what is obvious is that starting in the latenineteenth century, Motrebs were defined as bands of musicians, singers, and dancers, who enjoyed different levels of popularity according to the locations in which they performed: Courtyards and noblemen’s homes or the houses of normal people. Motreb is an Arabic word that has acquired negative connotations in the music and dance culture of Iran. It derives from Tarab, which means jubilation and joy. Fatemi argues that by means of examples from the literature that Tarab has a broad meaning, based on which the perception that the Motrebs performed merely for the purpose of merrymaking is void.23 Motrebs were not always performed in the same manner, and the perception of them was also subject to change. They enjoyed dignity and reputation in certain periods, and they were regarded as vulgar and marginalized in other times.24 Well-known Motreb bands of the late nineteenth century, in the era of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, were all bands with women in them, even if there were some men among them. Therefore, the female Motreb band was not a band in which all members were women, but in fact it was defined firstly by its audience, including women in houses and, secondly by having women dancers. Accordingly, what defines the gendered character of a Motreb band is its audience and dancers.25 Although Fatemi presents examples and documents according to which the women were present in Motreb bands and performed actively, disregard for these women dancers can be seen in his descriptions. Patriarchal culture not only dominates the stage to marginalize female dancers, but also in written form tends intentionally or unintentionally to downplay their roles. For instance, Fatemi writes that in the court of Fath-Ali Shah Qajar, female Motrebs were trained by the best masters and concludes that “everything had been organized in a professional and elegant way, both the female area related to the merrymaking ceremonies and the male area which probably was a more serious realm”26 (emphasis mine). He does not clarify, however, what exactly

23 24 25 26

For more information, see Sasan Fatemi: Festivity and Music in Iranian Urban Cultures, Mahoor, Tehran, 2014, pp. 19–22. (My translation) Ibid. p. 23. (My translation) Ibid. pp. 69–70. (My translation) Under the section 4.1. Iranian Dancing in American Writing this point will be discussed in detail.

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seriousness on the part of the males means and what is a needed for such a distinction. In a rare description of dancing of women Motreb dancers, Khaleghi writes about the Motreb bands called Galin and Monavar at the end of nineteenth century, who were invited to court and danced with much elegance.27 Khaleghi describes the dance of Monavar Shirazi as follows: “they covered the floor with flour, and the raqase (female dancer) drew a pattern with her toe or wrote a name. She was a master in this respect.”28 He continues to illustrate how the dance was performed in bazm ceremonies: The musicians played soft and melodic music, and the raqase [female dancer] who sat with open hair on the floor performing soft and slow upper body movements including head and hair and was whirling very slowly until the music become fast. The female dancer started to ring the bell [in her hand] and bent herself [upper body and head] back and forth. As the music played slowly toward a rapid tempo, she stood up to dance and at the end with the highest tempo, and the acrobatic movements were increased.29 Accompanying music with dance and synchronizing the dance with the rhythm of music; employing head, chest, and hair; utilizing objects; and having an entertaining nature are among the main characteristics of Iranian dance in this period. In addition to such Motreb bands that performed in the courtyards and bazm ceremonies, other Motrebs belonged to the “lower” class. The social historian Jafar Shahri maintains that the period of Mashruteh (Constitutional Revolution) at the very beginning of twentieth century was the time of the Motrebs’ appearance.30 According to Shahri, “They consisted of separated groups of men and women, who were invited to ceremonies and parties. The men went to the men parties and the women to the women parties, always consisting of three musicians […] and a male or female dancer.”31 In contrast, the theater researcher Beyzaie believes that Motreb bands had many musicians and raqase (female dancers) with all kinds of costumes, dances, and music and that both to men and women went parties 27 28 29 30 31

Ruhollah Khalghi: Sargozasht–e– Musighye Iran (History of Music in Iran), Tehran, 1956, p. 372. (My translation) Ibid. p. 381. Ibid. p. 382. (My translation) Jafar Shahri: Tārīḫ-i iǧtimāʿī-i Tihrān dar qarn-i sīzdahum (Social History of Tehran in the Twentieth Century), Rasa Publisher, Tehran, 1990, Vol 6/6, p. 190. (My translation) Jafar Shahri: Tārīḫ-i iǧtimāʿī-i Tihrān dar qarn-i sīzdahum (Social History of Tehran in the Twentieth Century), Rasa Publisher, Tehran, 1990, Vol 4/6, p. 339. (My translation)

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

to perform. However, the notion that women in the band danced for men is questionable, as the highly patriarchal society of the day did not allow such events to occur, especially in public places. In his groundbreaking book, Old Tehran, Shahri describes in detail the social and historical conditions of Tehran at the end of Qajar and the beginning of the Pahlavi dynasties. He believes that female dancers in Motreb bands would not be able to perform at men’s gatherings. Only male dancers were allowed to dance in public events and ceremonies, he claims: Not only was appearing with unveiled face and body in public places an unforgivable crime that could lead to killing and stoning to death, but showing just part of a woman’s face could have serious consequences; so how would it be possible that an unveiled woman with makeup dances in public place? Her presence in a public place was possible only once she was completely veiled in a way that strangers and non-family members could not recognize the curve of her body. So dancing in the public without veil in front of men was regarded as a great sin, and each Sharia court could have sentenced her to death, so thinking rationally was to let men dance in public.32 Shahri further explains the reason that some people think there were female dancers in Motreb bands who performed for men, referring to female impersonators (zan push) and boy dancers, who changed their hairstyle and used makeup to transform themselves into dancers with women-like bodies. They were imitating feminine charms and exaggerating women’s gestures, including raising eyebrows, winking, and playing with their hair with pretty coquetry. They danced with such feminine elegance by copying all women’s gestures in detail, so that any beholder would find it difficult to determine whether the dancers were men or women. Therefore, Motreb dancers’ female dance movements, with which we are familiar currently, were introduced by men to the public sphere. Shahri offer the example of Akbar Galin: “He was unique in dance; with his beautiful face, fit body, coquetry, rhythmic and harmonic movements and seductive and flirtatious gestures he could conquer the hearts of both men and women.”33 Shahri also emphasizes elsewhere that those who danced in Motreb bands were men:

32 33

Jafar Shahri: Tehran-e Ghadim, (Old Tehran), Moeen Publisher, Tehran, 1997, Vol 2/5, pp. 62–65. (My translation) Ibid. pp. 59–60. (My translation)

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…but the respectful women (!) who belong to the Motreb bands are not women in reality, they are men who shave their faces, put on women clothes, and use small artificial breasts formed out of cotton or sponges […] I must honestly say some of them are really far better than any female dancer in entertainment and coquetry.34 The female performers, who were part of Motreb bands, danced individually or collectively in houses and private gatherings only for women and children. Their dances were theatrical and had important narrations rooted in daily life and folk literature.35 Beyzaie refers to the musical and narrative nature of such performances: Frank and free-spoken narration and singing were adapted from folk tales and daily urban life. The themes of these theatrical feminine dances were critical, social, romantic, traditional, and religious. They were performed sometimes with the participation of the audience through improvisation.36 The main characteristics of such theatrical dances were frank conversations, verbal exaggeration, and bodily gestures. These characteristics could be interpreted as protesting reactions to the imposition of a commitment to be silent (voiceless) and chaste (motionless), as well as to the covering of the veil. The verbal eroticism and grotesque gestures in the theatrical dances of women gatherings evidence that women were not as passive as was claimed, but active, with an ability for erotic and non-erotic communication with others. In fact, the exaggerated dances created a space in which the women could express their dreams and demands explicitly, without self-censorship. In this way, for a short period the woman could performing as her real ‘self’ and could reveal what she hid inside herself in such a created atmosphere. She becomes a subject for a time in a patriarchal society, which otherwise beholds her as an object. These female theatrical dances for audiences of women conflict with Iranian national or classical dances, which evolved during the Pahlavi era and at the time of modernization in Iran. These national and classical dances were mostly presenting the picture of a free beautiful Iranian woman. In contrast 34 35 36

Jafar Shahri: Tārīḫ-i iǧtimāʿī-i Tihrān dar qarn-i sīzdahum (Social History of Tehran in the Twentieth Century), Rasa Publisher, Tehran, 1990, Vol 5/6, p. 555. (My translation) Ruhollah Khalghi: Sargozasht–e– Musighye Iran (History of Music in Iran), Tehran, 1956, p. 372. (My translation) Bahram Beyzaie: Namayesh dar Iran (A study on Iranian Theater), Entesharat Roshangaran va Motaleate Zanan, Tehran, 1965, p. 201. (My translation)

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

national and classical dances, in which selected beautiful women entered the stage with controlled and disciplined movements and gestures while retaining an emphasis on chastity and dignity, in female theatrical dances, there was no limit to the presentation of erotic, grotesque, improvised, and indelicate movements. The focuses of female performances in private gatherings were diverse and extracted from the daily lives of women and their struggles, where what counted was presenting their real ‘self.’ These dances were mostly about women’s private issues, restrictions, deprivations, and dreams, as well as love, protestation against polygamy, dissatisfaction with traditional marriage, and the tendency to have free sexual relations. Such performances appear to be strange because of their self-defining nature, inspired by deep feminine feelings and instincts. These female performances, above all, symbolized the ability of women to certify their femininity and their role as women and served as a medium by which women could declare their objections to notions such as passiveness and motionlessness. These mostly improvised dances accompanied with tombak and dayereh included lyrics to communicate with the audience.37 Such dances also created a world in parallel to the daily lives of Iranian women. In one interesting example of a theatrical dance, the female dancer puts her body at the center of focus, and by using movements and simple sentences, tries to explain the destructive effect of her husband’s second marriage on her body. By indicating part of her body during the dance, she maintains that she has had a beautiful body, which has become deformed upon the entrance of the second wife. At the end, the collection of deformations transforms her into an ugly and disabled woman. This grotesque body entertains the audience while illustrating the inelegance and ugliness of the society. This expressive and corporeal destruction reflects the internal and psychological dissatisfaction of the woman in a closed society, deprived of civil rights. The body of the woman is transformed into a protesting medium to rebel against the status quo and a metaphor to express willingness to change. In the context of private women’s gatherings, the function of a house gains another meaning as a female realm. The house is not merely the place in which she performs as a housewife and has to take care of children and a husband; rather, it becomes a place for the individual and collective experience of sexual expressions not 37

Sasan Fatemi, Peydayeshe moosighie mardompasand dar iran (Emergence of the Pop Music in Iran), Mahoor, Tehran, 2013, pp. 148–149. (My translation)

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imaginable for men, and the house serves also as a safe place to discover the kinesthetic joy of dance. These kinds of theatrical dances do not exist nowadays, and there is no contemporary equivalent for them. Nevertheless, studying them raises certain questions: Such dances serve as resistance mediums to disclose the inner feelings of Iranian women and to provide space to express and to perform, raising questions of why, how and by what processes they were doomed to exclusion and loss of functionality.

Figure 3: A female Motreb band38

Through the emergence of the Pahlavi dynasty and in the process of modernization that heralded the loosening of religious restrictions, especially freedom from veiling, women gained the chance to step into public and hetero-social spaces. However, uses of the resulting freedoms were not equal among women: Gradually, as the country moved toward freedom under Reza Shah and religious restrictions became less strict, some male and female singers and mu38

http://www.qajarwomen.org/fa/items/1261A115.html, Harvard University (Retrieved January 15, 2019)

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

sicians appeared who started to entertain people, among whom there were Jewish women who could play music […] and sing at women’s parties […] and gradually also non-Jews could enter homes and entertain people.39 Another point that Shahri emphasizes in describing Motreb bands is their religious affiliation as non-Muslim. Respecting the fact that the majority of Iranians are Muslims, this emphasis indicates the ‘dishonorable’ and ‘strange’ nature of dance among established Iranian social norms. Muslim men and women rarely became Motreb or dancers. These professions were perceived as disrespectful and did not represent the dignity of upper-class society. In other words, those who practiced this profession were Othered in their homeland, and what they practiced, dance, was a strange phenomenon, which hardly survived in its exile of unacceptance and non-recognition. The impact of cultural transformations on the exposure of women’s bodies and dance in hetero-social places occurred slowly. For traditional society, which became used to the invisibility of women’s bodies in public and with full veiling, the perception of the body in motion remained strange and indecent. Gradually, men and women were allowed to gather under one roof; however, female dancers remained unwelcome there, and if a dancer was invited, he was a female impersonator or a boy dancer. Now, the women could be part of the audience in this hetero-social environment. They could gather with men in one place, if they were mahram or relatives.40 However, the male musician had to sit blindfolded and turn his back to the audience to make sure that he could not see the women. As the same requirement could not apply to the dancer, male and female dancers could not dance in front of people of the other gender, and the immature boys were used to play the role of women. In the mid-thirties, the Kashfe Hijab (unveiling law) put an end to the performances of female impersonators. By opening a social space, mature male dancers were allowed to dance in front of women without being forced to hide their masculinity, and the musicians could play music with open eyes, without the need to sit with their backs to the audience. Men profited from this atmosphere and invaded private spaces with regard to their superiority in society and the permission to enter women’s and family parties. They rarely let female dancers to perform in their male-dominated bands, and while female 39 40

Jafar Shahri: Tārīḫ-i iǧtimāʿī-i Tihrān dar qarn-i sīzdahum (Social History of Tehran in the Twentieth Century), Rasa Publisher, Tehran, 1990, Vol 5/6, p. 612. (My translation) A mahram is a family member with whom marriage or sexual intercourse would be considered illegal in Islam.

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dancers had no place in male bands, in the new open society that favored gender mixture, they faced disinterest as female bands. In the Qajar era of the nineteenth century and before the spread of Ruhowzi culture, the famous Motreb bands consisted of dancers, musicians, and a ringleader.41 They now consisted of men and women who were not just non-Muslims. They were invited to the private ceremonies of upper-class society and to weddings and circumcision ceremonies. The performances, which were previously only entertainment, were slowly transformed into theatrical events staged with critical content, more equipment, and larger audiences. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new Motreb culture was shaped, focusing on theatre, and its dancers and musicians moved into the shadow of actors who were aiming to reach new, intellectual audiences and to draw a line between “absurd” and “serious” theatre.42 Although Fatemi does not specifically refer to the condition of dancers in Motreb bands in his analyses, instead concentrating on musicians, one can apply his argument to some extent to the dancers as well, since Motreb groups consisted of both dancers and musicians. From then on, the Motrebs were convinced that their performances could not compete with performances on the official stage, which was established by intellectuals and supported by government. Furthermore, the superficial tendency of the government towards modernizing cultural productions pushed the Motrebs toward promoting their socio-cultural stance. In this regard, Motrebs tended no longer to be called “Motrebs” due to the social pressures imposed on them. Instead, they were willing to be called “artists,” a term associated with elegance and excellence. The use of Motreb in dance and music was restricted to the lower classes who were still struggling to keep their traditions alive through

41

42

Ruhowzi (above pool) are those theatrical performances that took place after 1920 in the yards of ordinary people in joyful ceremonies, such as weddings. The stage of such theaters was the small pool inside the yard, covered by a big piece of wood above which a carpet was laid. That is why they are called “Ruhowzi theaters.” (Iranian Music and Popular Entertainment: From Motrebi to Losanjelesi and Beyond. G.J Breyley and Sasan Fatemi, Ruhowzi: the genesis of the genre, Routledge, New York, 2016.) Fatemi maintains that such intellectual theater bands consisted of interested people without professional knowledge of theater. This new trend distanced from traditional theater. First, in this theater, actors had to distance themselves from improvisation, and secondly, the theater itself had to convey a moral message for society, no matter whether the performance was comic or serious. For more information, see Fatemi, Peydayeshe moosighie mardompasand dar iran (Emergence of the Pop Music in Iran), Mahoor, Tehran, 2013, pp. 106–107. (My translation)

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

the process of Westernization. In this era, the number of members in Motreb groups increased, and Ruhowzi actors were added to them.43 Motrebs were divided into men or women, itinerant, Ruhowzi, and amateur bands, whose audience were mostly of the “lower” class. In this era, due to the prevalent pressure to be “modern,” a vast social class gap emerged in the capital city of Tehran. The wealthy social class who had settled the northern part of the city left the traditions such as Motrebi dance and music to those who had settled in southern part of the city. Intellectuals also started to bring Western music, theatre, and dance to the stage. Urban artists had no chance but to follow this trend and to imitate others to survive. This effort was futile; however, as their audience came from the southern part of the city, still regarded “lowbrow” and “banal” by the upper class. Motrebs in Iranian society had “ugly” and “deformed” images. They were “illiterate” and “rude,” “unhonored” belong to the “lower class” and are “rough persons”. Women were regarded as “whores” and were perceived to have affairs with the men of the group. Respectful people would not talk to them. The Motrebs were considered to look unattractive and speak poorly. They were also perceived to well be wholly unfamiliar with religion and likely to act in all ways prohibited by religion, seen to be working merely to earn money, without any sense of culture. Their popularity, however, emerged because of their talent to tell jokes and present funny movements, which could be “discourteous” at the same time. Humiliating characteristics were often used in the representation of Motreb women in this era: for instance, small Mina, squinteyed Mina, pickpocket Mali, and so on.44 Their permanent audience was mostly the lower class society of southern Tehran. From the middle of the twentieth century, they also had upper-class customers from time to time; however, it was not due to their singing and dancing expertise, but rather because of their so-called show talent to tell jokes and present funny movements. The huge cultural gap between performer and audience encouraged wealthy upper class and noble court families to hire Motrebs for their parties. The new 43 44

Saadi Afshar quoted in Fatemi, p. 24. (My translation) The same titles were attributed to female Motreb dancers in the Qajar era; for example, although Monavar Shirazi was a professional female dancer and singer and enjoyed a good reputation, some other sources refer to her in a humiliating way by calling her a “filthy” and “small, weak and thin” dancer. (Mounes- AL- Dole quoted in Fatemi, p. 67) The dances that have remained from this era also possess mostly masculine names and are expected to be performed by men, for instance Shateri, Baba Karam, Reng Haji, or Dash Dash.

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tendency of members of the upper class to engage with Motreb culture in time of Westernization in Iran can be interpreted as affection for foreignness and Otherness: “a conventional interest within a modernized culture toward its own traditions.” 45 Starting in the middle of the twentieth century, Motreb bands experienced other kinds of transformation; through the expansion of Western-style café and cabaret culture, a new space was provided for Motrebs to perform. Of course, this trend emphasized the gap between two walks of life: There were northern cafés and cabaret for the wealthy, modernism-oriented upper-class and southern cafés for the lower class, in which the “disreputable” and stigmatized female dancers and singers performed. Moreover, the dance was deeply influenced by theater and transformed into an “attraction” in Lalehzar’s theater halls, where dancing filled the breaks between show times. The seventies marked the zenith of female dancers’ presence. Television and cinema provided them to some extent with the chance to be seen. Notably, however, they were misused as sexual objects of the male gaze, and their presence in cinema was limited to appearance in commercial movies. The success of Arab dancers such as the Egyptian Samia Gamal led to a widespread imitation of belly dancers in Iran. Fatemeh Sadeghi (stage name Jamileh) became the most famous female cabaret dancer and in a short period; she was so popular that she started dancing in commercial movies and in cabarets. Jamileh successfully established herself for all occupations as a cabaret dancer and expressed her femininity through exaggerated movements in a seminaked body, a performing genre not acceptable in the official culture. (Figure 4) Jamileh bound herself held to none of socially accepted dress code restrictions. She openly showed parts of her body, such as belly and thighs, to the audience. Her skillful and dynamic dance movements, accompanied by frequent utilization of the lower body, addressed femininity-related assumptions and subverted the norms of power relations regarding the ‘elite’ and ‘normal’ people, as well as those between men and women. At the same time, her ‘grotesque’ body impinged upon and challenged the notions of order and harmony that governed the ‘classical’ body.

45

Sasan Fatemi: Festivity and Music in Iranian Urban Cultures, Mahoor, Tehran, 2014, p. 44. (My translation)

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

Figure 4: Jamileh dancing in the movie Outcast in 1970s (Translated from the Farsi title Rande Shode) 46

Jamileh and such female dancers, who did not belong to the upper class, could not reach a “respectful” position. Such social divisions kept them mostly away from the official dominant cultural atmosphere and restricted their field of activity to the marginalized southern part of Tehran. As a result, the female dynamic dances that initially arose from women’s desires, needs, and dreams were transformed in favor of a patriarchal modern cultural space and lost their early characteristics through that transformation. The female dancers entered a critical phase thereafter, resulting from the conflict between tradition and modernity. By applying policies towards women emancipation, it may be interpreted that protesting performances lost their meaning in the new, free social sphere, in which enough individual and social freedom for women does exist. However, as mentioned before, such policies merely re46

Screenshot from the movie.

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moved the outer veil and replaced it with an even more prohibitive inner veil. Unveiling, the freedom to choose dress, and the possibility for women to be active and present outside the home not only lead to recognition for female dancers in Motreb and later Cabaret dances, but also transformed them into Others. Despite the theatrical and critical nature of their performance, they were rarely allowed to access official stages. The distinction between one’s own and other grotesque bodies, as well as dividing dancers into two categories, made way for their marginalization and consequently cast them and their dances into exile. Official stages were provided only to the “standard,” “selected,” and “own” dancers who came on the stage with disciplined movements to represent ambitions of power relations and to serve as mediums of ideological reconstruction. The next discusses how in process of modernization and Westernization, the dominant culture started to distinguish between “sublime” and “vulgar” dance and did not let the latter category of performances flourish. Rather, it fundamentally changed its form and content in favor of its hegemonic ambitions. Such negligence and exclusion targeted especially the performances of women, in which the women expressed and defined their real selves by employing grotesque gestures and verbal exaggeration.

2.5

The Exile of Iranian Dance through Modernized Tradition

The history of Iran—in which tradition plays an influential role—has always been influenced by eagerness toward the West, modernity, and nationalism at all levels and aspects over the past 150 years. The twentieth century marked the beginning of common contact through various channels between Iranians and Westerners; colonial powers had a strong presence at this time, and the call for democratization and modernization reached its peak in the Iranian society.47 For centuries, Eastern societies were proud of their civilizations and military power, but this sentiment shifted radically after industrialization and the emergence of modernity in Western societies. The Easterners had no choice but to accept that the West was a superior power challenging their sovereignty. Accordingly, Iranian intellectuals believed that only Westerners could bring reform and establish order and civilization in twentieth

47

Abbas Milani: Modernity and Its Foes in Iran, Akhtaran, Seventh Edition, Tehran, 2008, p. 19. (My translation)

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

century.48 The need for Western actors and advisory was justified due to the fact that modernity originated in the West and required special “expertise” and “wisdom,” which was absent in Iranian society, according to these intellectuals.49 This approach served as a means for entering modernity, which coincided with the initiation and implementation of colonial policies in Iran and subsequently the arrival of Western choreographers and dancers. Dance in Iran has faced many surges and declines in the course of the country’s history, mostly because of the vast religious and political turmoil. Different forms of dance exist in Iran, including mystical and ritual, epic, folklore, and Ruhowzi or social dance, which is performed in ceremonies and parties. Until the second half of the twentieth century, no clear distinction could be drawn between dance as staged artistic production and dance as entertainment. Speaking about stage dance creates various complications, as this kind of dance is not a fixed and regulated one. Due to this fact, different names and genres of Iranian dance were developed during the second Pahlavi era and, later, outside of Iran: Persian mystical dance, Persian classical dance, Persian traditional dance, Persian modern dance, contemporary Persian ballet and classical Persian ballet, where the common element is the use of Persian as a fixed attribute. A variety of interpretations of Iranian stage dance and the absence of a unique definition of Iranian dance and coherent educational system can be tracked to its exiled nature. An exile who has roots not only outside of Iran, but also inside the country, is not even exiled due to dance restrictions and prohibition after the Revolution of 1979, but at the beginning of twentieth century and through Westernization and modernization. On this account, the study is argued whether stage dance is an imported concept and whether it has been imposed due to ignorance of cultural actors in the low- and middle class socio-cultural condition and need, consequently anticipating the exile of dance and dancers. Since “there has always been an association between the idea of exile and the terrors of being a leper, a social and moral untouchable,”50 it can be argued with regard to the historical facts that stage dance has been in exile from the very beginning of its formation in Iranian society. Once it began to be performed by through “selected” ideal

48 49 50

Taghizadeh the publisher of popular Kaveh Magazine: Iran shall be Westernized internally, externally, physically and mentally. (My translation) Ibid. p. 176. Edward Said: Representations of the Intellectual, The 1993 Reith Lectures, Vintage Books, New York, 1996, p. 47.

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bodies and for public audiences, it became increasingly and invisibly an unfamiliar, strange, and socially unacceptable phenomenon for others. This kind of exile emerged more explicitly outside of Iran, since the stage dance was expelled in a completely different geographical context, far away from home and with the necessity to survive in a different socio-cultural context. Exile is a phenomenon that relates to post-colonial discourse. Post-colonialism does not necessarily indicate the official termination of colonialism, but it also addresses the historical, political, and socio-economic continuities of colonial structures, dependence, and power relations. There is no need to leave a homeland physically to become exiled. Exile can also happen between different cultural spaces, especially in the process of colonization and modernization. In such a way, one can be exposed to cultural transformation through colonialism. This exposure occurs once a cultural phenomenon cannot be practiced, experienced, or performed other than through the mediation of modernity. Such a condition results in a feeling of being lost, marginalized, and spaceless. In the process of the transformation of urban theatrical dance to stage dance in the twentieth century, such theatrical dances were intentionally ignored, and local dancers were increasingly marginalized. The exclusion, marginalization, migration, and exile of the dance and dancer cannot be associated only with a certain era of the country—the post-1979 Revolutionary Iran—in which Iranian dancers were forced to immigrate, mostly to the America. This exile situation mainly results from the lack of social awareness towards the positions of dance and dancers, stemming from the governing policies of the power relations and the impact of colonialism. Although Iran has never been officially a colony, it has followed the same colonial pattern of a colonized country in relation to the West. The history of the social colonization and Westernization of the country began in at the end of Qajar era, when Iran entered the nineteenth century colonial world. This century is a threshold to an intensified effort toward modernization, wherein for many Iranian intellectuals, the West symbolized a utopia. In this period, Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, the king of Persia, traveled to the Europe and brought returned with a narrowed and biased interpretation of the West, Western progress, and modernization. He did not attend to the scientific and intellectual background of this progress. He believed that science and technology belonged to Europe and was not transferable or applicable to Iranian society. Other Qajar kings were also impressed by Western achievements, but had more or less the same understanding of the West and its political and socio-cultural accomplishments. This fascination, however, did not lead to a comprehensive and flaw-

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

less interpretation of the West and its affiliated developments. Naser al—Din Shah Qajar, who described his observations of the gardens, food, women, and technology during his travels to the Russian Empire and Europe, went to the ballet several times in Saint Petersburg, Paris, and Warsaw. He describes the ballet in his trip to Russia as follows: “The curtain pulled up. A strange world appeared. Many women dancers started to dance. They call this dance and play ballet, which means playful and still dance. They dance and play in such forms and types that are indescribable.”51 Due to his misperception of ballet and flawed understanding of its nature, he paid no attention to the ballet as an art, but was instead fascinated by the glamorous tutus of the ballerinas and introduced the tutus as a new fashion to his harem, ordering his wives to put them on.52 (Figure 5)

Figure 5: The women of Naser al- Din Shah Qajar’s harem in ballet tutus53

This attire became a dress code of the women in the court for almost a decade. In this way, the very first image of ballet in Iran was restricted to its costume and not the art form’s movements and required skills. Recognizing

51 52 53

Safar Nameh of Naser al Din Shah (Travel Book), p. 24. (My translation) Serena, Carla, -1884: Hommes et choses en Perse / Carla Serena. - Paris: Charpentier, 1883, pp. 244, 250. https://historydaily.org/naser-al-din-shah-qajar-and-his-84-wives (Retrieved August 19, 2021)

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that classical ballet was later transformed into a standard criterion in recognition of Iranian stage dance, which led to ballet-oriented professionalization, helps one to understand the process of dance’s ultimate exile in Iran.

2.6

Colonialized Choreography: Pseudo-Authenticity and the Emergence of a Representative Body

The history of 70 years of stage dance in Iran and the struggle to establish dance as an art form cannot be separated from concepts such as modernity, nationalism, colonialism, migration, and hybridity. As mentioned before, dance had long been associated with prostitution, the lower classes, and entertainment. Bringing dance to the stage led to respect for and recognition of it. The arrival of Western cultural representatives and the establishment of ballet schools by immigrants in Iran had suddenly promoted dance in the view of the Iranian public. Ballet then became a criterion for distinguishing between “sublime,” “noble” dance and “vulgar” dance, and the ballet thus evolved into a tool to legitimize dance and make it an “authentic” as well as “modern” form of art. Beginning with the introduction of ballet in Iran, dance was not just a socio-cultural and artistic phenomenon, but was deeply influenced by political relations. As Susan Foster argues, As culture, dance is in(sinew)ated with power relations. Built bone-deep into the dancing body and permeating its practice and performance, these structurings of power both discipline and pleasure the body. And this cultivation of the corporeal takes place within and as a part of the power relations that operate throughout the body politics.54 Such body politics can truly be tracked during the Pahlavi era by introducing ballet and using ‘selected’ and ‘labeled’ bodies of women on stage as representatives of a ‘modern’ Iranian woman. Yelena Avedisian, Madame Cornelli, and Sarkis Djanbazian, all immigrants, trained the first group of ballet trainees. Cornelli is a Russian immigrant who lived in exile after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Avedisian is an Armenian who fled Turkey because of the Armenian Genocide, and 54

Susan Leigh Foster (ed.): Worlding Dance (Studies in International Performance), Worlding Dance- an Introduction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 7.

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

Djanbazian fled the Soviet Union due to pressure from the Communist government on the Armenians. Therefore, the founders of ballet training in Iran were exiled immigrants facing various challenges in practicing their profession, such as insufficient language competence and a different approach toward dance in the host country. The eagerness of the upper class to send their children to the ballet courses can be followed in the text of the art critic Farrokh Safavi: It is astonishing how Tehranis, especially upper-class and rich families, welcomed ballet by sending their children to ballet classes from childhood. Ballet was expanded rapidly in Tehran, and various schools were established to teach it, such that in 1960, one thousand trainees were learning ballet. However, these classes mostly taught the national and folk dances of other countries (mostly Russian) to their trainees instead of classical ballet, since they had not a correct understanding of classical ballet.55 The idea of establishing Iranian ballet was proposed by Nilla Cram Cook and supported by the royal family to continue the modernization policies of Iran and as an effort to institutionalize dance as an art in the country. Cook was sent to Tehran by the US government, implementing Franklin Roosevelt’s dream of helping to modernize Iran after the Second World War.56 Although Iran chose to remain neutral in World War II, its long-shared border with the Soviet Union and its cooperation with the Nazis were reasons it was invaded and occupied by Allied forces, under the pretext of searching for Nazi spies hiding in the country. Reza Shah Pahlavi was forced to resign, and his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, was crowned as the new monarch in Iran. The US aimed to help a free and sovereign political regime in Iran, which could protect itself against Russian and British influence. To do so, the US clearly preserved the right to supervise such process. This act of oversight was an effort to modernize the country and to initiate change and innovation, aiming to create a new national identity, in favor of the Western interests and colonial policies. Tavakoli-Targhi has put such supervision this way: “Westernization, modernization, and acculturation were conceived as interchangeable

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Safavi also believes that such [ballet] classes helped a lot to promote dance by bringing it from ‘Howz’ to the ‘stage’ and entice the audience to sit silent and have respect for the dance. In monthly Irane- Abad Magazine, No. 9, December 1960. p. 72. (My translation) Nesta Ramezani: The Dance of the Rose and the Nightingale, Syracuse University Press New York, 2002, p. xiv/ introduction.

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concepts accounting for the transition of “traditional” and “non-Western” societies.”57 As a pioneer of collecting folk dances, Nilla Cook came to Tehran in 1946, travelling all over the country and collecting dance styles. In the Studio of the Revival of the Iranian Classical Arts, cook started to incorporate national culture and modern values and beliefs. By establishing the first ballet company in Iran, she institutionalized that form of dance, inspired from Iranian paintings and literature,58 to revitalize and represent the archaic artistic glory and cultural legacy of Iran.59 The activities of this institute coincided with a period of time in which the dances of girls in Motreb bands, especially those who could train, had deeply desirable impacts, according to Khaleghi.60 However, as mentioned, not only was there no official support to promote and train the performers, but also, due their exclusion from the official stage, this dance style and the performers representing it were increasingly marginalized and invisible. Khaleghi describes the obsolescence of these dances: We have had very beautiful dances that are now démodé like many other national arts. Modern women are eager to watch the dances of ‘savage’ Africans and Latin Americans performing in an erotic and unpleasant way […]. Seldom can Caucasian Lezgi dance or Arabic dance be seen in ceremonies; however, from time to time, Iranian dance is danced in weddings or parties; it attracts a lot of attention, as there are few who can dance it very well.61

57

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60 61

Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, the Homeless Texts of Persianate Modernity in Iran between Tradition and Modernity, Ramin Jahanbegloo (ed) Lexington Books USA, 2004. p. 129. Nesta Ramezani: The Dance of the Rose and the Nightingale, Syracuse University Press New York, 2002, p. 27. For example: Gordafarid dance inspired by Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (The Book of Kings), Caravan inspired by Saadi’s poems, Man va Saghi (Wine Bearer and I), Pol-e-Isfahan (Bridge of Isfahan), Darius Dance inspired by the wall reliefs in Persepolis. Performances of all these dances were accompanied by the Military Orchestra. (In Talash Magazine, No. 16, 1969) Ruhollah Khalghi: Sargozasht–e– Musighye Iran (History of Music in Iran), Tehran, 1956, pp. 376–7. (My translation) Ruhollah Khalghi: Sargozasht–e– Musighye Iran (History of Music in Iran), Tehran, 1956, p. 376. (My translation)

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

Although Khaleghi refers to non-Iranian dances being performed in discos and parties, his commentary applies also to the professional dance scene. The so-called Iranian choreographies present a combination of ballet with folk dances. He names some dances, such as the bell dance, dance with glass, and dance with a candlestick, as Iranian dances and acknowledges that almost nothing remained from them: “Iranian dances […] were beautiful arts which are unfortunately on the brink of extinction. […] How fine it could be [that dancers] learning the national dances and dance to beautiful Iranian beats.”62 Khaleghi, however, does not clarify whether these dances are officially considered national dances or national is only his term. What occurred in dance in the period of modernization and Westernization was accompanied by the presence and active involvement of Western cultural representatives, adjusting themselves to the cultural policies of the government to modernize the country and at the same time abiding by traditional Iranian principles. Therefore, splendid images of the dancers were presented on the stage by focusing on Oriental cultural elements, while idealistic, imaginary, and adorable pictures of culture, civilization, and nation, as well as the ideal Iranian woman, were illustrated through dance. “To be modern,” according to Barthes, “is to know that which is not possible anymore.”63 Modernity is therefore accompanied by discontinuity. As such, practicing traditions is not possible nowadays, due to contemporary nature of modernity. In other words, every society embraces modernity from the moment in which it refuses to accept traditions as lifestyles in daily life and thus discards them. To be modern, Habermas considers, is “what assisted the spontaneously self-renewing historical contemporaneity of the Zeitgeist to find its own objective expression.”64 Thus, modernity represents an awareness of beginning a new epoch. Modernity can by no means be compatible with tradition, since it has been shaped in confrontation with, rejection of, and breaches of tradition. In other words, modernity is a contemporary principle that stands out against the old

62 63 64

Ibid, p. 383. (My translation) Roland Barthes: Réquichot et son corps (1973), in L’Obvie et l’Obtus. Essais Critiques III, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1982, p. 211. Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Edited by MaurizioPasserind'Entrèves and SeylaBenhabib, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1997, p. 39.

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order or tradition. Any theoretical effort in this respect leads to crises and to the creation of paradoxical situations on objective and subjective structural levels. In addition, tradition is based on dogma and cannot usually abide criticism of its teachings and norms, while modernity is an ongoing and dynamic phenomenon and bears criticism and refusal as a matter of course. Self-criticism is a fundamental pillar of modernity, which inevitably reflects its antisanctimonious nature. Modernity, as a social phenomenon, is a social order and structure shaped in accordance with social and historical necessities at objective and subjective structural levels. As mentioned before, any effort to combine it with tradition is doomed to fail. The crises, resulting from repeated failures to reconcile tradition with modernity, challenged the Pahlavi dynasty on both socio-cultural and political levels, as the monarchy tried to represent a mixture, resulting from traditions of “royal nationalism” and a modernized “royal democracy.” Such contradictory combinations signal the paradoxical discourse and hybrid political identity of the society. They outline that in order to prepare the way for the appearance, expansion, and continuation of modernity, fundamental and comprehensive changes on various social structural levels, both subjective and objective, must occur. Therefore, any superficial interpretation of modernity can create crises in traditional societies. The process of the modernization of dance in Iran, focusing on the preservation and application of traditional motifs, was fundamentally at odds with the nature of modernity. Hence, modernization not only did not support the evolution and expansion of Iranian dance, but also engendered ambiguities and misinterpretations of modern dance, furthermore creating a space in which all dances that did not accord with modern tastes were labeled as “primitive” and “traditional.” Cook started her work with teenagers, who belonged mostly to elite families or those with a Western father or mother. She incorporated ballet techniques in Iranian dance and secured its “validation” and “authenticity” by relying on the support of the royal family and elite classes. Cook’s tendency was to stage the Orient and present imaginary and adorable scenes, “half-imagined” and “half-known,” in her choreographies. On this stage appeared figures whose roles were to represent the larger whole.65 By utilizing bodies of the elite-class girls, covered with traditional clothes, and by putting them center

65

Edward Said: Orientalism, Vintage Books Edition, October 1979, USA, p. 63.

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

stage, she tried to create “positive images” of Iran.66 By relying on an archaic and glorious past and primarily through the labeled female bodies, this approach aligned with the Western political ambitions after the World War II to modernize Iran.

Figure 6: The Caravan, rehearsing outside67

The images of rural spaces and peasants’ everyday lives as exotic and romantic Oriental images were used in one of the very first choreographies of Cook: As the curtain rose, the three of us—girls from good families—lay with our heads resting on one arm. Behind us a play of lights on the curtain simulated the dawn—three sleeping village girls awakened by the sun’s rays. We rose, we stretched, and we set about various tasks. Through pantomime we conveyed such activities as sifting flour, kneading bread, washing clothes, and playfully splashing each other with water.68

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Bhabha outlines that postcoloniality uses modernity to create positive images by “staging the past as symbol, myth, memory, history, the ancestral […]”. Homi K. Bhabha, “Race, Time and the Revision of Modernity,” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, H. Tiffin, Routledge, London and New York, 2006, pp. 219–223. Haideh Ahmadzadeh: With Grace and Style: My life as a Persian Ballerina, 2008. Nesta Ramezani: The Dance of the Rose and the Nightingale, Syracuse University Press New York, 2002, p. 5.

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In the choreography of The Caravan (Figure 6), three girls are seen who rehearsing in the garden. One of these three pretty and smiling girls is standing, and the other two are sitting on the grass beside her. Their costumes combine the clothes of women in the Qajar era and the belly dance costume: a combination of long loose skirts, shawls, and belts, with sleeveless crop tops, decorated with sequins and beads. The coy, charming, and joyful facial expressions in combination with the poses of the hands, arms, and neck reflect the Iranian miniatures. Therefore, the dance of the girls of the upper class, with their standard bodies, in the greenery, is presented as a pleasing and dreamy image. In another performance, the Prayer of Darius, Cook recalls the ancient glorious history of Iranians, as the dancer performs on the stage and Herodotus’ quotation of Darius, the king of the Persian Empire, is narrated: “I am Darius, King of Kings, Lord of this Earth, Son of Hestaspa, the Achaemenid, A Persian, Son of a Persian […]. [The dancers] always started the performance with this ballet, as it set the right atmosphere for the rest of the evening.”69 The return to the past, emphasizing the power of the Persian King and pride in Persian identity, was performed through ballet for the upper classes and selected audiences. The dance stages were in the residences of the royal family, as there were no theater halls at the time, and the performances took place in the presence of the royal family members and foreign ambassadors, along with selected members of the elite class. It seems that Cook spared no effort to bring dance to the stage and transform it into a piece of art in Iran. Her emphasis on the social class of the dancers, however, was to distinguish between her group of dancers and other, lowerclass dancers. She believed that her girls “were all from respectable families, and not some dancing girls from a ‘cabaret.’”70 This kind of opinion is being regarded as the threshold to purify dance by employing and incorporating ballet and relying on the perceived-to-be-decent bodies of a certain social class.

69 70

Haideh Ahmadzadeh: With Grace and Style: My life as a Persian Ballerina, 2008, p. 24. Ibid. p. 30.

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

Figure 7: Prayer of Darius, Haideh Ahmadzadeh. 71

The crucial question here regards need to emphasize such a distinction. On one hand, dance was traditionally associated with the manifestation of a savage enjoyment of which the natural body is capable, while on the other hand, it is treated as a practice of cultivation, domestication, schooling, and taming of the body. This ambiguity characterizes the relationship of dance with the body as well: The natural body of an urban dancer is regarded as a bad, evil, and shameful body, which enjoys. This body is a worthless and dangerous object, and it must be destroyed to make of it a body perceived to be good and decent: Distinctions were thus applied between the shameful

71

Haideh Ahmadzadeh: With Grace and Style: My life as a Persian Ballerina, 2008.

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and savage and the decent and tamed.72 This ideology of “the ruling class succeed[ed] in oppressing other classes with their apparent approval.”73 This effort to oppress other classes failed completely after the Revolution of 1979 and resulted in the complete removal of the ‘selected and purified’ bodies, who enjoyed the support of an elite audience. From this perspective, those dancers who had not accessed the official stage but had more audiences in the lower and middle classes were systematically ignored and marginalized. Thus, efforts to change the looks and attitudes of the society toward dance and dancer in the era of the second Pahlavi and to solidify dance as an art and the dancer as an artist were misleading, if not counter-productive. Cook represents the rural, social, and cultural parameters of Iran in this era by utilizing folklore music and traditional costumes, inspired by the ancient costumes. By naming performances after historical and epic figures of Persia, she creates imaginary and mythographic scenes in an effort to recall the superior civilization of the past and encourage nationalism and patriotism (Figure 7).74 The dancers also presented themselves as national heroes, able to articulate the history of their motherland through art to the Others. After performing inside Iran, in order to bridge to neighboring cultures and to show the glory of the Persia, reanimated by the spirit of modernity, the group was sent to Azerbaijan, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, India and some other countries as cultural ambassadors. In these performances, the emphasis was again on distancing the performances from the grotesque movements of cabaret and instead presenting a purified authentic dance. One dance review by a Lebanese magazine, aside from admiring a performance in Beirut, refers to the non-acrobatic movements and considers the dance an interpretation of the feeling being hidden in Persian poetry, considering this kind of dance to be ballet. Thus, it is obvious that what makes such dance Iranian or Oriental for the Oriental audience, and what makes it authentic, is its focus on Iranian poetry. Since it is in “Persian ballet” that for the first time the stage dance is formed, based on narration and storytelling

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Jelica Sumic-Riha: The diasporic dance of body-enjoyment in “the eight technologies of otherness,” Sue Golding (ed.), Routledge, London and New York, 1997, p. 233. Hans Bertens: Literary Theory: the Basics, Routledge, London and New York, 2001, p. 204. The Pilgrimage of Anoushirvan, The Prayer of Darius, The Bridge of Isfahan, Gordafarid: The Spirit of Persia, Rostam and Sohrab are among these performances.

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

extracted from classical literature, where dance is transformed into an expression of the poem. Hence, “Persian Ballet” is a medium for expressing and presenting authenticity while representing the innermost spirit of the times.

Figure 8: Nesta Ramezani pictured on the cover of her book The Dance of the Rose and the Nightingale75

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Nesta Ramezani: The Dance of the Rose and the Nightingale, Syracuse University Press New York, 2002.

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Cook did believe that dance materials are the myths, legends, and songs of the deserts and mountains; the dances of the tribes; classical poetry, full of pictorial imaginary and spiritual significance, which were being ignored by the Iranian Lalehzar Theater.76 In her choreographies, she used head and hand gestures from Iranian paintings—miniatures—and Zoorkhaneh movements,77 elements from Sufi whirling and pictorial imaginary and spiritual insights, extracted from Persian poetry.78 However, it remains questionable why she focuses solely on archaic history by presenting glorious illustrations or on rural and folklore elements, ignoring her present time and place and its urban society, with its rich culture of performance. In performances that combine narration, movement, and gesture to determine the situation, there is a great potential to be brought out of homes and into stage dance and theater. Such ignorance could be regarded intentionally. As there is no record of Iranian dances and theaters with themes and motifs rooted in Iranian urban society in her choreography. Cook labels the female Motreb and urban dancers as “dancing girls” to distinguish between her dancers and Others, and she reaffirms the public attitude toward marginalized and “vulgar” urban dancers. In such a way, and in the name of the nationalization of dance, a clear line is drawn between different groups of dancers, entrenching this distinction, which is related to social class, marginality, and foreignness. According to Bhabha, marginality is the result of the modernity: The marginal or ‘minority’ is not the space of a celebratory, or utopian, self—marginalization. It is a much more substantial intervention into those justifications of modernity—progress, homogeneity, cultural organicism, the deep nation, the long past—that rationalize the authoritarian, ‘normalizing’ tendencies within cultures in the name of the national interest or the ethnic prerogative.79 Cook creates the Persian ballet in the absence of a deep understanding of the needs, beliefs, and faiths of her contemporary Iranian society; she merely en76 77 78 79

Nilla Cram Cook: The Theater and Ballet Arts of Iran, Middle East Journal, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Oct., 1949), pp: 412–413. Forms of Persian heroic gymnastics inspired by Shahnameh (The Book of Kings) by Ferdowsi. Nesta Ramezani: The Dance of the Rose and the Nightingale, Syracuse University Press New York, 2002, P. 76. Homi K. Bhabha (ed.): “Introduction: narrating the nation” in Nation and Narration, Routledge, London and New York, 1990, p. 4.

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

forces the policies of the power institutions in Iran, in favor of modernization, and she institutionalizes a misrepresented authenticity. She even changes the non-Iranian names of the dancers into Iranian ones to generate more authenticity.80 Cook’s band forced to lose its ‘Iranian essence’ upon employing dancers from other countries and was finally dissolved in 1953. Following the suggestion of the Ministry of Culture and Arts, the Iranian National Ballet was established in 1956. From its inception, all trainers, choreographers, and, in later stages, most of the dancers were Westerners. The arrival of Western actors in this period resulted from a widely accepted trend, claiming that knowledge could be acquired from outside Iran and that the trainees shall be sent abroad or the trainers are sent to Iran to teach them.81 Iranians who were employed by the National Ballet were proud of being in a position to raise their arts to a high level in society. In this way, Iranian stage dance and women dancers served the political ends of the institutions of power in Iran by creating a space for the realization of their ambition. The point is that this ambition is not the subject’s ambition, but the ambition of the institution itself. It is through ambition that an institution of power exists, but to realize this ambition the institution needs the purified dancing body. Crucial in this respect is that the subject (women dancer) is unaware of the ways in which the institution uses and therefore consumes and enjoys her body. The Iranian National Ballet followed Cook policies, with the slight difference that Roudaki Hall82 was for years to come filled mostly with Western choreographers and repertoires. The main goal of training and performing ballet as a Western classical dance and a symbol of modernization was “to 80

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Haideh Ahmadzadeh, as one of the first and main dancers of Cook’s company, writes in her autobiography that Cook changed the names of those non-Iranians to Persian and Arabic names to make them sound more authentic. She even chose an Iranian name for herself for a performance at an Indian embassy. Abdollah Nazemi, an Ex-dancer of the National Ballet writes in 1967 that “five years back, once a group came from Great Britain to teach us ballet, they worked on the Nutcracker with us, […] although I was dancing the role of the prince, I had no clue of the story. It was not only me; for sure, other performers did not know the story. […] The training sessions were like those in sport classes; however, the performers were happy that they could do some ballet movements without paying attention to the story and getting the soul of the role. We just imitated blindfolded. Among the audience were not a few people who came to the hall to show off, without understanding the story; they spoke about it later with friends just to show they have a taste of arts!” (Talash Magazine, No. 6, Tehran, 1967) (My translation). The first national dance and opera stage in Tehran.

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elevate the performing arts from a lowly place, such as private parties and cabaret shows, to the stage where they belonged, and to give them esteem and credence.”83 and to remove the negative connotations of Ruhowzi dance. Since the correlation between ballet and Ruhowzi is antagonistic. While ballet is associated with modernity, progress, education, and the upper classes, the Ruhowzi tradition is associated backwardness and the lower classes. The Iranian National Ballet had a completely Western repertoire in music and choreography, contradicting its national name. It was only able to present a single Iranian ballet, Bijan and Manijeh, in 23 years based on an Iranian legendary story and with Iranian solo dancers and Iranian music, composed specifically for it. Even here, other dancers were Westerners. A noteworthy consideration in the establishment of Iranian National Ballet is whether we can properly speak of the nationalization of an Iranian phenomenon whose origin and identical characteristics were shaped in the West. It is not enough to call ballet a national dance, due to its performance in the cultural and geographical context of Iran with Iranian music, but very few Iranian dancers. It is not also enough to copy the dance styles of other nations and imitate them to be able to claim that we own a “national culture and arts.” Regarding the establishment of national culture raised from a people’s culture and by those people, Frantz Fanon states, A national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people’s true nature. It is not made up of the inert dregs of gratuitous actions, that is to say actions which are less and less attached to the ever-present reality of the people. A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and, praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence….84 Every nation has its special cultural identity and shall therefore create its own national arts. A dance can be called national that has its specific performance patterns and complements the nation’s identity, an identity that dynamically improves itself and tends to move toward excellence. The progressive nature of dance does not conclude in methodology and style, but definitely covers content and themes: a dance that emphasizes bodily movements, behaviors, 83 84

Haideh Ahmadzadeh: With Grace and Style: My life as a Persian Ballerina, 2008, p. 163. Frantz Fanon: On National Culture, 1961, p. 188. (http://www.rlwclarke.net/courses/LITS 3303/2008-2009/12CFanonOnNationalCulture.pdf) (Retrieved May 12, 2015)

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

allusions, and the common language of the majority of people and mirrors the cultural character and dominant social atmosphere. By expressing social issues, the dance has the chance to be welcomed by the audience in both content and form and, consequently, creates progress.85 In addition to employing numerous Russian, American, and British choreographers, trainers, and ballerinas, without whom the National Ballet could not have survived, Cook’s approach as a method was still relevant; with its focus on the authenticity of dance and the utilization of Iranian paintings and classic literature. Suggested by the Ministry of Culture and Arts and the support of Shah and Queen in person, an institute was established to collect, preserve, and disseminate folkloric dance and bring it to the stage. Robert de Warren, who had primarily come to Iran as a ballet instructor and choreographer, was assigned to initiate this project.86 He traveled around the country and started the observation and documentation of folklore dance forms of the local tribes and ethnic groups, translating those observations that into a theatrical presentation for the stage with non-local dancers, applying beautiful objects and antique clothing. This epoch coincided with a time in which, at the macro level, an artistic policy based on combining nationalism and Westernization was strongly promoted. Cultural policy makers demanded a formal art that would be considered modern and yet express Iranian identity. How such art was to become modern was considered irrelevant. Hence, a kind of pluralism was born, according to which in painting, for instance, Western abstract art and Islamic traditional art were linked and the use of various Persian calligraphies, tiles, carpet patterns, and folk themes was prevalent. This effort to reconstruct archaic heritage and shape it into a modern form was led by the political institution and mainly neo-traditionalists, anticipating an artificial return to the past with a tourist absorption approach.87

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The critic does not mean ignoring the techniques and experiences of the West and other nations. On the contrary, it emphasizes their utilization and employment in an appropriate way. Robert De Warren: Destiny’s Walz: In Step with Giants, Eloquent Books; 1st edition, New York, 2009, pp. 145–146. Ramin Jahanbegloo: Iran and Modernity, Goftar Publishers, Tehran, 2001, pp. 145–50. (My translation)

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The process of bringing folk dances with the ballet mixture to the stage and regarding them as National Dances was designed in line with such policies, which were criticized by Leili Tajadod, Ex-Iranian dancer and choreographer: The Iranian folk dances have been developed for collective joy in ceremonies, and they lack the nature of artistic performance, which means they are not prearranged for the audience, as everybody participates in such events. In an effort to make adjustments to bring such dances on stage and make them pleasant for the audience, many original atmospheric elements are presented as pure ‘attractions,’ where the authenticity is sacrificed. The repetition of performing of these dances in theatre centers results in the establishment of such invented dances as ‘folklore’ or ‘local.’88 Worthy of discussion is the fact that although the main objective of planners was to initiate and progress ‘national’ or ‘classical’ dance on the basis of folklore, they taught ballet to the dancers, and for this reason, the rhythms of European-styled dance were used in choreographies.89 Iranian audiences were not concerned with whether the mere utilization of Iranian cultural materials and resources like paintings, literature, and classic music in choreography and decoration that normally serve the purpose of facilitating communication with the audience would lead to the creation of national or classical dance. Nor did they consider proper what the role of movement itself is in choreography. The audience and supporters of the national dances had been astonished with the richness of a phenomenon, which they perceived to originally belonged to them. They believed, it is an ancient phenomenon that is rediscovered and should be accepted unconditionally, since the westerners have been determined the performing style, and familiar cultural codes have enriched it.90

88 89 90

Talash Magazine, No. 16, 1969. (My translation) It was believed that the ballet training was good for the folk dancers, as it added grace and subtlety to their movements. (Ahmadzadeh, p.135) This artistic style was confirmed by the bourgeoisie, which politically and culturally grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. It had a nostalgic attitude toward the West, the feeling of lagging behind, and had to fill the time gap with imitation.

2. Exile at Home: The Imposition of Outsider Status on Dancers and Dance within Iran

2.7

Conclusion

The history of the past 150 years in Iran has been influenced by eagerness for the Western modernity, and nationalism and national identity. Modernity was not merely represented by flourishing capitalism, industrial development, and urbanization. Modernity is a non-static entity that developed a new style for the creation and perception of art production and caused artists to become trapped by markets and by power.91 The lack of correspondence between modernity in the West and in Iran created an outdated past with a barred future. This asymmetry caused the replacement of modern wisdom with “mode.” Iranians became modern without thinking in a modern way. They put on modern clothes, but continued judging about themselves in a premodern way. In other words, instead of understanding, imitation emerged. Modernization was understood as project for “making up for lost time,” and in the context of art, it blurred the concept of authenticity.92 The modernization of dance in Iran was no exception to the conflicts the modern with the traditional. The cradle of ballet is in the West. Therefore, to Iranian cultural policy makers, it was a strong sign of modernization, fulfilled by inviting numerous Western ballet dancers and choreographers. This idea institutionalized classical ballet, as the basis on which learn any form of dance, wherein any innovation with even a slight effect on this perception was not accepted.93 Thus to even learn an Iranian dance, one must learn ballet, and in this way, the ballet became the backbone of dance education and performance, as well as a symbol of modernity. Ballet entered Iran very late, however, and it was supposed to flourish in just few years, without consideration

91 92 93

Abbas Milani: Modernity and Its Foes in Iran, Akhtaran, Seventh Edition, Tehran, 2008, p. 214. (My translation) Ramin Jahanbegloo: Iran and Modernity, Goftar Publishers, Tehran, 2001, p. 23. (My translation) The Martha Graham Company danced Appalachian Spring in Tehran, and Merce Cunningham brought staged performances at the Shiraz Art Festival; each of these performances failed, however, since their styles were not known and acceptable for Iranian dance managers and instructors who believed in classical ballet as a sign of modernization. They regard any kind of avant-garde and innovative approach in the arts as proof that “everything has been experimental and nothing is serious.” For instance, the conceptual arts and absurd theater in the dramatic arts are more symbolic of a “lack of experience” than “richness and completion of all possibilities to experience” (Jahanbegloo, p. 275) (My translation)

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of its centuries of socio-cultural pretext in the West. Cultural mismatch and the presence of Western cultural representatives like Cook in the Pahlavi era gave rise to choreographies in which the Orient was represented as a fairyland full of beautiful dancing girls and not as an undeveloped region with isolated women in veils. Consequently, theatrical representation in dance evolved, and the function of dance became to narrate and to be a symbol of an occasion for conveying a message. Western choreographers like Cook and De Warren were interested in finding and reaffirming the old truths by applying them. To push their projects forward, they believed the best way to prove such truths would be to have the natives comprehend them. Thus, they created a dance style that represented Iranian ‘authentic’ dance for the generations to come. Dancing this style on national and international stages to present modern Iran inevitably caused the expulsion of original forms of Iranian dance like Motrebi dance from homes, making it obsolete and strange. In other words, Iranian dance was exiled in its own home, as neither the place of performance, nor the audience and dancers were any longer in their original places. Notably, in the process of the formation and expansion of Iranian authentic-and-modern dance, contradictory traditions played an influential role in helping the modernization agents and performers, although modernity is obliged to reject traditions, in order to enable progressive transformations.94

94

In articles published in journals before the Revolution of 1979, the Iranian National Ballet and national and folk dance groups are mostly associated with each other and placed next to each other. For example, see the Music Journal in 1959, p. 39.

Chapter 3. Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland

This chapter focuses on exile from the Iranian homeland and another turning point in the history of dance in Iran is addressed: the 1979 Revolution, prohibition of dance, and elimination of dancers, mass immigration, and change in type of exile. Since the 1979 Revolution, California has been the first destination Iranians immigrants. For this reason, the first part of this chapter addresses the complicated situation of Iranian immigrants in America: their challenges as the newcomers, the effect of the political tensions between Iran and the US, the trauma caused by leaving and losing home, the experience of double exile, and the creation of exile culture. Following that, the place of Iranian dance as a marginal and Oriental dance is studied, and the focus is on concepts such as Orientalism, exoticism, otherness, and authenticity. The internalization of Orientalism and exoticism in the choreographies of American women dancers and dance institutes is a notable subject. Iranian dance has also been developed in this setting, and almost on the same basis; Iranian-American women dancers have also attended to the choreographies and methods of their American fellows. This attention is not mostly due to interest, but is to attract the audience and to survive in the market. Furthermore, this chapter explains the reasons of marginalization of the Iranian women dancers in the US and the clichés related to the Oriental women dancers. It outline from where this mindset emerges and why dances of these women dancers are considered erotic or mere entertainment. The evidences of this misunderstanding and cliché can be found in the literature of the Western authors such as Curtis and Flaubert and through an analysis of certain examples facing Oriental women dancers while traveling to the Orient in the nineteenth century. These written sources are important references,

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as they point specifically to the systematic exile of the women dancers. The last section of this chapter Rediscovering Iranian Dance in American Institutions is a study of the activities of the Ballet Afsaneh dance institute in north California. This institute has a great share in creating a ‘dreamlike’ and ‘ethnic’ image of Iranian dance and is popular among the Iranian community in the diaspora. Studying the activities of such established institutes is important because it challenges the activity of independent Iranian women dancers who tend toward deconstruction.

3.1

Double Exclusion in the United States

The swinging of Iranian dancers between tradition and modernity lasted forty years, until the Revolution of 1979 in Iran. During the Revolution, the royal family was the main supporter of arts projects, and all Western dancers and choreographers, along with most Iranian dancers, left the country toward exile. Those who remained faced strict restrictions and prohibitions, even in private spaces. Thus, even many who initially stayed later left Iran, mostly for the US, a country in which they saw themselves as temporary guests, who would soon be able to return to Iran. The US, as the first destination of Iranian immigrants and the largest community of exiled Iranians, plays an undeniable role in the presentation, preservation, and performance of Iranian dance. A considerable number of classes and workshops of Iranian dance in different places, such as parks, museums, municipal halls, libraries, universities, and sport events—whether by Iranians or by Americans—indicate how important it is to focus on Iranian dance as a case study. In recent years, the Farsi television channels outside of Iran, such as BBC Persian, Voice of America, Iran International and Man-o-To TV have broadcast their programs from the US and Great Britain, introducing Iranian dancers and choreographers in diaspora. Thereby, these media pave the ground for the presentation of the dancers and their works for audiences both inside and outside of Iran. Their audiences, especially inside of Iran, are far broader than the audiences of state television channels in Iran. Due to the undeniable impact of these channels, it is expected that the attitude of Iranian society toward dance will be subject to profound changes in the near future. Therefore, studying the progression of contemporary Iranian dance and the challenges it faced, along with the influence of migration processes and the impact of

3. Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland

the host country in its current state, is inevitable. The discussion, criticism, and introduction of the discourse is essential to its completion. I shall discuss, particularly, the meaning of being in exile in the US; the way that the Iranian immigrants have historically (re)defined dance in exile; the impact of the new environment on the dancer; and the reception of this impact by its audience. The different aspects of Iranian life in modern history have always been politicized. The everyday life of Iranians after immigration have generally been regulated also by political and cultural relationships between their home country and host country. In the post-Revolution years, Iranian immigrants constantly struggled with themes such as exile, loss, political asylum, political resistance, and opposition. They mostly felt treated discriminately and spent most of their power to fight against stereotypes such as that they were “hostage takers,” “terrorists” and “religious zealots.” The loneliness, exile, and loss they faced in the diaspora, as well as issues such as Revolution, war, and individual and cultural identity can be traced in the poems of Iranians in the diaspora. The 1979 Revolution and the subsequent Iran–Iraq war forced many Iranians to spread all over the world. The Iranians who have left their country in the last 43 years are distributed across all continents and comprise a globally scattered population of an estimated 4–6 million people.1 The mass immigration to the US began during final year of the Pahlavi era before the Revolution of 1979, continued for the subsequent decade, and created the biggest wave of immigrants in recent Iranian history. In the first phase, royal family members, members of cabinet, military personnel, and upper-class families left Iran. The second phase included people from all classes, genders, religions, and ethnicities, as well as members of cultural movements and political parties that fled Iran. They entered the US in exile as political refugees. Christians, Jews, Baha’is, Zoroastrians, Sunni Muslims, and cultural and political activists—such as journalists, authors, poets, musicians, actors, dancers, and media personnel—started to establish their communication networks to resume their cultural activities by applying their experiences.2 The exact number of these immigrants is unknown. According to the latest published statistics, in 2012, from Iran’s National Organization for Civil Registration, 1.4 million Iranians live in the US. The Iranian journals in the US,

1 2

Nader Vahabi: Atlas de la diaspora Iranienne, 2012. Shirin Hakimzadeh: “Iran: A Vast Diaspora Abroad and Millions of Refugees at Home.” Migration Policy Institute, 2006, available online at http://www.migrationinformation .org/feature/display.cfm?ID=424 (Retrieved December 13, 2015)

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however, estimate more US-Iranians live there: According to the 1990 Census, 1.8 million Iranians lived in the US at that time.3 More than 50% of Iranian immigrants to the US at that time resided in California.4 Hakimzadeh reports that “Iranian Americans are most highly concentrated in California, which has a larger Iranian population than the next 20 states combined. Within California, most Iranians live in the Los Angeles area, dubbed Tehrangeles.”5 In spite of the absence of reliable figures capturing the total population of Iranians outside the country, researchers believe that US-Iranians are by far the biggest immigrant Iranian community.6 Moreover, the heterogeneity of US-Iranians and their special socio-cultural lifestyles and interactions with the host country make them an attractive case study. In addition, the controversial relationship between Iran and the US, and the absence of a direct relationship and the availability of a cultural dynamics for immigrants in US society are other factors making this case study novel. US-Iranians experience a unique situation in comparison to Iranians in other Western countries, as there have been no diplomatic relations between the two countries after the 1979 Revolution; subsequent relations have been inflected with tensions or hostility. Among the main points of political turmoil between two countries are the Revolution of 1979 and the institutionalization of combating Westernization and Americanization, the US embassy hostage crisis in Iran in 1979, and September 11 attacks. The hostage crisis and the September 11 attacks had a profoundly negative impact on US public opinion regarding Iranians, who were stigmatized as “enemies.” Following that, the embargoes on Iran changed the individual and collective life of Iranians, who fled their country due to dissatisfaction with the governing political regime and had to suffer not only homesickness and exile but also faced new challenges from the diplomatic tensions in their new homes. Prejudice and discrimination against

3

4 5

6

Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Georges Sabah, and Claudia Der-Martirosian, Beyond Nationality: Religio-Ethnic Diversity. In Irangeles: Iranians in Los Angeles, eds. R. Kelly and J. Friedlander, Berkeley: University of California press, pp. 59–79. Mohsen M. Mobasher: Iranian in Texas: Migration, Politics, and Ethnic Identity, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2012, p. 149. Shirin Hakimzadeh: “Iran: A Vast Diaspora Abroad and Millions of Refugees at Home.” Migration Policy Institute, 2006, available online at http://www.migrationinformation .org/feature/display.cfm?ID=424 (Retrieved December 5, 2015) Ali Akbar Mahdi: Determinants of Adaptations for Second Generation Iranians, Cira Bulletin, Vol 13, No. 1. March 1997, p. 37.

3. Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland

migrated Iranians were the compensation they had to pay for the political adventures of the Iranian government.7 Such discriminatory confrontations caused the traumatization and marginalization of many Iranians, restricted their presence in the social sphere, and gradually forced them to become ashamed of their nationality and try to hide it to maintain their dignity and create fake new identities, which would prompt less hostility in the US.8 After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, US-Iranians faced a new wave of discrimination: hate crimes and violations of their civil rights by both public and private actors.9 They shared a common feeling of being foreigners, outsiders on the margins of American society. Despite four decades have passed since the hostage crisis and two decades since September 11, Iranian im/migrants continue to face the consequences of those events. As long as US-Iran diplomatic tensions persist, generalizations and stereotypes against Iranians remain unchanged. In such a situation, Iranians in the diaspora will continue the paradoxical life of double exile, a fragmented and conflicted life that has made them ambivalent about living both in Iran and in the United States. […]; they are neither happy in exile nor looking forward to returning home. Their identities are marginalized in the societies of both their host and their home countries.10 Facing and experiencing such a “sudden sense of double loss or double exile and trauma”11 makes the case of Iranian immigrants in America unique. Thousands of Iranians had to flee from the post-Revolutionary political instability, socio-economic chaos, and the Iran–Iraq war (1980–1988), and these Iranians were forced to settle in exile. Despite many other migrant groups, Iranians were confronted with double exile, as they were far away and rejected from home and were also rejected by their host society:

7

8 9 10 11

Iranians were confronted by such statements: “Deport Iranians,” “send an Iranian home,” “Go home dumb Iranians.” Moreover, they could not get service in restaurants, some students were not accepted at the universities, and Iranian flags were burned. Mohsen M. Mobasher: Iranian in Texas: Migration, Politics, and Ethnic Identity, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2012, p. 47. Ibid. p. 46. Mohsen M. Mobasher: Iranian in Texas: Migration, Politics, and Ethnic Identity, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2012, p. 47. Ibid. p. 8.

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This double loss and double social trauma left an incredible mark upon Iranian immigrants’ collective consciousness and affected their ethnic identity fundamentally. It imposed upon them a social life full of dilemma, cultural inconsistency, religious and political ambivalence, ambiguity, and paradox personally and collectively.12 This special situation led to the application of strategies to combat the dilemma: the choice between revealing one’s Iranian national identity versus avoiding the stigma attached to being Iranian; practicing Islamic faith versus giving in to the fear of being viewed as a fundamentalist Muslim or a terrorist; […] desiring to return home versus abhorring the social conditions of life in Iran; and last but not least, maintaining ethnic attachment and preserving the Iranian cultural heritage versus acculturating into American society and being accepted as an Iranian.13 Iranian identity in exile is thus contested and problematized. Dealing with such identity crises in the Iranian community has resulted in the creation of multi- and sub-ethnoreligious identities, which are faced with tribal stigma. Given the lack of “a unified sense of national identity strong enough to bind Iranians together” in exile, “Some members of the community identify themselves as Iranian, while others call themselves Persians. Many others vary their self-descriptions among several possibilities—Iranian, Persian, Persian American, Iranian American, and American Iranian—depending on the situation and the audience.”14 Many Iranians have tried to disconnect themselves from members of their ethnic groups, reflecting their social conditions and a prejudiced view of the host society toward them. To cope with the challenge of endangered identity, not only were they hiding their identity to escape from related stigma, but they also reduced their social contact with other Iranians in the Iranian community to avoid participating in Iranian events. These challenges are prompting the term exile to describe more than just geographic change. In exile, identifications, symbolic links, and concrete social relations are exclusively bound to the lost homeland and are recognized in longings and aspirations to return. From the other side, social, political, and cultural 12 13 14

Ibid. Mohsen M. Mobasher: Iranian in Texas: Migration, Politics, and Ethnic Identity, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2012, p. 9. Ibid.

3. Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland

establishment and networking in the host country are difficult or sometimes nearly impossible due to absence of having a fixed homeland. That is why the experience of exile often presents itself as a state of being “in limbo” and as a temporary condition or a “double exclusion.” Academic and public attention to the phenomenon of Iranian diaspora can be also traced back in the geopolitical turmoil that followed the 1979 Revolution. Iran stood in the headlines and was the focus of the academic world. Iranians in diaspora used literature, film, and theater to discuss their hybrid cultural identities and their simultaneous bonds with different homes. One of the first theoretically and most accomplished academic works of the Iranian diaspora was done by Hamid Naficy. In his book The Making of Exile Culture, Naficy introduces the term “exile” (Tabiedi) through a study of Iranian television in Los Angeles: The term “exile” in this study refers to individuals or groups who voluntarily or involuntarily have relocated outside their original habitus. On the one hand, they refuse to become totally assimilated into the host society; on the other hand, they do not return to their homeland—while they continue to keep aflame a burning desire for return. In the meantime, they construct an imaginary nation both of the homeland and of their own presence in exile.15 Naficy points out the impact of mutual experiences of the strangeness, exclusion, and marginalization in exile. “Living in strangeness“ and “fighting for survival” in a foreign environment, according to Naficy, served Iranian (and other) immigrant groups as a common horizon of experience to form a collective identity. In Naficy’s terms, the longing for the return has an outstanding significance for the exiled, due to the impossibility of returning home. “Physically located in one place while dreaming of an unrealizable return to another. The style of dreaming of the homeland and of staging of a return to it is both dystopian and utopian, with the result that exile becomes […] ‘an endless paradox’.”16 Gradually, Iranians in exile have found out that their exile would not be temporary after all. Many of them eventually decided to cope with the situation and settle in their new home.

15 16

Hamid Naficy: The Making of Exile Culture: Iranian Television in Los Angeles, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993, pp. 16–17. Ibid. p. 17.

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3.2

Iranian Dance in the US: The Marginalized Dance

In an Essay Looking at World Dance refer Ann Cooper Albright and Ann Dils to the crucial concept of “world dance.” This subject is worthy of discussion, as social and folklore dances gradually entered US faculties of dance studies as separate courses. They believe that the visibility of folklore dances and collective ritualistic movements at the beginning of 21st century served as a threshold for the appearance of world dance. The events in public places, including streets, squares, hillsides, and beaches, presented the ritualistic movements of people who celebrated and danced for the arrival of the new year or harvesting in the autumn; these events attract their audience from different nations and cultures to dance. They mention that world dance has many followers and practitioners in US universities: African dances, belly dance, flamenco, Indian classical dance, and so forth.17 Beyond the popularity of such dances, it is vital to study whether they are local or transnational, native or cosmopolitan, and traditional or contemporary. It is also important to focus on the concept of world dance. World dance may represent a neo-colonial equivalent of the Oriental and generally serve as a code by which to distinguish between Western versus non-Western, modern versus traditional or Western versus ethnic dances. Albright and Dils’s solution to address this possibility of representation is to avoid restricting world dance solely to movements. To understand these dances, one must think beyond movements, since world dance consists of narrations of power, resistance, gender, colonialism, tradition, and modernity. Iranian dance is not popular in the US. Jane Desmond defines such dances as theatrical dances, which are less to be seen in the mass media. They “rely more on the physical transportation or migration of performers, students, teachers, and choreographers from one locale to another.”18 Iranian dance is generally unable to be outlined as a defined genre to a Western audience. This dance is mostly categorized as “Middle Eastern” or “Oriental” (or according to

17

18

Ann Cooper Albright and Ann Dils: “Looking at World Dance” in Moving History/ Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, Wesleyan University Press, 2001, p. 92. Jane Desmond: “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies” in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance. Edited by Jane Desmond, Duke, University Press, 1997, p. 43.

3. Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland

new definitions, as world dance), since there is normally no distinction between Iran as an Islamic country and Arab countries in the Middle East. In other words, Iranian dance in exile suffers mostly from generalizations and clichés resulting from Orientalism, and remains relatively unknown at the global stage.19 Said addresses the Other in Orientalism in 1978 to analyze the challenges facing representation of culture, history and society in the eastern countries. He articulates “the relationship between occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony…”20 .This Orient covers the mythical Orient as well as the geographical one, including people who belong to different religions, races, languages, and traditions. Said asserts that the West generalizes them into categories such as “Arabs”, “Middle Eastern”, or “Islamic culture.” The Orientalist perspective is an object-oriented attitude toward a phenomenon called “Orient.” The Orient is associated with “spirituality,” “eroticism,” “mysticism,” and “exoticism.” Orientalists employ methods to build fictional images of Eastern countries. They refer mostly to pre-modern history and archaic texts by regarding the Orient as a “fictional essence” to bridge primitive traditions and the Oriental peoples living in the present time. Several aspects of these concepts and connotations have faced changes in a globalized and interconnected world. The question is whether such concepts have been consequently changed in the field of Iranian dance and whether this style of dance, which has been invented and established by US choreographers in Iran, has taken a different nature. It is also a matter of discussion whether Iranian dance could be recognized as such outside of its exotic and Oriental framework. Is the marginalized dance able to be visible without the willingness of US hegemony, or as Spivak questions, “Can the Subaltern speak?” Iranian dance is about the East, but even more about the West (and America, in particular): “In fact, Western discourse about the East reflects a con-

19 20

Iranian dancers emphasize that their dance is not identical with belly dance, despite a few similarities in aesthetics. Edward W. Said: Orientalism, Vintage Books Edition, (October 1979), USA, p. 5. (The concept of Orientalism was developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the reports, novels, and thoughts of travelers and authors who travelled to the East. Most of them had no command the local languages, and they therefore were unable to make direct contact with local people or distinguish between different social textures in those societies.)

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tinually changing historical process of self-definition by the West.”21 From this point of view, Iranian dance could be considered as an embodiment of American lust and ambivalences displaced onto an Orientalized and Other’s body. Concepts such as exoticism and Orientalism have been interwoven with Iranian stage dances. Being in exile in the US has also imbued Iranian dance with a special character, which belongs to that geographical space. The attitude of US choreographers towards being exotic and their approach to the Oriental dance has led Iranian dance to be possessed by them, such that the Iranian audience awaits the authenticity of its own dance as conceived by a US choreographer and accepts what such choreographers present in an ‘attractive’ form on the stage. Such issues can be discussed from two points of view: firstly, regarding how the desire of “Oriental exoticism” has been appeared among US dancers and how the audience has reacted to it and, secondly, regarding what exoticism and Orientalism mean in Oriental dance and how it emerges in Iranian dance. These two aspects are going to be discussed in the following sections of this chapter.

3.3

Oriental Dance and Exoticism in the Choreographies of American Dancers

Within the twentieth century, the term “Oriental dance” has been used to refer to particular dances from North Africa to India. The English term “Oriental dance” is a translation of Raqs Sharqi, or “Dance of the East,” an Arabic term indicating that in the Arab world, this is a dance of the “East.” Erdman informs us that Oriental dance was a term invented originally by Americans and Europeans “to describe innovative and balletic dances which were Eastern in theme, content, mood, costume, musical accompaniment, inspiration, or intent.”22 Oriental dance, according to Brandstetter, “had already lent an exotic element to opera and nineteenth-century ballet.”23 In the realm of dance, 21

22

23

Jane Desmond: “Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis’s Radha of 1906” in Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, Wesleyan University Press, 2001, p. 263. Joan L. Erdman: “Dance Discourses: Rethinking the History of the “Oriental Dance” in Moving Words, Re-writing Dance. Edited by Gay Morris, Psychology Press, London and New York, 1996, p. 252. Gabriele Brandstetter: Poetics of dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical AvantGardes, Oxford University Press, New York, 2015, p. 108. (Originally published in Ger-

3. Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland

she maintains, “it also clearly corresponded with a tendency to merge antiquity and the Orient.”24 These dances with exotic-erotic connotations represent “the dichotomy of the fairylike, pure dancer and the erotic-sensual ‘worldly’ dancer.”25 The idea of Oriental dance and subsequently its genre, as developed by Western admirers of the Orient in 1920, has been enhanced and adapted by ‘Occidental’ dancers in places regarded as Oriental by Westerners. Due to its “exotic movements,” it deeply affected Oriental dancers in the Occident as well as in the Orient. The perception from this dance was based on concepts such as “exotic movement,” “glittering costumes,” “drapery veils,” “vibrant jewelry,” “flowing lines,” “graceful positioning,” “sublime dedication,” and “strangely tuned music.”26 This stereotypical classification and exoticism influenced the programs of American dancers such as Ruth St. Denise, La Meri, and Isadora Duncan after their special interest in the feminine divine. Obviously, America paved the way for the flourishing of exoticism and Orientalism in dance more than any other country. As Kendall states that Ruth St. Denis “could only have emerged in America.”27 Desmond traces the Americans’ fascination with exoticism to the beginning of the twentieth century, which was very popular in “high art and low art forms.” In some high art contexts, the exotic was cast as a utopian vision of the past glories of classical civilization.”28 Shay interprets this interest with reference to American enthusiasm in identity building and suggests events through which to understand the adoption of exotic dance in the American dance scene, among others: international dance festivals and exhibitions and the performance of exotic dance traditions among pioneering dancers. The appearance of the large-scale world exhibitions and fairs of the late nineteenth century attracted millions of viewers, dancers from exotic lands. Shay

24 25 26

27 28

man as Tanz-Lektüren: Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde by Fischer Taschenbuchverlag in Frankfurt am Main, 1995. Translation from the German by Elena Polzer with Marco Franco). Ibid. Ibid. p. 66. Joan L. Erdman: “Dance Discourses: Rethinking the History of the “Oriental Dance” in Moving Words, Re-writing Dance. Edited by Gay Morris, Psychology Press, London and New York, 1996, p. 252. Elizabeth Kendall: Where She Danced, New York, Knopf, 1979, p. 12. Jane Desmond: “Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis’s Radha of 1906” in Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, Wesleyan University Press, 2001, p. 260.

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believes that such exhibitions have played a crucial role in establishing dualities such as “civilized- primitive, modern-traditional, metropolitan centercolony, powerful-weak” 29 and separated doers from watchers. The Oriental dances were subject to name and nature change in theses festivals and exhibitions. The most important example is belly dancing, which was invented in Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and remains popular as a choreographic genre.30 Belly dancing has emerged mostly as an industry, and instructors have appeared everywhere: “A few teacher actually taught specific dances from specific countries, but most tended to teach a step from Egypt followed by another from Morocco, or Turkey, or Iran.”31 In the 1970s, these dance forms were transformed into a medium to pursue “love, spirituality, seeking a feminist road to sexual and sensual empowerment, losing weight, feeling attractive, and joining other women in an affirming activity.”32 Exotic influences especially Ruth St. Denise. She is believed to be the first American to widely use themes of the Orient for her dances, as distinct from the hootchy-kootchy activities of other Oriental dancers of the day.33 Terry writes on the paradoxical reactions of the reporters to Ruth St. Denise new exotic dance: “On the one hand, they compared her with the ‘Persian dancers of the Midway’ and found her to be more exotic, and, on the other, they reported that ‘none of her dances are open to vulgarity’.”34 Orientalism and spirituality in the dance of Ruth St. Denise and the rise of “barefoot dancing” were reflected in her works and created a very special form, seen not only in vaudeville but also in the parties of elites and in American and European art theaters. In addition, she introduced the idea of the Eastern goddess to elite artistic circles. Ruth St. Denise, as a white female performer, brought the Orient to the stage for white audiences through Radha Dance.

29 30

31 32 33 34

Anthony Shay: Dancing Across Borders: The American Fascination with Exotic Dance Forms, McFarland Publishers, North Carolina, 2008, p. 34. Barbara Sellers Young: “Body, Image, Identity: American Tribal Belly Dance” in Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism, and Harem Fantasy. Edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers Young, Mazda Publishers, Costa Mesa, CA, 2005. Sellers- Young: quoted in Dancing Across Borders, p. 144. Anthony Shay: Dancing Across Borders: The American Fascination with Exotic Dance Forms, McFarland Publishers, North Carolina, 2008, p. 141. Walter Terry: The Dance in America (revised edition), Dacapo Press, New York, 1981, p. 52. Quoted in Helen Thomas: Dance, Modernity and Culture: Explorations in the sociology of dance, Routledge, London and New York, 1995, p. 73.

3. Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland

Desmond asserts, Framed by the essentialist, transcendent spirituality of the piece, the audience is brought into ego identification with the white as nonwhite and the Western as Eastern. At the same time, the voyeuristic and fetishistic aspects of the dance […] objectify it as separate from the observer. A ‘colored’ white woman […] also evokes an ambiguous response. While ‘mixing’ sexualizes the white woman, it simultaneously indicates a potential mixing of the race, legally proscribed at the time.35 Radha could thus be regarded as a medium of reflection for American desire embodied through an Orientalized women body. Figure 9: Ruth St. Denis in The Peacock36

35

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Jane Desmond: “Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis’s Radha of 1906” in Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, Wesleyan University Press, 2001, pp. 266-267. Jerome Robbins Dance Division: The New York Public Library. “Ruth St. Denis in The Peacock, posed on the grounds of Ravinia Park”, The New York Public Library Digital Collections, 1914. (Retrieved August 19, 2021 from https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/it ems/510d47df-85b9-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99)

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Shay emphasizes that the American audience was interested in Orientalist exotic dances, because of “both racist and aesthetics issues.”37 He explains further, the audiences of the time preferred the American or English white dancers to any native performers. Authenticity was not a concern, because for the overwhelming majority of Americans and British the Orient—Morocco, India, or Persia—was one entity. They wanted their exotica filtered through American bodies.38 The attitude of Russel Meriwether Hughes, with the stage name La Meri, in using exotic differed from that of St. Denise. Foster asserts that there is a claim that La Meri invented the term ethnic dance “as ways to distinguish dances that reflect the unchanging mores of the people of all classes … of a particular land or race.”39 Her performance and teaching represent a long history of American interest in the images, themes, and dances or music of foreign cultures. Through her concerts, she offered a way for the audience to access societies, but also displayed those “cultures as small, collectible, and lacking in complexity.”40 Ruth saint Denise and La Meri collaborated on some productions and searched for the essentialist and spiritual Orient. However, they had different approaches toward the Orient in their works. “St. Denise was interested in some mysterious ‘essence’ of foreign cultures and not at all concerned with ‘authenticity,’ while La Meri was fascinated by actual dance cultures of the world.”41 As an amateur, she performed impressions of the imagined Orient. These included such things as a “Persian Slave Dance” and an “Egyptian Frieze Dance.” In her programs, she identifies dances as “Moroccan,” “Arabic,” or “Algerian” with no indication as to the specific dance. “La Meri studied with a professional dancer for a brief period in Morocco and later performed the

37 38 39 40 41

Anthony Shay: Dancing Across Borders: The American Fascination with Exotic Dance Forms, McFarland Publishers, North Carolina, 2008, p. 9. Ibid. 60. Quoted in Susan Leigh Foster: Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance, Routledge, New York, 2011, p. 55. Ibid. p. 58. Nancy Lee Ruyter: “La Meri and Middle Eastern Dance” in Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism, and Harem Fantasy. Edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara SellersYoung, Mazda Publishers, Inc, Costa Mesa, California, 2005, p. 209.

3. Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland

dances that she had learned from her. Like the other early dancers, her choreographic works were accompanied by music by Western composers.”42 Dancers such St. Denise and La Mari could remove the ‘negative connotations’ of Oriental dances by introducing new interpretations and creating an exotic dance style at once artistic, modest, and sublime to be staged for Western audiences.

Figure 10: La Meri incorporating classical Indian dance into the ballet Swan Lake, Photo by Jack Mitchell, 1951

Following La Meri and Ruth St. Denise’s choreographies as well as movement and choreographic strategies from Hollywood films and classical ballet, some American choreographers adapted many of the elements of movement and costume as their own for the purposes of performing them in a new context: the Western stage. Some other dancers in the twentieth century developed their dances by reading about other societies “through highly romantic

42

Anthony Shay: Dancing Across Borders: The American Fascination with Exotic Dance Forms, McFarland Publishers, North Carolina, 2008, p. 71.

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and Orientalist accounts written or produced by Western writers and artists […]. [By] the wearing of costumes, learning language, living for significant time periods in those regions, [American choreographers] “naturalized” these dances.”43 The same is relevant to Iranian dance and can be traced in performances of Iranian dance in America. By adopting the exotic and utilizing the characters of Oriental dance, American dancers and choreographers have created a dance style praised as authentically Iranian.

3.4

Fascination with Orientalism: Stereotypes in Body Image of Women Dancers

Iranian dance in American exile is a historical consequence of the idea of Orientalism. Orientalist viewpoints, alongside a lack of familiarity with choreographic codes, often lead Western viewers to assume that Iranian dance—no matter how recent its composition is—as is traditional and associated with folklore. The approach of Iranian dancers in performing Iranian dance differs from that of non-Iranians. The non-Iranian (mostly Americans) choreographers provide ideal and imaginative images of the homeland for Iranian audience. Therefore, they emphasize being authentic, especially; otherwise, they may confront critics from Iranian dancers who claim that they are presenting a false image of their home on the stage. This emphasis on authenticity increases the desire of American choreographers to use exoticism and Orientalism in the productions. Certain Iranian choreographers, however, have attempted to fight the stereotypes related to ethnic dances and to bring another image to the stage. This effort is almost useless, because the audience desires to see these choreographers in the form of the Orientalist stereotypes with which they are familiar. Labels such as “ethnic” or “world” dancers impose upon Iranian dancers repetition and limitations that inhibit the creativity and innovation. The dancer must satisfy the requirements of the market and institutions or has to face the threat of being cast aside. The term “ethnic dancers” marginalizes them in terms of what they do, what they are, and what they can be. Considering that the dancers are Iranian, everything they dance has to reflect Iranianness. If curators or festivals choose a motif from Iran, they want to see something Iranian. They select the Iranian dancers for the culture of 43

Ibid. pp. 14– 23.

3. Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland

their body, which carries that culture no matter whether the body is moving or not. Accordingly, dancers Iranianize themselves and become Others to be interesting for audience. Hence, if they want to survive and stay on the stage, they must commercialize themselves and serve as entertainers. As “Oriental” dancers, the bodies of Iranian dancers are mediated as sensual, erotic, and spiritual. There are politics related to Orientalism that limit the body, especially the woman dancing body in American exile. Stereotyping is regarded as a solution for making visible. The colonial tendency to create clichés originates from the fact that colonialists tend to verify their perceptions of the exotic and spiritual Orient, as well as those of their audiences. The representation of the exotic Orient and stereotypes related to Oriental women dancers in the US can be traced mostly in the travel books of authors such as Flaubert and Curtis in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this section by studying parts of these travel books, stereotypes referring to Oriental women dancers are addressed. Flaubert and Curtis’s descriptions of Kuchuk Hanem, a professional Qawazi dancer and courtesan in Egypt, who was visited by them in two different times and performed solo dances privately for them, includes significant highlights.44 In Flaubert’s vision, the dance of Kuchuk represents Oriental exoticism. By describing dance of the Oriental female dancer from the point of view of a Western tourist man, one can discern that the body of female dancers in combination with jewelry, costumes, and makeup has created a touristic attraction. The body of the Kuchuk appears to Flaubert as an exhibition and a historical monument in Egypt: When she bends, her flesh ripples into bronze ridges. Her eyes are dark and enormous. Her eyebrows black, her nostrils open and wide; heavy shoulders, full, apple-shaped breasts. […]. She wore a large tarboosh, ornamented on the top with a convex gold disk, in the middle of which was a small green stone imitating emerald; the blue tassel of her tarboosh was spread our fanwise and fell down over her shoulders;.[...] For a bracelet she has two bands of gold, twisted together and interlaced, around one wrist. Triple necklace of large hollow gold beads. Earrings: gold disks, slightly convex, circumfer-

44

Kuchuk Hanem is not a real name. In Turkish it means “little lady” but Flaubert translates it as “Dancing Woman.”

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ence decorated with gold granules. On her right arm is tattooed a line of blue writing.45 Kuchuk, performing free movement in the dance of the bee, seems to Flaubert erotic and offering a sexual invitation. This kind of body differs from the disciplined female bodies in the Western ballet that he may know. He perceives the dance of Kuchuk as expressionless: Going up on the dais, she removed her veil […]. Then she began to dance […] With her eyes half-closed, she twisted her body backwards and forwards, making her belly rise and fall and her breasts quiver while her face remained expressionless and her feet never stopped moving […] 46 Flaubert’s observation of expressionlessness could be interpreted to difference in the perception of dance in two different cultures: “Occidental dances were eccentric and emotionally expressive whereas Oriental dances were concentric and compressive.”47 For instance, ballet as a Western dance is an emotional and expressive narrative through movement, which is not a same form as abstract and centric Eastern dances. Flaubert further describes dance of Kuchuk as “savage.” The dance of Azizeh, the other female dancer whom Flaubert met, is also “savage, and makes one think involuntarily of the contortions of the negroes of central Africa.”48 Collocating these adjectives “expressionlessness,” “erotic,” and “savage,” one can recognize how such labels have been transformed into the characteristics of “Oriental” dance in today’s interpretation. Flaubert’s travel book about Egypt is also significant, as it is among the few written documents that refer to the exile of female dancers as punishment, along with the related agony and suffering. This account presents historical proof of the old tradition of sending female dancers into exile due to their profession. The moving body of the Oriental dancer has been always disputable and controversial: As Flaubert wrote to Louis Bouilhet, from Cairo, “We have

45

46 47 48

Gustave Flaubert: Flaubert in Egypt:a sensibility on tour; a narrative drawn from Gustave Flaubert’s travel notes & letters. Translated from the French. Edited by Francis Steegmuller, New York, Penguin Books, 1996, p. 122. pp. 114–115. Gustave Flaubert: Herodias, in Three tales. Translated by Robert Baldick, New York, Penguin, 1961, pp. 120–121. Quoted in Susan Leigh Foster: Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance, Routledge, New York, 2011, p. 58. Ibid. pp. 115–121.

3. Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland

not yet seen any dancing girls; they are all in exile in Upper Egypt.”49 He adds, “They were sent, by way of banishment, to Esneh, five hundred miles up the river, where they are allowed a small stipend by the government to keep them from starvation. This reformation in the capital produced frightful results, which I cannot allude to here.”50 By providing appealing images and detailed narratives of his experiences with dancers in Egypt, Flaubert stereotypes not only the Egyptian dancers but also all the women dancers in Orient: The Oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one man and another. Smoking, going to the baths, painting her eyelids and drinking coffee—such in the circle of occupations within which her existence is confined.51 In mentioning Kuchuk, I have not to tend to emphasize Said’s approach that Kuchuk as a representation of East is totally objectified and performs for the West. Rather by studying the thoughts and narrations of Flaubert and Curtis as Western male tourists, I want to clarify how the generalization of the Orient has resulted in the creation of stereotypes about “Oriental” women dancers; without considering that the Orient is not culturally a homogeneous region but rather encompasses various cultures and sub-cultures. As Brandstetter elucidates, “In the strangeness of the Orient, an awareness of the culture’s otherness combines with an image of the feminine as ‘opposite sex,’ and thereby culminates in the spectacle of exotic and erotic dance.”52 Further analysis of the extent to which Iranian female dancers are recognized by such stereotypes in contemporary times and their choreographic solutions to exceeding these

49 50 51

52

Mohammad Ali in 1834 prohibited female dancing and prostitution in Cairo and ordered the deportation of all known dancers and prostitutes to three cities. Eliot Warburton: The Crescent and the Cross or Romance and realities of eastern travel, London, h. Coldburn, 2 vls., 1844, p. 221. Gustave Flaubert: Flaubert in Egypt: a sensibility on tour; a narrative drawn from Gustave Flaubert’stravel notes & letters. Translated from the French. Edited by Francis Steegmuller, New York, Penguin Books, 1996, p. 220. Gabriele Brandstetter: Re-naissance of the orient in Gustav Flaubert’s “Hérodias”: Interwoven movement patterns in Salome’s dance. In Movements of Interweaving Dance and Corporeality in Times of Travel and Migration. Edited by Gabriele Brandstetter, Gerko Egert, and Holger Hartung, Routledge, London and New York, First Published 2019, p. 280. (Retrieved June 15, 2019 from https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/#/books/ 9781351128445)

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stereotypes are discussed in Chapter 5 Transformation and Reconnection to Home. That chapter also considers how Iranian dance distinguishes and establishes itself as an independent—and not an Oriental—dance form.

3.5

Rediscovering Iranian Dance in American Institutions

Dancers in exile have preserved their contact with their home country despite their physical absence. They fully utilize the cultural products of Iran, including music, textiles, poetry, and literature, and the socio-political development of the country remains reflected in their works. Californian dancers have been primarily responsible for preserving, transferring, and transforming Iranian dance into its contemporary form, especially since the 1979 Revolution. The large population of Iranians in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area has made California the location of the most populous Iranian diaspora and has resulted in a specific life style for these exiles in this geographical area; this lifestyle resembles neither the Iranian and nor the American. For the exiled, who are away from their homelands, California is a site of the creation of their dreamed-of and desirable Iran, for which they long. Such a created atmosphere is regarded as a second home for many: a place in which to present the ‘true’ face of Iranian culture and illustrate a fabulous and different picture of Iran. In this space, Iranian culture is emptied of meaning, and “Persian” culture is that which gives birth to identity. Those who spent most of their lives in this diaspora or were born and grew up there prefer to call themselves partly “Persian” and less “American.” The propaganda in the US media and the presentation of a one-sided picture of Iran as a dangerous “Middle Eastern” country in three time intervals posits an image of Iran that classifies it as dangerous and barbaric. Iranians in exile who have no place in their homeland are strongly influenced by the political tensions and mainstream propaganda against Iran, on the one hand, and tend to preserve their Iranian identity, on the other. Since there is no chance to compete with the US media to reverse the stereotypical picture it presents, these exiles opt for other ways to show that a real Iranian is not the current Iranian government. The first way in which they distinguish themselves is to call themselves and their heritage “Persian,” a more multi-representational term that symbolizes the glory of historical Iranian civilization. By avoiding the use of ‘Iranian,’ they distance themselves from contemporary Iran. The second method is to resist the propaganda and overcome the Iranian shame, highlighting ‘Irani-

3. Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland

anness’ through investing in cultural and artistic productions. Dance, as an element of cultural heritage, has been an influential medium for immigrants through these years. They expressed themselves through dance in Iranian national celebrations, parades, and festivals. Although it seems that the Iranian dance has been liberated from exile at home and has found its position, in reality, its exile continues in a more explicit way: In pre-Revolutionary Iran, the exile was less apparent, due to governmental support of dance; in the diaspora, however, the exilic nature of the dance is more exposed, due to the need for private investment, which enables dancers and choreographers to survive. The dancers’ unwilling migration to their new location and their geographical remoteness from their homeland has one inevitable consequence: absence. Dance in exile is no exception: An art born and developed within the geographical borders of a country has now extended involuntarily beyond this context to grow and be presented elsewhere, and thus is absent at home. For the very first time, the number of immigrant population of Iranians reached its peak after the 1979 Revolution and eight-year Iran–Iraq war. The process of detachment from the past and being thrown into a new world brought about complicated psychological and social challenges. The immigrants had to learn to live with new set of norms and to cope with the strangeness of their new world. Sociologists refer to “culture shock” in describing such situations. Immigrants have to rebuild their lives, as migration is far from simple geographical relocation and settlement in another pre-established society. In such an ambiguous atmosphere and unknown future, wherein the hope to return to homeland was still alive, the Iranians slowly began to be seen in society and attracted US choreographers: Although they were numerous, there was no dance to represent them. These immigrants needed a motivation and a medium to bring them out of depression and heal the pains of homesickness, as well as to help them to present their national and cultural identities in exile. Multicultural festivals, Middle Eastern music, and dance camps have been the platforms for most non-Iranians interested in the exotic and in Middle Eastern culture to study and learn Iranian dance. Iranian dance in festivals is performed mostly by groups doing belly dances also by non-Iranian women who are doing Iranian dance and picked up different styles from the Middle East, all performing together and pretending to be offering educational content. For most non-Iranians doing Iranian dance, the primary focus is belly dance. Iranian folklore dances with outstanding positions of respect among Iranians for being dynamic and participative, being performed in groups and

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therefore presenting unity, having the potential to present traditional costumes, and being linked to the Iranian music and poetry provide a medium through which immigrants can revitalize and present their identities. However, Americans, not Iranians, were the first to focus on this issue. The choreographies of institutions such the Afsaneh Art and Culture Society (Ballet Afsaneh) in northern California and the Avaz International Dance Theater in southern California, among the others, have offered testimony on this point. These two institutes have played an inevitable role in applying dance as a medium to present Iranian cultural identity. Nevertheless, they were not fully successful in expanding dance as an art form among the Iranian community in the diaspora, not in training a new generation of professional Iranian dancers and ultimately bringing Iranian dance out of its exilic space. Ballet Afsaneh, located in the San Francisco Bay Area, is a center for Iranian dance training and performance. During the 1980s, the Middle Eastern Dance Festival was held in the Bay Area. The main competition at that time, however, was among belly dancers and flamenco dancers. After the mass immigration of Iranians, they became the audience of a festival in which they had no voice as newcomers from a Middle Eastern country with a different culture. This new culture, which has a dance style other than belly dancing—in spite of being in Middle East—and the absence of other cultural institutes to represent Iranian dance sparked the establishment of the Ballet Afsaneh in 1986 and created an opportunity especially for Iranian women to have a platform on which to perform. Considering the name of the center and the analysis of the performed dances, it can be argued that the policy of this center follows the same school of thought, starting in the 1940s in Iran. In this invented form, ballet as a “modern” Western medium is put beside Afsaneh (myth) as something fairy-like, ancient, and inaccessible, to create a fabulous and imaginative combination that is modern and at the same time traditional. In this center, Iranian dance and music are presented alongside other dance forms from Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Armenia, and India. The Afsaneh dance style has no structured source of inspiration for movement. Dancers of this style are attractive and smiley women with ideal objectified bodies and exaggerated makeup, who move on the stage in Afsaneh style costume. They symbolize the princesses who would exit from the heart of Iranian archaic history and identify the charming seductive Oriental woman on the stage. The performance of dances with a fusion of various forms is another characteristic of Ballet Afsaneh in its presentation of Iranian dance. Since most choreographers of the center cannot travel to Iran or make direct contact within Iranian

3. Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland

society inside Iran, their perception from Iran is imaginary and one sided. To fill this information gap and conduct research, they travel to Iran’s neighboring countries, such as Armenia and Tajikistan. The outcome, however, is imperfect, and the movements and costumes of Persian Afsaneh Style exhibit a combination of aesthetics from neighboring countries. In other words, they pick up various dance styles from Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries and combine and perform them as “Classical Persian dance,” which can be regarded as the persistence of exoticism in dance in America. The popularity of Ballet Afsaneh, its long history of activity, and the wide spectrum of dance classes and stage performances have led Iranians in Californian exile to accept the definition of Iranian dance as being conceptualized by this institute. The dances of Ballet Afsaneh, to some extent, differ from those of twentieth-century dances within Iran, in which dance was a constructive form wherein certain stories, music, and motifs were expressed through ballet and folk dance. These dances are not of a narrative nature, and the dancer moves exactly to the rhythm, accompanied with music. They convey beauty and work as moving ornaments. Among the main characteristics of this dance is that it resembles the ‘poetic’ and ‘imaginative’ choreographies of Robert de Warren, which reflect the figures and poses of characters in Iranian paintings.

Figure 11: Roya (The Dream), choreography by Ballet Afsaneh, 201153

53

https://www.kqed.org/arts/57734/at_ethnic_dance_festival_a_gathering_of_traditions _from_east_and (Retrieved August 19, 2021)

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Dances are like pictures that become mostly contemporary through costume design. The quality and type of movements that become the characteristics of “Persian dance” in the course of years in exile can be outlined as follows: It is a network of spatial and gestural symbols, and each gesture and pose should signify an inner emotional state. It is courtly, graceful, fluent, abstract, and symmetrical, with long lines and 90-degree or 45-degree angles and curves, counter-lines, and circular motions. Emphasis falls on movements of the hands and arms, with many arm extensions at certain points. Torso movements are more in the upper body, with no hip movement or snapping. Side bands are symmetrical and similar to Azeri, Armenian, and ballet dance. The dancers are almost women who are mostly dancing together. This dance style and the costume designed in Ballet Afsaneh have been regarded as references to other dancers and trainees in recent decades, making it a touchstone for Iranian choreography. The Iranian audience enjoys watching and feels connected to the dances. Such institutions represent them in a positive way and in their point of view in an authentic way. The performances are often a source of pride in their community. Iranians often deplore the ways, in which their dances have become in the West an essentialized and Orientalized symbol of their cultures and societies. In this way, their unknown dances are introduced to new and wider Western audiences. The Iranian audience does believe that with the emergence of Islam, the glory and grandeur of Iran have been lost, and they consider such glory in terms of nostalgia and romanticization. In addition, the banning of dance after the 1979 Revolution engenders a sense of loss and mourning, as they believe that part of their cultural heritage within Iran was thus lost; they therefore dedicate themselves to preserving and performing Iranian dance in any form and style, even in ethnic forms. As Said put forth, “there is no doubt that imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away.”54 Considering that, Iranian immigrants who are dreaming of home, since they are far away from Iran, seek to repeat the historically unattainable past by supporting this institute. They are convinced that Ballet Afsaneh has brought joy and beauty to the Iranian community. It channels the realization of Iran’s charm through an American institute on the stage, through a dance, which is for them also modern and traditional. 54

Edward Said: Orientalism, Vintage Books Edition, October 1979, USA, p. 55.

3. Moving toward External Exile: Iranian Dance and Dancers Cast out of their Homeland

Competition with such institutions poses challenges for individual Iranian dancers and choreographers, due to budgeting limitations and administrative barriers. The Iranian dance performed by both groups creates for the audience a symbolic socio-cultural memory with regard to representations of nationalism and the formation of “the imagined nations” as well as the construction of national memory, however, which could be accompanied by auto-exoticism and auto-Orientalism. By studying the evolution of Iranian dance from the beginning of bringing dance on stage until now—in US exile—the representative and metaphoric nature of dance is evident. Albright calls such dances “New Epic dance.”55 Buckland defines the function of such choreographies as “a piece of theater with no ethnographic context. Often this is presented nonetheless as an authentic representation of another culture or a since vanished piece of history.”56 “Persian dance” has always been regarded as a medium by which to show the beauty, elegance, and glory of archaic history, pride, and nationalism and as a medium to display cultural identity, while less attention has been paid to its artistic dimension from either audience or performer. With the motif of exile, the forced relocation of dance from zones of self-determination, power, and security are noted. Relocation, as identified by displacement and the subsequent historical persecution and harassment, faces an ambivalent exilic situation through the geographic relocation of Iranian dance. It faces a metamorphosis within Iran, being relocated from its original place and ignoring its original dancers, and it further faces misperceptions and misinterpretations that push it toward implicit exile; in the US, it further struggles with explicit exile due to forced geographical relocation. Its anonymity in the new place and the need to widen the audience lead to adaptation and to targeting broader audiences as an act of survival. What is common in to both forms of exile is the role of Others and its motivation in fulfilling the audience’s demand to convey a message. Accordingly, dance is emptied of its artistic dimension and becomes solely a tool for power institutions. These institutions decide upon the type of performance, play the main role in this transformation. In the process of transformation, Iranian

55 56

Albright, Ann Cooper, Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, 1997, p. 150. Theresa Jill Buckland (ed.): Dance, History and Ethnography: Frameworks, Sources, and Identities of Past and Present in Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture, Identities, The University of Wisconsin press, 2006, p. 15.

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dancers who are mostly women are ignored and have limited space for active engagement and influence, although their bodies are the objects of conveying the messages. Therefore, they have to deal with complications and barriers to prove themselves, because these women have mostly been exposed to general discrimination in the context of colonial discourse, and as women dancers, they have faced specifically gendered discrimination and assumptions.

Chapter 4. Change of Perspective: Becoming Contemporary through Tradition and Experiment

This chapter presents a new and different look at what has existed in the past, in relation to Iranian dance and women dancers. The first part of this chapter studies the literature published in America on the field of Iranian dance. The interpretation of, and the look toward, Iranian dance as “ethnic” and “traditional” in America can be read through these written sources. Tradition, in spite of its relatively negative connotations, can be pragmatic, if considered from another aspect. This kind of consideration can be observed in the work of American dance researchers such as Novac and Franko regarding the traditions of modern, postmodern, and experimental dances. How this look can be inspiring for Iranian women dancers, is discussed in this chapter. The last part of this chapter addresses the liminality theory and the space and opportunity that this liminality has created for the Iranian women dancers with hybrid identity in exile in America.

4.1

Iranian Dancing in American Writing

Research on the presented definitions of Iranian dance in American and Iranian-American encyclopedias and references demonstrates how Iranian dance is regarded as traditional and ethnic, whereas its transformation and contemporaneity have mostly been ignored. Notably, due to the absence of academic discourse regarding dance within Iran; almost no literature has been published within the country. In this section, the focus is on the literature published in the US by Anthony Shay, a scholar of Iranian dance, and Robyn Friend, an American dancer, choreographer and writer of Middle

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Eastern dance. The focus here is mostly on their writings in the ‘Iranian dance’ entry for the International Encyclopedia of Dance and Iranica (Encyclopedia of Iranian Studies). It is discussed that in most literature, Iranian dance is considered as historical, static, and unprofessional phenomenon, rarely with an ability to be modernized and updated. The definition of Iranian dance in International Encyclopedia of Dance is restricted to two genres: regional folk dance and solo improvised dance. It refers more to amateur performers in the framework of social dance and not necessarily to professional dance. In most of this literature, professionalism is limited to the Motrebs of twentieth century who no longer exist and for whom there is no contemporary equivalent. In the Iranian dance section of Iranica Encyclopedia, published in the US by Iranian and US researchers, Friend and Shahbazi, an archeologist, divide Iranian dance into three periods: pre-Islamic Iran, Persian dance in the Islamic period, and modern Persian dance. In this section, despite considering a separate part for dance in Islamic era, no information is provided and it is also unknown why in the modern period, instead of Iranian dance, “Persian” dance is used. Applying the descriptor “Persian” ignores other ethnic groups residing within the geographical borders of Iran; moreover, it refers to a place that does not exist.1 According Iranica, “Modern Persian Dance” considers as “traditional dance of the 20th century, before the Revolution of 1357 Š./1978”; however, the entry does not clarified what the modernity of such dances means and under what criteria traditional dances have been classified as modern. Under this rubric, Friend refers to the time of the second Pahlavi as an era in which the performers regained their dignity, without offering references for this claim or giving examples, and without even elaborating which type of dancers and performers regained the mentioned dignity. However, it can be assumed that she refers to those performers who belong to the dominant culture, as prescribed by the nation’s institutions of power, rather than the Motrebs who transformed into café and cabaret dancers. In Iranica Encyclopedia, Friend divides professionalism into two categories: traditional and non-traditional. Similar to the definition in the International Encyclopedia of Dance, Friend’s definition considers twentieth-century Motrebs to be professionals and believes that their dance comprises “professional traditional performance.” The only difference 1

In 1935, Reza Shah changed the official name of the country to Iran and asked all foreign countries to change from Persia to Iran (Land of Aryan). On the other hand, Persians or Pars people are an ethnic group who consist only 60% of the Iran population.

4. Change of Perspective: Becoming Contemporary through Tradition and Experiment

between Friend’s definition and that of the International Encyclopedia of Dance is that she considers it plausible that the dancers’ professionalism continued in a non-traditional way, in her view beginning with Mohammad Reza Shah’s reign in 1941 and ending with the 1979 Revolution.2 In these discussions, the absence of contemporary Iranian dance is evident. The lack of distinction between stage dances and dance as a social phenomenon or folk dances and traditional dances has further complicated this already complicated phenomenon. Studies of this kind are mainly based on resources such as observations of their authors in past Iran and mostly in rural areas, having less to do with today’s Iran and Iranian immigrant dancers in the present time. As a dancer and choreographer explains Friend her experience of learning Iranian classical dance in the essay The Exquisite Art of Persian Classical Dance. She started to learn “Persian Classical Dance” in 1974 in Los Angeles, and she names Leona Wood and Anthony Shay as trainers of Iranian dance. Leona Wood has rarely been mentioned in the literature, although focusing on her techniques as an American woman who taught Iranian dance in the far past seems to be inevitable. Wood, as Friend says, was acquainted with Iranian dance through belly dances in night clubs. Friend writes, Her [Wood’s] first encounter [with Iranian Dance] was in a nightclub; the dancer was advertised as a “belly dancer,” and though she wore the standard belly dance costume and danced to Arabic music, her dancing was unlike any belly-dancing Miss Wood had ever seen. Though the dancer herself was coarse and low-class, her movements showed the subtleties of the Persian classical style. Miss Wood was also acquainted with an upper-class Iranian lady, who showed her the genteel dancing she had been taught as a little girl. It was Miss Wood’s combination of these two styles that formed my own first instruction in Persian classical dance.3 From Friend’s description of Leona Wood’s interest, it can be concluded that Iranian classical dance in the US was mostly made popular through belly dance and was created in combination with other dance styles, differing from what is understood as “classical dance” in Iran. In other words, the Orientalist image of Wood from Iranian dance as an “Eastern dance”, which is also

2 3

Robyn C. Friend: “Modern Persian Dance” as a sub-heading under the entry for “Dance” in Encyclopedia Iranica. Online edition, New York, 1996. Robyn C. Friend: the Exquisite Art of Persian Classical Dance. http://robynfriend.com/theexquisite-art-of-persian-classical-dance/, (Retrieved May 21, 2016).

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reflected in her paintings, laid the foundation stone of so-called Persian classical dance in the US and was followed by a future generation of American dancers such as Friend.4 Hence, Iranian classical dance in the US was defined and established by American choreographers. As such, Iranian dancers are also expected to adjust their choreographies accordingly. Anthony Shay has also done research on Iranian dance. In his book Choreophobia: Solo Improvised Dance in the Iranian World, he addresses to the complex situation of improvised individual dance in Iranian culture, based on his observations, performances, and training courses. He explains the paradoxical reaction of Iranian culture towards Iranian dance. He defines choreophobia as “an amorphous set or “system” of reactions and attitudes that largely ranges between ambivalent and negative and that characterizes the reactions of many, if not most, Iranians...”5 Shay discusses above all Iranian improvised dance done by individuals and amateur social dancers without considering elaborating on Iranian dance in a creative and artistic context, focused on special examples of performances. In this research, despite his interviews, he rarely reflects women’s voices and does not explain whether women dancers go beyond social dance frameworks nor how and to what extent. Shay is also cofounder of Aman Folk Ballet (1963–1977) and the Avaz International Dance Theatre (1997–2008) in Los Angeles, which staged dances from Eastern European countries as well as Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries. In Choreographic Identities, Shay discusses issues of representation and the right to construct visual representations. He gives an account of the way a community be represented to the outside world through dance, and the power to make decisions.6 Here, he expresses his motivation and interest in why and how he became involved in the dance of the Others in Los Angeles: “I was attracted to the colorful ethnic diversity that lay at my (dancing) feet in Los Angeles. As an Anglo American, like many of the individuals with whom I danced in folk dance groups, I felt that I did not have a colorful or interesting background.”7

4 5 6 7

A collection of her paintings is published in the book Leona Wood. Edited by Aisha Ali, Mardi Rollow and Susan Marshall, published by Routledge in 2016 in New York. Anthony Shay: Choreophobia: Solo Improvised Dance in the Iranian World, Mazda Publishers, Costa Mesa, California, 1999, p. 179. Anthony Shay: Choreographing Identities: Folk Dance, Ethnicity and Festival in the United States and Canada, McFarland Publishers, North Carolina, 2006, p. 6. Ibid. p. 3.

4. Change of Perspective: Becoming Contemporary through Tradition and Experiment

In another example, explains Shay: In my home, we did not listen to exciting folk music or perform interesting and colorful folk dances like those that some of my friends did[…]. My family seemed to have no history and no ethnicity. The colorful traditions of the various groups I encountered through school friendships with their exotic music and fascinating dances beckoned to me. I embraced them wholeheartedly, and the doors of a new and colorful world opened to me.8 The description he offers about his motivation to learn the dances of the Other is in line with the approach of those mentioned twentieth-century dancers in America: appropriating the dance of the Others for one’s own use, in this case to construct history and identity. The first encounter of Shay with “Persian dance” happened on a Persian New Year event he attended in 1955 at the University of Southern California: There, a young opera student in a gold lame dress and with long flowing black hair stepped into the candlelight, and dancing […], dazzled the audience with her extraordinary dance skills. Her graceful hands and fingers carved crystalline, filigreed shapes into a geometric mystery in the shimmering candlelight.9 Shay compares the Iranian dancers with their modern counterparts in a critical way: “It would be difficult, if not possible, to encounter a dancer in Iranian context who, like Martha Graham”10 and continues by quoting Foster

8 9

10

Ibid. Anthony Shay: Choreographing Identities: Folk Dance, Ethnicity and Festival in the United States and Canada, McFarland Publishers, North Carolina, 2006, p. 140. (The name of the woman dancer is not mentioned in the text but in footnote.) Anthony Shay: Choreophobia: Solo Improvised dance in the Iranian World, Mazda Publishers, Costa Mesa, California, 1999, pp. 40–41.

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“While making a dance, she claims to be possessed: seized by the idea inside her, victim to cycles of destruction and creation entailed by her creative act, she suffers through the birth of her dance.”11 He adds further “Such notions and approaches seem alien to the type of creativity one encounters with the dancer in an Iranian or Iranian-American context.”12 It is questionable, why it is required that the Iranian dancers share the same emotional approach to dance as Graham’s. Moreover, the similarity of their process of creating a new dance style, modernist dancers, is not dealt with here. Even the criteria, according to which he defines such creativity among Iranian dancers as “alien,” remain unknown; as well as the necessity of forcing a cultural phenomenon to be placed in an American framework as a prerequisite of recognition and considering one approach to renewal. He claims elsewhere, “For the outstanding Iranian dancer, like the Iranian musician, is also encouraged in Iranian and Iranian-American society to present fresh and unique performances and creatively improvise within shifting stylistic parameters.” However, he does not go through the work of the “outstanding dancers.”13 In a very few examples, he calls a trainee of the Avaz International Dance Theatre “highly proficient,” but she is a “performer of the domestic style.” Shay refers only to performances of this trainee in Avaz dance classes, and this trainee’s purpose has been above all to change her dance style in her family’s tradition and not as a professional dancer. In Shay’s writings, women dancers remain mostly anonymous. They are not mentioned by name, except in rare cases, and even then only in footnotes. For instance, in Choreographic Identities, without referring to Banafsheh Sayad (one of the interviewees in this research) in the main text and without giving a detailed description of her dance, Shay writes, “she fixed her audience with a smoldering gaze”14 which can be interpreted that her dance movements did not play a significant role

11

12 13 14

Shay quotes Foster’s explanation of the dance of Graham, Susan Foster: Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American dance, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 1986, p. 28. Anthony Shay: Choreophobia: Solo Improvised dance in the Iranian World, Mazda Publishers, Costa Mesa, California, 1999, p. 41. Ibid. p. 39. Anthony Shay: Choreographing Identities: Folk Dance, Ethnicity and Festival in the United States and Canada, McFarland Publishers, North Carolina, 2006, p. 140.

4. Change of Perspective: Becoming Contemporary through Tradition and Experiment

in attracting the audience, but rather her gaze. In another place, Shay refers to dancer Nesta Ramazani from the Pahlavi era in Tehran as an “amateur dancer.”15 It seems that for Shay, only men contributed to the transformation and modernization of Iranian dance and injected the creativity and innovation necessary to establish dance as an art. He states that Abdollah Nezami (Former Iranian male dancer) “introduced modern dance elements into his choreographies and movements.”16 Shay believes that Khosrow Jamali, the artistic director and US-Iranian custom designer of the Avaz International Dance Theatre and himself, brought the original choreographies of Iranian regional and classical dance to the stage. Such “Persian and Iranian” choreographies have had a “huge impact” on the US-Iranian community’s recognition of dance as an art, claims Shay of the impact of his choreographies in cooperation with Jamal.17 In his conclusion to Choreophobia, Shay confesses that his reputation as the manager of “respectable and professional” company enabled him to show Iran “properly” and “authentically” to the US-Iranian community and to change their attitudes toward Iranian dance. He affirms that Avaz and “other companies” (mentioned without names) created a space for Iranian dance to be regarded as an artistic activity among Iranians.18 Shay also maintains that “solo improvised dance has now become an icon of Iranian identity in North America.”19 It is not discussed here whether the productions of Avaz have also had an impact on non-Iranian audiences recognition of Iranian dance as a special genre, distinguished from being Oriental. Similarly, the role of being a native citizen, having access to financial resources, and to the media as crucial factors in the popularity and success of these dances is overlooked. In analyzing his popularity among the Iranian audience and media in the US, Shay does not refer to the fact that Iranian audience generally has given more passion and attention to Western artists as progressive in art. In fact, Iranian enthusiasm toward the Westerners working in the field of Iranian culture and arts and trying to show the positive face of Iran is far higher than that for Iranian

15 16 17 18 19

Ibid. p. 233. Ibid. p. 150. Ibid. p. 149. Ibid. pp. 177–179. Anthony Shay: Choreographing Identities: Folk Dance, Ethnicity and Festival in the United States and Canada, McFarland Publishers, North Carolina, 2006, p. 15.

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artists who do the same job. Shay concludes that one of the projects resulting from his research on Iranian dance is “the future development of both a technical vocabulary, […] and a teaching method to accompany it, and Avaz’s plan to form an academy.”20 However, although years have passed, such techniques have not yet been developed. This study does not intend to ignore the role that Avaz has played in bringing Iranian folk dance to the stage, creating a special genre among the Iranian diaspora. However, regarding the American nature of such institutions as a dominant culture, the Avaz International Dance Theatre (in South-California) and the Ballet Afsaneh (in North-California) have emerged and established a fixed image of Iranian dance for the Iranian community. The audience expects similar images in terms of the choreographies, number of dancers, expensive costumes, and stage equipment: Due to the lack of financial support and facilities, these pre-conditions are difficult to fulfill for independent, struggling dancers and choreographers, who are seeking to be different and making their dance new. Additionally, the interest in folk dances is reflected in texts as well as on the stage. Such dances are brought to the stage with very few changes as traditional Iranian dances, as it is believed that change and experimentation have no place in Iranian dance, so that its “authenticity” can be preserved. For instance, Robyn Friend regards classical dance as tradition and folk dance as “recreational dance of the villages and tribes,” 21 which consists fixed and unchangeable patterns. The above-mentioned arguments demonstrate, one of the main reasons that Iranian dance is still regarded as a traditional and ethnic is such analyses, despite having new and contemporary elements. From this point of view, traditionalism in dance is equal to being “amateur,” “old-fashioned,” “and unchangeable.” Most dancers also refer generally to these references and define themselves within such frameworks. Although there are some who try to break through pre-defined frameworks and go beyond such definitions, they face challenges in their artistic activities because of the restrictive performance conditions imposed by dominant culture. In order to gain a holistic understanding of experiments, explorations, and other voices in the realm of Iranian dance, one must first consider the

20 21

Choreophobia: Solo improvised dance in the Iranian World, Mazda Publishers, Costa Mesa, California, 1999, p. 179. (This company closed down in 2008.) Robyn Friend: The Exquisite Art of Persian Classical Dance, http://robynfriend.com/the -exquisite-art-of-persian-classical-dance/, (Retrieved May 21, 2016).

4. Change of Perspective: Becoming Contemporary through Tradition and Experiment

following questions. Answering these questions offers a more accurate perception of the current conditions and of the women dancers in exile: Is it a necessity to employ thematically and kinesthetically traditional dance forms to be able to define a dance style as Iranian? Do inspiration from the environment in exile and experiences of living and moving there have an impact on whether the dance is Iranian or non-Iranian? Is it imaginable that Iranian dance could differ or have an Iranian theme that is automatically understood as traditional and old? Does the Western nature of modern dance make it impossible to be applying on Iranian dance styles, and can Iranian dancers not be modern, simply as a result of their national identity? Is it ever possible to look to Iranian dance and dancers from a different perspective and illustrate a new horizon for Iranian dance, beyond what has been prescribed so far? To answer these questions, I first track the process of establishing modern, postmodern and experimental dance in the US as a model to demonstrate whether and how Iranian dance would be able to establish itself as contemporary. By referring to and applying the theories of dance scholars such as Franko, Foster, and Novack, I argue that tradition and experiment are the two main factors in the realization of that contemporary Iranian dance. In the next step, I follow the selected dances of the three Iranian women dancers in California to determine how experiment and tradition influence the work of those dancers and help them to conceive new genres of contemporary dance in the history of Iranian dance.

4.2

American Modern and Postmodern Dance as a Concept of the Contemporaneity of Iranian Dance

In his book Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, Mark Franko follows “a revisionary account of historical modern dance.” He does not regard modern dance as progress, but a return to individualism, in which the dancers and choreographers experience and design their own personal dance methods and create new genres. Franko considers Isadora Duncan a modernist, due to her “sacrificing the expression of her personality to the reinterpretation of past art.”22

22

Mark Franko: Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1995, p. 18.

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Finding the vocabularies and style of movement according to natural body, spirituality, and relationships between emotion and bodily gesture were among the first characteristics of modern dance. The emphasis on the “natural body” appeared first in the work of Ruth St. Denise, who followed the Delsarte System, which named after “François Delsarte.”23 In modern dance, Duncan poses the body “as medium for the divine expression of human spirit.” “Simple phrases of movements” were an integral part of Duncan’s dances. She danced “to classical music” in bare stages, which were “classically draped.” Her simple customs consisted of “only a Grecian-style toga,” as Foster describes the dance style of Duncan in Reading Dancing.24 Foster generally regards the emergence of solo modern dances among women as a resistance to defined relation to the male dancers in ballet, in which women dancers were relating spiritual and material in their dances. Music has also a defined relation to the designed movements of modern dance. It offers both a structure and an emotional development the choreographer could follow. Choreographers fitted movement to the rhythmic and dynamic properties of the music without actually imitating the music or attempting to make it visible. Musical syntax guided them in developing their own thematic concerns.25 Foster assumes these transformations in dance of modern dancers as their way to “respond to a new expressionist aesthetic.”26 In dance, there is demand for change according to the time in which the dance exists. For Martha Graham, modern American dance is directly linked to the time and place of its creation, in addition to being simple and movement-based: “The modern American dance is characterized […] by a simplicity of idea, an economy of means, a focus directly upon movement, and behind and above and around all an awareness, a direct relationship to the blood flow of the time and country 23

24 25 26

Susan Foster writes about the popularity of Delsarte in the US: Delsarte (1811–1871) established “a new system for analyzing movements on the belief that human physicality directly manifested human spirituality” and made the body able to express a person’s sentiments. This system was used in the growing physical culture movement in the US. Susan Leigh Foster: Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 1986, p. 156. Susan Leigh Foster: Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 1986, p. 145. Ibid. p. 163. Ibid. p. 147.

4. Change of Perspective: Becoming Contemporary through Tradition and Experiment

that nourishes it.”27 The choreographies of Martha Graham in 1930s through to the end of World War II are reflections of the socio-historical environment of US in those days, and they confirm her modernist approach based on direct connection between time and place with creation of dance: “The psychology of the land is to be found in its movement.”28 Further refers Foster to a notable point. She regards the production of a “wide variety of theatrical impressions” as the result of “experimentations” by modern choreographers such as Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denise, Maud Allan, and Loie Fuller, among others.29 For many dance scholars, modern dance is a genre started and developed in the twentieth century, and experimentation represented the resistance of modern dancers to the rigidity of ballet. The tradition of experiment followed among the postmodern dancers and choreographers in 1960s and 1970s. Although not all modern companies are experimental, modern dance can be said to have dedicated itself to experimentation. Some dance scholars label modern dance the fundament of experimental dance. Cynthia J. Novack, for instance, asserts that the wave of experimental dances of the sixties and seventies was shaped by imitating the modern dance of the twenties and thirties. In both periods, the dancers tried to present professional dance as a “serious American art.” Distinguishing themselves from social and entertaining dances and utilizing various techniques and genres (e.g., Delsarte training, theatrical genres, social dances, body therapies) is amongst the characteristics of modern dance. Practitioners of such dances are situated in marginal circumstances and struggle to preserve their independence in spite of financial challenges. Furthermore, focusing on “spiritual, artistic endeavor”, passion and “dedication to the ideals of dance” shaped the tradition of modern dance.30 Modern dance, as a new dance style and artistic genre, was unpopular among the audience. Franko considers also the diversity of modern dance styles as a symbol of change in this genre over the course of the time. Such changes can occur during the professional life of a single choreographer. He points to the verity of the names, which represent more the individual styles of dancers than a special and established genre. Accordingly, they certify the

27 28 29 30

Merle Armitage: Martha Graham: the early years, Da capo Press Inc, 1978, pp. 100–101. Ibid. p. 107. Susan Leigh Foster: Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 1986, p. 148. Cynthia J. Novack: Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture, The University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, 1990, p. 24.

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diversity of their approaches to a certain genre, such as natural dance for Isadora Duncan, in which she was “expressing herself”; dramaturgical dance for Martha Graham, in which she was “formalizing bodily movement into new configurations”; and objective dance for Merce Cunningham, in which he “organizing bodily movement into new configurations without expressive intent.”31 Among the other characteristics of modern dance era in the US is the absence of written sources about it, since only dancers are highly aware of their performances. The critic John Martin has noted that “there is no literature, to speak of, in English on the subject [of modern dance] […] and the only source of enlightenment has been the actual performances of the dancers themselves.”32 Many of the dancers and choreographers during this period and during the establishment of Modern dance were women who experimented their individual dances. Franko regards the experimentations of Duncan’s personal discovery of movement to be a foundational narrative of modern dance.33 Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis were successful in presenting new concepts of dance by relying on various methods such as combining the dance elements of the past with the spiritual and natural schools of the day, as well as with foreign cultures. The experimental dance of the early choreographies of Graham followed a movement started in thirties by Ruth St. Denis and Duncan, which rejected the classics and established dance finally as modern art. Franko also outlines the differences of attitudes among these dancers. While Duncan created “female subjectivity” by selecting dance as “woman’s place,” Graham sought a “subjective form” in dance.34 However, the common objective of modernists was, in the first place, to move beyond classical ballet. In addition, the attitude of dance scholars toward the term “tradition” is noteworthy. Dance scholars such as Mark Franko and Cynthia Novack have a different understanding than that of Eastern or US fellows writing about Oriental dance. They observe American dancers’ push for change and disregard

31 32

33 34

Mark Franko: Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1995, p. ix. John Martin: The Modern Dance, New York, 1933. Quoted in Franko, Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1995, p. 38. Mark Franko: Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1995, p. 1. Ibid. pp. 2–40.

4. Change of Perspective: Becoming Contemporary through Tradition and Experiment

for tradition. These dance scholars do not regard tradition as an old, historical, and static phenomenon. They also do not address tradition as something indigenous and authentic, but instead consider the tradition of modern and postmodern dance in twentieth-century US to bridge experiment and tradition, institution and revolution, consolidation and innovation. This tradition led to the establishment of modern dance as a genre over a period of years through the efforts of its practitioners, and it was rejected later by the next generation of dancers. Franko declares that the individual techniques of each choreographer, which he calls “traditions,” can expand in the US after completing their experimental phases. Novack also supports this idea that a tradition of change does exist in modern dance, since various generations of choreographers have rejected previous styles and presented their own dances. Novack defines the tradition of modern dance as that of a “continuous revolution.” She is of the opinion that there is a rapid change in different styles; in American modern dance, which “is innovative by definition, movement styles change rather quickly.”35 Franko also tracks the experimentation process of modern and postmodern dance through the same lens, where in each era a group of dancers were inspired by the approach of their ancestors and at the same time criticized and finally rejected that approach. In contemporary Iranian dance, tradition and experiment confront each other and create new genres of dance, resulting from the tendency to change, create, and innovate and to defy the imitation of fixed and ratified patterns of the past. The connection of experimental dancers with tradition is restricted to a link to their past in order to legitimize their works and not merely extend and imitate the past. These dancers present a new image of dance by creating their own styles, based on change; however, some apply keywords extracted from established and known genres such as Persian Modern Dance or Contemporary Persian Ballet for the sake of recognition. Notably, for some of these dancers, ballet is still representing as modern; therefore, in calling their style Modern Ballet, Contemporary Ballet, or Persian Ballet, conclude that their work possesses a “technique.” Ballet is not understood here in its Western classical context, but more represents newness and novelty and is regarded rather as a solution to escape the labels of traditional and ethnic dance. By focusing on such vocabulary, Iranian-American women dancers in the US step outside the definitions of dance determined by their history and cul35

Cynthia J. Novack: Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture, The University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, 1990, p. 138.

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ture and experiment with new dances. The Iranian-American women dancers avoid using the term of ‘experimental’ because of the fact that they fear losing their restricted audience, as ‘experiment’ may be interpreted as an elite term. However, they employ modern music, simple one-color costumes, and individual techniques and vocabulary to change their dances, and in this way, they make their dances new. The dancers in this study do not follow modern dancers in the determinately and aim-oriented “reduction of art to the essence of its own formal means,”36 but rather they are interested in absorbing the audience and connecting with it. Some could even fulfill the connection by bridging movement and expression, wherein they manage to illustrate their feelings by means of movement. Diverse types of expression, including the female subjectivity elements of Duncan and moving from the internal to external body, can also be traced to Iranian experimental dancers such as Banafsheh Sayyad. In her Mystical Dance, Sayyad asserts that she draws inspiration from inside her body and believes in natural movement as well as internal spirit. Iranian-American women dancers—influenced by American idealism—present themselves as independent artists, unbound to the existing norms of the institutes. Their experimental dance enables them to explore their individual approach, train trainees, and link themselves with the audience. They not only look for new terminology to name their dance styles, but they are also keen to establish their personal style. Although they are regarded as Iranians, they do not look solely to Iran as a source of inspiration. Residing in the US presents them a special chance to utilize American culture for inspiration and connection to the audience. Living in the era of globalization and multiculturalism in cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, with multitudes of culture, music, and movement styles, provided them with the opportunity to easily access diverse types of movement and technique and appropriate them in their choreographies. The expansion of technology in a globalized world with free access to Internet has enabled Iranians within Iran to benefit from their online courses, which has had deep impacts on dance practice inside Iran. They also use the opportunity for free movement to other parts of the world, especially Europe, absorb trainees, hold workshops, and teach their techniques. Their method of performing on stage differs from performance to performance, and it is mainly the expression of music 36

Mark Franko: Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1995, p. x.

4. Change of Perspective: Becoming Contemporary through Tradition and Experiment

through movement. Their methods are not fixed, have mostly no coherency, and obey no limitations. Their main objective is primarily to avoid being regarded as Oriental and ethnic dancers. Contrary to the American institutes bringing Iranian dance to the stage, for these dancers being authentic is less important. The audience and scholars mostly ignore them, since they have not moved within the tradition and believed in experience. By inventing new styles and moving beyond tradition, they also challenge the American institutes involved in the dance performances of Iranian community, as well as the scholars of Oriental dance. As mentioned earlier, they do not have a direct link to the elements of modern and postmodern dance in their experimental approach, but rather share a refusal of the past and create something new through experimentation. This creation of a new style and its presentation are highly influenced by the capitalist environment and consumption-oriented affinity for new products in the US. Iranian-American dancers and choreographers may be able to go beyond experimentation and establish a genre in the history of Iranian dance.

4.3

Dancing in Liminality: The Experimentation of Women Dancers in Exile Diasporic identities are those that constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference. (Stuart Hall)

This part of the research deals with contemporary Iranian dance as result of the dancers’ experimental practices in US exile after the great wave of immigration starting in 1979. It is argued that, in spite of its challenges, being in the US provided the dancers with a “liminal” condition. Liminality provided them a space in which they could benefit from freedom in “the land of opportunity.” By following American modern dancers’ experimental approaches and through persistence, which resulted in the generation of a new image of dance, the Iranian-American women dancers struggle to present a new understanding of Iranian dance: a dance that differs from the dominant and mainstream image of Americans of “ethnic” and “belly” dance and also from understandings of the Iranian community in which dance is considered only a medium to represent cultural identity.

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Drawing on the concept of “Liminality” introduced by Arnold van Genneps and Victor Turner in the modern migration and exilic culture, Naficy investigates the condition of in-betweenness of Iranian television and filmmaking in the diaspora.37 For him, liminality relates to ambivalence, ambiguity, and resistance, and it subverts the cultural codes of both the homeland and the new home. As Turner asserts, the liminal person “passes through a symbolic domain that has few or none of the attributes of his past or coming state.”38 Naficy further argues that the threshold condition of the exiled artists liberates them from old and new restrictions. The “deterritorialized” situation becomes a “passionate source of creativity and dynamism,” and their produc-

37

38

Naficy utilizes Homi Bhabha’s concept of the in-between. Bhabha applies this term in the context of the construction a post-colonial identity, cultural difference, and performance. According to Bhabha, different types of cultures existing in a single space face each other, negotiate each other, and interweave productively with each other. Accordingly, Bhabha introduces the hybrid theory of “third space” as a threshold between various cultures and identities. Bhabha states, “What is theoretically innovative and politically crucial is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences.” (Homi K. Bhabha: The Location of Culture, Routledge, London and New York, 2004, p. 199) Bhabha believes that by getting away from the traditional definitions of originality and roots, a third culture can emerge from past and present, with an independent identity. He argues that identities are constantly changing and that they cannot remain unaltered. Therefore, observing and analyzing identity is a continuous activity, and emerging changes are completely reasonable. Bhabha asserts that those who live at the border of two cultures can create a new culture if they have good relations to both cultures; otherwise, they have no choice but to drown in the new culture or remain biased in their previous culture. He maintains that success lies in accepting the new culture, using and adapting it to go forward and discover new horizons. He asserts that the migrant shall join the host society and learn the language and culture perfectly. This process might be imitative at first, but in time it can reshape itself and become creative. Migrants can rewrite and review past knowledge and culture and give it a new meaning. Bhabha calls this process “Restaging the Past.” According to him, this third space provides the migrants with the chance to get know themselves from a different point of view and, by changing themselves, to take part in the surrounding transforming world. Victor Turner: Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 1974. Quoted in Hamid Naficy: The Making of Exile Culture: Iranian Television in Los Angeles, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993, p. 8.

4. Change of Perspective: Becoming Contemporary through Tradition and Experiment

tions transform into “iconographic hybridities, doublings, and splittings.”39 From this point of view, the status of exiled artists as “liminal hybrids” and “syncretic multiples” provides them the chance that “transcends their original or current social and cultural locations.”40 Naficy’s observation in filmmaking is most relevant and applicable to dance. Of course, the women dancers’ displacement and exile in the US allowed them a more productive space to move and to unchain themselves from the restrictions of their home country; however, it also created new chains, bound to the policies of the new environment. Hence, the exiled have to address the challenges of various places and not just one place. Naficy elucidates in this respect: “All cultures are located in place and time. Exile culture is located at the intersection and in the interstices of other cultures. Exile discourse must therefore not only deal with the problem of location but also the continuing problematic of multiple locations.”41 The physical change in the performance space makes it inevitable to review and redefine the Iranian dance through a definition that differs from those presented in previous analyses. Such redefinition is necessary to distinguish between present and past times in order to be examine Iranian dance and dancers from different angles. Therefore, a critical approach based on Franko’s revisionary attitude to the history of modern dance becomes inevitable. He states that critical distance from American modern dance is a “betrayal” to the history of arts and criticizes the systematic elimination of discourses such as gender difference.42 Dancers in exile must constantly move between different dichotomies in order to consolidate themselves and their dance: tradition versus modernity, old versus new home, Self versus Other, inclusion versus exclusion, and East versus West. Traversing this situation requires self-confidence, exchange, networking and documentation of the works of exiled dancers. Ignoring them and overlooking their movements has enabled their marginalization. Additionally, the works of Iranian dancers are not seen and criticized properly by 39

40 41 42

Hamid Naficy: “Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panics: Independent Transnational Film Genre,” in Global/ local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (eds.), Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1996, pp. 125– 128. Hamid Naficy: The Making of Exile Culture: Iranian Television in Los Angeles, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993, p. 2. Ibid. Mark Franko: Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1995, p. ix.

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scholars, leading to the inability of the dancers to figure out their strengths and flaws and consequently to remove or improve them. Western scholars of Oriental dances generally disregard the voices of these women dancers and instead focus on reflecting those views and voices that verify their theories. Having these points in mind, and focusing on the renewal and individual transformation of Iranian-American women dancers and choreographers, who have been extensively ignored on stage as well as the academic literatures, Chapter 5 Transformation and Reconnection to Home presents a new look at the work of Iranian-American women dancers. The aim is to present a new analytical approach by referring to the interviews of selected dancers and by observing and discussing parts of their works. To realize this goal, Iranian dance is not restricted in this analysis to a fixed traditional framework. Accordingly, elements such as costume, stage, music, and the structure of performances are considered to trace the experimental approach and the transformation process of Iranian dance. In Editor’s Note Doing Indigenous Dance Today by Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Rulan Tangan, an indigenous dancer, states her motivation about the creation and need for indigenous contemporary dances: “Contemporary embodiment can protect the traditional by allowing that to stay private, while filling in missing links that have occurred through various treacheries of colonization.”43 Although Tangan dances by people, for people, and with people, she believes that her works are in the realm of contemporary dance: “Because, as our lives and experiences grow and adapt and regenerate, with resilience and innovative renewal in the most dire of circumstances, our stories and ways of telling them can grow and adapt and regenerate with fundamental values and philosophies staying largely intact.”44 If contemporaneity is inevitable, the question is raised as to how the Iranian women dancers in exile make the dance contemporary. In addition, it remains unclear whether they are “localizing a new phenomenon” or “renewing a localized phenomenon.” No matter what the answer is, to accomplish each of them, there is a need for transformation and resistance against predefined norms. Utilizing the traditional and non-traditional Iranian symbols, characters, and narrations, these dancers start to experience and create their own new individual styles of dance, which

43

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Jacqueline Shea Murphy (ed): Editor’s Note: Doing Indigenous Dance Today in Dance Research Journal Volume 48, Number 1. Special Issue, Cambridge University Press, April 2016, p. 4. Ibid.

4. Change of Perspective: Becoming Contemporary through Tradition and Experiment

differ in form those of their Western counterparts, but follow the same process: The kind of dance of transformation “through interweaving of different movement cultures and concepts of expressiveness.”45 Interviews with Aisan Hoss, Shahrzad Khorsandi, and Banafsheh Sayyad revealed valuable insights: Hoss grew up, trained, and worked in Iran and left the country in the last few years and resides in the US, whereas Khorsandi and Sayyad left the country with their family after the Revolution 1979. Therefore, the displacement and loss of home is an experience they share. Each has chosen a special approach to Iranian dance; however, there are some similarities in their training and approach toward Iranian dance: All interviewees have a background in Western modern dance and still use elements and vocabularies of Iranian dance in their choreographies. Avoiding being placed in predefined categories such as “Oriental” or “ethnic,” which is imposed by the politics of the place where they reside or by the organizers, is their common concern. The creativity to present innovative and special works and not merely “primitive” or “traditional” choreography and the recognition of their dance style as an independent genre are also their common goals in exile. In fact, exile provides a space for them to think individually to innovate and create an independent genre of dance. In order to evade being labeled, they experiment to create individual techniques and introduce a new chapter in the history of Iranian dance, which I call Contemporary Iranian Dance. Contemporary Iranian Dance can be interpreted as abstract, expressionist, improvised, or as any other style of dance. Contrary to so-called classical dance regarded as dominant and semi-official Iranian dance, and it follows special rules in terms of costume and theme; being a mixture of ballet and folk dances, these dances are choreographed and performed independently and away from the regulations that apply to Iranian classical dance. However, it does not mean that the set of contemporary dancers are unfamiliar with Iranian dance traditions and are not inspired by them. Nevertheless, from their points of view, tradition as a sovereign totality is regarded as a restrictive element. This attitude toward tradition leads them to go beyond tradition by means of experimentation. Keeping a distance from tradition provides them with a space in which they can overcome financial challenges,

45

Gabriele Brandstetter, Gerko Egert, and Holger Hartung (ed): Movements of Interweaving Dance and Corporeality in Times of Travel and Migration, Routledge, London and New York, First Published 2019, p. 8. (Retrieved June 15, 2019 from https://bookshelf.vi talsource.com/#/books/9781351128445)

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as they are able to produce with far lower costs and justify the “non-authenticity” of their dance in confrontation with Iranian audience. It is assumed that being in the “land of opportunity,” where everybody is free to do what they please has enabled them to experiment and explore new styles of dance.

Chapter 5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home

Chapter 5 is dedicated to three Iranian-American dancers: Aisan Hoss, Shahrzad Khorsandi, and Banafsheh Sayyad. It discusses the path these dancers have taken to reach their current state; what situations of exile have created for them, either in the individual domain or in dance; the features of their choreographies; how their relationships with Iran are reflected in their choreographies; and the definition of “traditional” and “modern” in their works, along with the role of experience in those works. Being situated in exile condition in different historical periods, the imposition of the dominant culture, displacement, and non-simultaneously are among reasons Iranian dance has experienced an experimental phase with a long delay. The fact that the literature has so far not been based on experimental but traditional dance also plays a crucial role in this study. Iranian-American women dancers in exile constantly seek strategies and methods to escape the Oriental and exotic frameworks usually imposed upon them and present a new image of Iranian dance, while preserving their loyalty to Iranianness in their techniques. Experiments, along with definitions of new names for their techniques, have shaped their approach in the past two decades. Inspired by the concept of exile by Naficy, and through the application of the experimental characteristics of modern and postmodern dance, this chapter studies the contemporary dance of Iranian and US-Iranian women dancers in the US. This part of study aims to discern whether the experimental approach of dancers over the last decade, influenced by the American dance milieu, has started a transformational process in Iranian dance. Experimentation in the dances of Hoss, who was born and grew up in post-Revolutionary Iran, had to face restrictive policies regarding dance, and finally immigrated to the US in 2013, differing from Khorsandi and Sayyad

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who both left Iran after the 1979 Revolution and grown up in the US. Experimentation in the dances of Khorsandi dance, who was trained in modern dance, also differ from that of the dances of Sayyad, who employs a combination of techniques in her performances. The tasks of this chapter are to study the various approaches of these dancers in applying Iranian dance aesthetics as well as to analyze the role of their nationality on the quality of their choreographies. Based on the analyses of selected videos, the connection of each to their homeland in the performances will be scrutinized. Finally, varying attitudes toward Iranian dance will be studied. The following sections draw upon the result of personal open-ended interviews in 2015 und 2016 in California, participation in dance training courses, and analysis of selected choreographies of these three dancers.

5.1

Moving in/for Profession: Hoss from Tehran to California (the case of Aisan Hoss)

Aisan Hoss, who works under a pseudonym for reasons of personal security, lives and works in the Bay Area in North California. She was born in 1983 in Tehran and immigrated to the US in 2013 to study at Mills College in the Master of Fine Arts in Choreography program and has been teaching dance and choreographing since finishing her master’s degree. Although even imagining the prohibition of dance for women is almost impossible in the West, such restrictions are quite familiar to Hoss, due to her daily life’s experience in post-Revolutionary Iran. She considers such restriction to be a motivator. Her acquaintance with dance started at the age of twelve when she watched her friend do what she perceived as an adorable dance at her Birthday party. That piece of dance also impressed her mother, such that she employed a private dance teacher to train Hoss at home. Hoss then learned ballet by participating in the underground classes of her teacher Haydeh Kishipoor. At the age of eighteen she joined the Shiftegan-e-Del ensemble, which performed Iranian Classical Dances and folklore dances for women in Talar-e-Vahdat Hall; at the same time, she started to teach dance. After a while, Hoss felt she needed to learn more advanced techniques, so she decided to leave Iran to continue studying dance at a professional level. Many barriers faced her in her pursuit of her dream, such as her father’s precondition that she had stay in Iran, enter the university, and get her bachelor’s degree; only then could she leave the country to follow dance. Hoss left Iran for Great Britain after graduating

5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home

with a degree in business management. In search of finding a dance-training course, she accidentally found Laban Dance School, and by a small amount of research, she realized that her level and techniques were not up to the standards of the school. Given that she considered herself a professional in Iran, with good mastery of dance techniques, she found starting from the beginning in Laban School to be very challenging. Hoss registered for a one-year program at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance School, to be able to audition for a B.A. in dance. In addition, she took extra courses to catch up and get proper training. At this point she was disappointed to recognize that almost all the training she had in Iran was not according to standard dance trainings, and she had to rebuild her body from the beginning. Hoss well recalls a day, close to her audition date, when one of her instructors told her that she should not participate in the audition because she was not prepared enough to perform. Nevertheless, she did participate in the audition performance of Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance School and gained successful entrance to the school. In addition to being trained in Laban techniques, she was trained in Graham, Cunningham, and release techniques. Hoss has had made tremendous progress during her studies at Laban School, as her instructors let her to freely choreograph her performances and bring them to the stage. She maintains that such a freedom played an influential role in increasing her self-confidence, although there were instructors who compared her with other trainees who had grown up in Western dance environment without considering her background, educational restrictions, and the social limitations of the country in which she had grown up. An instructor told her once that not only was she not making progress, but also her development was effected by a sort of regression. Such expressions created physical and mental uncertainties for her. Regardless of the setbacks she faced, she finished her degree, and came back to Iran. Due to two broadcasted programs about her works on Persian speaking televisions in the UK, she faced problems with security officials upon her return to Iran. Consequently she preferred to continue her activity under a pseudonym. Hoss opened her own dance school in Tehran in 2012. She rented a house in the north of Tehran and started holding courses. Soon after, she succeeded in gaining many students. Hoss herself tended to teach modern dance and Graham’s techniques; however, as ballet still represents ‘modern dance’ for many Iranians, students mostly desired to learn hits form of dance. Graham techniques also found some advocates among her students because of its expressive and emotional nature, which eases its connection and understanding

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for them. Based on this experience, she is convinced that for an Iranian audience, it is difficult to identify with contemporary and postmodern dance. Her courses included modern dance and ballet in private courses for dance instructors and for children. During the start of her career, and although it was initially agreed that she could hold such courses, the landlord canceled the rental of her house in fear of authorities and neighbors who might complain that a Raghas-Khoone was operating there.1 In the meantime, her application to continue her studies in the Master of Dance and Choreography program at Mills College in North California was accepted, for which she also received a grant. This acceptance allowed her to escape the problems and challenges of working professionally as a dance instructor in Iran. She immigrated to the US in 2013 and has not returned since finishing her studies; she does not intend to do so, due to the socio-political situation in Iran. Hoss believes that dance in Iran is a complicated and paradoxical phenomenon; the limitations imposed by the country’s government are make it unclear that one can work with dance, which makes the experience of a dancer unpleasant and unstable. She feels quite comfortable in her new place of residence and is convinced that she has made noticeable progress in terms of her technique and choreography. Although she had performed on the stages of the most prestigious performing halls in Iran, like, Talar-e-Vahdat, she considers that the conditions resulted from supervision and censorship was stressful and restrictive. For instance, in spite of the fact that the performances in Tehran were restricted to female audience, all movements were reviewed beforehand by governmental officials and subjected to modification if regarded as “not normal” or “not neutral”: for example, movements of the hips. In addition, dance attire required to cover the entire body restricted the possibilities of movement in the dance. Moreover, she regards teaching techniques and training sessions that were in some ways misleading and incorrect, sometimes departing markedly from the original techniques. The lessons she considered misleading were inaccurate mostly because of her lack of access to sources and exchanges of knowledge in Iran, which disallows dancers or choreographers to acquire knowledge and forces them to imitate. Hoss remembers courses she attended wherein the figures and movements were copied solely from Western videos. The dancers mostly did not know what the dances and associated techniques were, nor the philosophy behind the movements. During her career, Hoss experienced 1

Raghas-Khooneh means, literally, “house of dancers,” and it has a negative connotation.

5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home

twice reaching a zenith of success yet failing again, and thus moving for her profession: from her success of Tehran as a principal dancer of the Shiftegane-Del ensemble to the nadir of London and from her success in Tehran and having a dance school to immigration to the US. In this way, she experienced moving for her profession by going to Great Britain and the US and learning Western techniques and also by moving beyond Iranian dance. What is defined and recognized as Iranian dance is a cliché for Hoss. To her, the uniformity of such dance is too great, and it is geometrically quadrangular. Iranian Classical Dance has been defined and standardized in a way that does not provide the dancer with the possibility of being conceptual and innovative. It is merely beautiful and graceful; it raises no questions or challenges to the audience. Notably, Hoss has not performed or taught Iranian dance for seven years; however, she entered Ballet Afsaneh after arriving in the US and started to perform and teach Iranian dance. As a well-known institute among Iranians of North California where “New Persian Classical Dance” is presented, Ballet Afsaneh offered her a channel to gain recognition, find network and an audience, and start her own new projects. Performing Iranian dance at the beginning of her residence in the US had deep impacts on her future career: I have never been involved so much with Iranian dance. I have been long away from it since going to London. In Iran, for one year I offered dance courses, but none of them were Iranian dance. No one asked me ever to offer it. After coming to California, I started Iranian dance with Ballet Afsaneh and felt really good to dance it. Every day, after finishing courses at university, and after being for such a long time in an English speaking environment, I could go somewhere that I can hear Iranian music. However, this period of joy was short; soon I realized that I could no longer connect to this space. The dancers, their costumes, and makeups were so strange to me that I could not imagine going like this on stage if I would perform it in Iran. We Iranians are famous for heavy makeups, but that was obviously too much! It was also strange that the director of the institute insisted on coverage of our whole body in a way that no part of it should be seen. Putting on sleeveless and short clothes was forbidden on the stage. I could not even hug and kiss my husband after the performance, which was shocking for

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me.2 From the beginning, I also emphasized that I am not going to use accessories and heavy makeup. The initial shock resulted in a phase where I was able to find myself in the new environment and realize what I really want from dance and why I am not in favor of this approach. I could not stay indifferent to such an imaginary and exotic image and started to dislike it.3 Hoss explains the main reason for her disinterest in this system as follows: I do believe that as a woman I suffered a lot in Iran because of the attitude towards a woman as an object. Hence I avoid presenting myself as a lovely, beautiful and seductive woman. I want to be like a scorpion or become so muscular that I look like tough. If I followed their attitude [that of Ballet Afsaneh], I should change myself and objectify my body and that’s what I cannot stand.4 In Iranian dance presented by this institute, the existence of a beautiful woman with long eyebrows and nice makeup is more important than the choreography of movements, and therefore a dancer like Hoss wears a metaphorical masque to satisfy the audience and to be able to stay on stage; the masque is far away from her character. Hoss gives an explanation of the beginning of her career at this institute in a critical way: As an Iranian, I felt that maybe I do not know Iran and Iranian Dance very well once I entered Ballet Afsaneh and saw those [non-Iranian] dancers who are insisting that they are representing authentic Iranian dance. Each dancer claims ownership of choreographies and they fight for this ownership, regardless of the fact that the only Iranian in the company is me. Their prejudice on costumes, movements, and makeups is so excessive that it seems weird to me. If someone intends to perform a different choreography or set of movements even by giving credit to the original choreographer, it resulted in serious conflicts. They want to preserve ‘Persian dance’ as it was before the 1979 Revolution and to supposedly keep it alive. However, claiming to do so is impossible even for me, who left the country three years ago. As a dancer, I have to dance in the place of origin [in Iran], smell Tehran while dancing, and feel the current atmosphere while I am on the

2 3 4

Inside Iran, it is not culturally accepted for wives to hug and kiss their husbands in public. Ballet Afsaneh in North California follows the same policy. Personal Interview, November 2016 in Berkeley. (My translation) Personal Interview, November 2016 in Berkeley. (My translation)

5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home

stage. Only then is my dance purely Iranian under any conditions. I cannot claim now that my dance [or that of Ballet Afsaneh] is Iranian, since I am not performing inside Iran.5 Respecting the fact that Ballet Afsaneh has a long tradition of performing Iranian dance at the same time presenting a cliché of such dances, understanding the way that Hoss adapts herself to such policies, although she rejects clichés regarding Iranian woman dancers, is crucial. Hoss has spared no effort to convince the administration of her institute to change their policies and perform differently in recent years. She has succeeded in taking over part of the choreography and diversifying it in new projects. She notes that founder and artistic director of Ballet Afsaneh, has recently become less sensitive in terms of “authentic” Iranian dances, using exotic costumes and makeups, and considers Hoss’s presence as an Iranian newcomer to be positive.6 In teaching Iranian dance in the US, Hoss has experienced the return to the past and used movements that have Iranian names such as Pasoozani, which were employed by her teacher Haydeh Kishipoor in Iran. Since such names were imported from Iran, they were interesting for and attracted trainees. At the beginning of her work at Ballet Afsaneh, Hoss did not avoid teaching common clichés in Iranian dance in association with the “cuteness” of the dancer; however, she changed her teaching und choreographing style after two years, as being active in only the field of Iranian dance was insufficient for her. From the other side, she was not interested in putting on the (metaphorical) masque of a beautiful girl or in preserving seductive and female standards in Iranian dance. Therefore she canceled all training courses for children and teenagers as the first step, since most Iranian parents in the US send their children to such courses to learn Iranian dance within the established clichés, to be able to dance in parties to Iranian music, look graceful, and ultimately use dance as a medium to get acquainted with culture and identity. Hence the first challenge she faced after canceling the courses was to answer the question how to remove clichés in such courses and whether there could be another interpretation of Iranian dance. Afterwards, Hoss succeeded in absorbing a range of adult Iranian and non-Iranian trainees who had already tested different dance styles. Those who tend to experiment are open to change and innovation while at the same time interested in Iranian

5 6

Ibid. Personal Interview, November 2016 in Berkeley. (My translation)

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culture. Hoss tries to deconstruct the geometry of established movements in Iranian dance by applying new techniques: by enhancing the dimensions of movements, increasing dynamic movement, adding improvisation, and a spontaneous understanding of music. She believes that it is time that movements in Iranian dance are no longer rigidly dictated; challenge should be included in performances, and the aesthetics of the movements shall not play the main role. Therefore she teaches dance from inside of the body rather than from outside. Contrary to most instructors of Iranian dance, she does not start exercises with music, but instead the movements are practiced in silence, and only in the last twenty minutes of each course do the students work with music. In the conception of Hoss’ choreographies, the look is, however, completely Iranian: The homeland in its current state serves here as the source of inspiration. Hence, most of Hoss’s choreographies are religious, including motifs such as Adhan (the Islamic call to worship), Islamic hymns, and mourning carnivals in Ashura. They are the daily religious motifs that she grew up with. The sounds and movements of those rituals have remained in her body, mind, and soul. They have given shape to her identity and are an inseparable part of her, although as a non-religious person, she does not deeply believe in them. The important issue in her choreography is to transfer the emotions and voices of today’s Iran to the new environment, aiming to use her dance as a mirror of her homeland. One of her desires is to dance a whole piece to the sound of Adhan. However, has not done such a dance so far, in fear of negative or even angry reactions from Iranians in exile, who normally do not welcome religious themes. Hoss has even proposed a cooperation with an Iranian musician colleague to work on such a project, but the proposal was immediately rejected by him. Religious themes are sensitive and can be confronted with negative reactions from the audience; they can even cause problems in Iran, with security officials who do not tolerate the combination of dance and religion. Another approach to bridge the homeland is to apply musical productions produced within Iran. As for the Iranian audience, dance is defined by music, and unknown and strange music can make dance interesting and make the audience in the diaspora curious about it. Hoss wishes to present such choreographies to bring Iranian audiences to a level of awareness that they can sense inside her body, reading the details of her movements and avoiding focusing just only on her face and costume, as Iranian audience fixes their eyes mostly on the face rather than on the movements. Hoss means the audience has to realize that dance is something beyond a coherent and sym-

5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home

metrical collection of movements, whose absence makes dance obscure and vague. Notably, the value set among the trainees and audience in the US and Iran differ, as those in Iran are willing to experience Western techniques and styles, while those in the US emphasize a return to their roots and preserve the originality and authenticity of these roots. This difference in values puts the dancer and choreographer in a dilemma. Thus, Hoss regards herself a pure Iranian dancer with an Iranian style of dance, although the base of her technique is Western modern and contemporary. She emphasizes that her technique, teaching, and choreographing remain unfinished if the Iranian dance aesthetic is completely removed. She is also aware of the fact that the vocabulary of her body and movements differentiate her choreography from that of her Western fellows, putting it at the center of consideration. The techniques and possibility of expressing emotions have been provided for Hoss through the opportunity of being in the West, so that she can express and picture whatever she could not present in her own country. In fact, her Western setting provided her with the space, tools, and freedom to work. As a result Hoss’s choreographies are most interesting for Western audiences, as religious rituals and various mourning ceremonies often inspire her and are central to her choreographies, which are mostly unknown to the non-Iranian audience. On the contrary, they are unattractive for the Iranian audience, as they are familiar motifs and are usually unpopular. The unwillingness of Iranian audiences is a primary challenge for Hoss, but not the only in using such motifs. As mentioned before, Iranian musicians and Iranian dancers do not tend to work on such religious themes, and non-Iranians are mostly unfamiliar with Iranian dance, music, and culture. Cooperation is very time consuming for a number of reasons. In this framework, while working with an international group, the members of the group shall first watch relevant videos about the context and concept. Hoss translates and gives information about the context to make it conceivable and understandable for them. Worthy of mention is also the reverse financial effect of activity in the field of dance in US and Iran. In the US, in spite of the fact that Hoss is in the market and has executed a number of projects and courses, she cannot financially survive only through dance. In addition, she needs to have another business to be able to pursue dance. On the contrary, in Iran she could easily afford a very good life with the income from dance courses, despite that dance is prohibited, since people from the middle and upper classes in Iran are ready to pay to learn anything new. The challenges for Hoss as a dancer in her place of re-

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location have not come to end; yet the form of the challenges has changed. These are among the others the main challenges she faces: difference between training methods, financing of her lifestyle and productions costs, avoiding clichés of being an Oriental female dancer, and the choreographies imposed by established institutions. In addition she faces the challenges of convincing Iranian artists to cooperate with her, due to probable future problems at the time of traveling to Iran, of trying to raise the awareness of the Iranian audience in the diaspora to understand the concept of contemporary dance through her productions. To realize Hoss’s strategy to cope these challenges and to see how she connects to home in her productions, I select parts of her choreographies, which are addressed in the following part.

5.1.1

Imagining and Embodying (Iran)ian-ness

The linkage to home and reflection of its memories can be tracked in the choreographies and dances of Hoss outside of Iran, which are experienced in different formats. To do so, she not only binds herself to Iranian dancers to perform those memories, but she also tries to embody the concept of home by engaging of international dancers for her choreographies. In the following sections, three choreographies from Hoss after her immigration to the US in 2013 and experienced life and work in an environment of displacement and exile will be studied. The aim is to shed light on her approach of innovation and experimentation in her choreographies, how she connects to her homeland and identity, and by what means she reflects them in her works. In the frame of a work-in-progress project, Linda Bouchard, a Canadian composer and multimedia artist, is developing the dance Identity Theft in collaboration with dancer and choreographer Aisan Hoss and versatile instrumentalist Kyle Bruckmann. The solo dance was presented in the SAFE house for the Performing Arts, San Francisco in August 2016. The piece refers to the fragility of one’s personal connection to the global world and the enormous pressure of one’s own inner topography in the current moment. Hoss embodies here the nuanced, fluid, and threatened connection she has to her own identity and her intense sense of belonging to her homeland and culture, a place of displacement. With dance, live music, electronics, live video, and everyday objects, this solo dance is an exploration of those perceptions and experiences.7 The spaces created in this solo by Hoss have been experienced 7

http://lindabouchard.com/works/identity-theft/ (Retrieved January 12, 2017)

5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home

daily by each Iranian woman who grew up after the 1979 Revolution: spaces full of restrictions and challenges. Generally, Hoss’s choreographies have a dark and bitter atmosphere, which does not mean that she exaggerates the image she presents of home, but rather such images reflect her individual experience in the environment in which she grew up. The costume’s colors are dark, symbolizing the school dress codes and dark chadors mandatory for girls from the age of seven. The darkness and sorrow are amplified by the melancholic music; there is no difference if Iranian or Western music is used. This type of music enables an exact atmosphere to convey the concept to the audience. Hoss illustrates in Identity Theft that changing where one lives does not abolish dark thoughts and restrictions. Their impact remains in the mind and body of the displaced person. The dance starts with the narration of the dancer: “I am from Tehran, the capital city of Iran. I was born five years after the 1979 Revolution…” and the rest of the sentence grows faint among other noises. From that point, bodily movement replaces oral narration of her life’s experience in her homeland. Dark chador, rope, chain, a world map, and a cage are objects that serve the choreography and invite the audience into the world of a dancer and detail her life: From one side, they address the restrictions of Iranian women at home due to the hijab and patriarchal regulations; at the same time, they raise the issue of the identity paradoxes and crises that result from the attempt to adapt to the new environment after settling in the new place. At the beginning of the piece, Hoss’s body is covered by a black chador, and she covers her face with her hands; however, after a while she frees herself. Hands are moving upwards and sideward, and the movements of the waist and shaking of the hips there are rooted in fixed figures of Iranian dance. The dancer stands on a rolling wheel at this point, which represents the instability of her position in her homeland. (Figure 12)                  

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Figure 12: Identity Theft: Dance and Choreography by Aisan Hoss

(Screenshot from the video, taken by the author)

 In the other part of the dance, which designates the space after migration, Hoss struggles with a rope fixed to her. The suggestion is that escaping the chain of memories and thoughts that have accompanied her in dark days is impossible for the exiled, even miles from the place of their place of origin. The accumulations of those memories and thoughts are at first overwhelming for the exiled; however, after some time of resistance, the exiled starts to think about putting this weight on the ground, contemplating such memories as experiences and opportunities and moving forward while relying on them, no matter how complicated, onerous, and time consuming it might be. For a person in exile, moving on is the only way to salvation: understanding the restrictions, becoming accustomed to them, and move forward. Hoss’s movements in this part of the choreography are highly dynamic, including rapid movements, leaps, constant changes of position, utilizing figures of Iranian and Azeri dance as well as ritualistic and religious movements in combination with modern techniques.  

5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home

Figure 13: Identity Theft: An autobiographical choreography

(Screenshot from the video, taken by the author)

Adherence to the homeland as well as tendency to preserve cultural identity despite all restrictions is an indispensable part of an Iranian migrant’s life. Escaping the physical constraints of the homeland does not mean at all that mental constraints can also vanish so easily. Escaping the cage of home is impossible, although one is not present physically there: One shall carry the cage with her/him into the new world. Hoss embodies this concept as much as possible in Identity Theft, a solo performance that takes 35 minutes to complete. Yiel(D)isinherit is another choreography of Hoss, which premiered in Lisser Theatre at Mills College, Oakland, in April 2015. This piece—which has 4 choir singers, one santur (Iranian hammered dulcimer) player, and six dancers—is one again about Hoss’s dark yet familiar memories of home. It conveys the dark voices and images that the post-Revolutionary generation repeatedly heard and saw in movies and experience in daily life since childhood. These sounds and images became the sounds of home and lightness for her in exile and miles far away from her homeland. This piece, choreographed by Hoss, poses a significant political and religious challenge for her. Such topics in the Iranian diaspora are quite sensitive, as US-Iranians not only do not identify themselves with religious themes, but also have a hostile attitude toward

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them. Moreover, the sensitivity of religious themes in Iran forces those who are willing to travel to Iran to avoid cooperating in such artistic projects, as they do not want to face security problems when they enter the country. Hence, all dancers, musicians, and choir singers of Yiel(D)isinherit are nonIranians. The dance begins with “In the Name of God, The Merciful, The Compassionate” in Arabic language, which is the fixed phrase at the beginning of all Surah in the Quran and in prayers, and has also been a fixed introduction to all public speeches and lectures of clerics and politicians after the 1979 Revolution. Hoss breaks a taboo by starting the dance with this phrase: Bringing this phrase to the stage is a taboo from a religious point of view, one that is punishable. Its use in such performances is rejected in the homeland, as it is regarded as disrespectful toward God, while the phrase is blamed or neglected in the diaspora. For the Iranian audience, having escaped from the religious atmosphere of Iran, it is not acceptable to witness again the dark religious picture of Iran. They attend dance performances solely where they can see an imaginary, beautiful, colorful, and joyful Iran. Therefore, Hoss selects her musicians and dancers from among non-Iranians and attempts to absorb the non-Iranian audience. In the first part of Yiel(D)isinherit, Hoss is inspired by scrutiny of Ashura in Iran.8 Fully black costumes and green shawls, as well as the chest-beating ritual of this piece, explicitly represent the mourning rituals of Muharram that are carried out each year like a festival across Iran. 9 For a month, the streets and public spaces are allocated to the mourning processions to perform this ritual. Huge musical bands that play only grieving music and performers in big processions in fully black costumes are perform improvisationally, conquering the city’s public spaces and transforming the city into a black mourning creature. In this religious performance, men play the main role, and therefore the stage is entirely male-dominated, while women are present as a passive audience. In this dance piece, however, the roles shift. Women dancers move individually or collectively and perform this ritual, while men observe. After a funeral ceremony in the graveyard, santur music starts, which is smooth and slow at the beginning but becomes more cheerful after a while

8

9

Ashura is known by Shia Muslims as a day of mourning for the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali (the grandson of the Prophet Muhammed) at the Battle of Karbala in the year 680 CE. The color green has for the Muslims various connotations such as paradise. For Shiite counted color green as dynastic color from the twelfth century.

5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home

and is accompanied by sounds of the rhythmic clapping of hands mixed with a chest-beating sound. Here the second taboo is broken: Chest-beating shall not be combined with energetic dance and cheerful music, but rather with grieving and sorrow. While the choir calls repeatedly the name of Husayn as in a mourning ritual, the women dancers practice chest-beating.

Figure 14: Yiel(D)isinherit: Choreographing of home’s memories

(Screenshot from the video, taken by the author)

Hoss’s theme in this dance again recalls memories mostly of death, darkness, bitter occasions, and religion, with which she grew up. Since such memories are part of her individual and cultural identity, she regards them as an opportunity through which she can create a space for innovation and differentiation. In this way, bitter life experiences at home are embodied and performed on the stage in a new home. In this respect, Hoss puts it forth in an interview, One of the differences between me and [some other] American-Iranians, is they’re like “Oh I hate this chanting!” [The public Islamic call to prayer, common in many Muslim areas in the world] And for me it’s like “Oh my god, I miss it. This reminds me of something.” So for this piece, it was [exploring] those relationships that I miss. I took the chanting and also the images that remind me of things[…]. In Iran the movies are so dark, like 99% of movies. And I love movies, I’ve watched most of them. Movies are also the

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experience of our lives, [and] some of the images are still in my mind. Some of them are really rich […]. I started playing with those images. It was very personal. The whole piece became very dark, but in a good way. I was happy in a way [that I could share] something that I miss and that I could just bring it up with less stress. Having those memories and bringing them out on the stage was something that was pleasant.10 Hoss appears as a dancer and choreographer in a short experimental video, published in December 2016 on her social media channels. In Shedding Skin, Hoss embodies once again her affiliation to the homeland and certifies the fact that the dancer’s body acts as an archive of memories and concerns, despite being physically away from home; in this way, she visualizes her emotions and insights in the form of dance. The black and white film illustrates an abandoned, soulless, and deserted space. Motifs such as black chador, ritualistic movements, Islamic chanting, sorrowful music, and dark costumes are indications of Iran. The performance happens in two open and closed spaces. What is performed within the cold, soulless and closed space with cemented walls is associated with the constrictions of an introversive body. Hoss utilizes empty narrow spaces such as the spaces under stairs to convey the challenge of being an Iranian female dancer outside Iran. Moving in narrow and unstable spaces, such as places of displacement, restricts the possibility of free movement for the dancer. The frequent walking up and down stairs addresses the struggle of the dancer to go back and forth and start many times from zero. Only in this way she can change herself so as to acclimatize to the new environment and to establish her as an artist. (Figure 15) Chador has dual meaning in this dance-film. Not only as a cover, but it also refers to skin: a skin under which the dancer has lived and defined her identity. In the process of becoming new and changing, one must shed skin. In this process of struggle, a new identity is created that cannot be linked to only one place. Moreover, chador creates a space and movement here that serves as a creative medium, rather than as restrictive clichéd coverage. The second space in this film is an open vast space in a steppe: moving among a mass of black textiles waving in the wind symbolizes a self-struggle and fight with oneself in a free, limitless space. Fighting to escape from identity is more laborious than beneficial. One’s identity might be inseparable and immortal;

10

http://www.artforourselves.org/features/aisan-hoss-iranian-dancer-and-choreographer, (Retrieved January 7, 2017)

5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home

even so, it is subject to change and transformation. As such, displacement or change of geographical location cannot be interpreted as fading out of the past and unchaining the person from all limitations, but instead creates new restrictions in new forms and categories. Hoss explains Shedding Skin as follows: “A place of (dis)placement is not about better or worse, free or unfree; it is bittersweet, involving acceptance, coming to peace, independence, shedding attachment and letting go.”11

Figure 15: Shedding Skin: Carrying the past with all its heaviness

(Screenshot from the video, taken by the author)

By analyzing the above-mentioned dances in terms of content and form, it is identified that Hoss does not think about absorbing the Iranian audience and satisfying them in her independent choreographies outside Ballet Afsaneh. In this respect, while criticizing the Iranian- American community’s point of view toward today’s Iran, she emphasizes the role of her generation and contemporary artists inside Iran: It is a fact that after 1979 Revolution, unpleasant occasions happened in Iran and many restrictions were put in place, but I strongly argue that from among such restrictions tough artists could rise and make their way to success, and I want to present myself as one of them; an artist who rose from the bottom of all these restrictions and saved her life. I want to express my thoughts and emotions through dance and show that it is the postRevolutionary generation who moves arts forward; hence an end was put on 11

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzpmuCKq8Xs (Retrieved January 7, 2017)

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the pre-Revolutionary era. For instance holding the Mehregan festival [which was celebrated by Iranian Courtyard before 1979 Revolution] is a pure business for Iranians expats in California, as it has no meaning to celebrate a festival that has been obsolete for decades in Iran. Such festivals have no significance for us as the post-Revolutionary generation. Ashura and Muharram are triggering memories in us. Or for example Shahnameh [The Book of Kings]12 does not mean anything to me; why I should use its poems in my choreographies, whereas I have never learned it, just because it is a trend outside Iran? For me, separating myself from Iran is painful and by no means do I want to distance from it and what is happening there. If our dance is aimed to reflect Iran and Iranianness, it shall reflect experiences from the current situation in today’s Iran. If [US] Iranians in the diaspora are unable to understand today’s Iran and they are careless about it, it is their problem and I am not changing the way I have chosen.13 In order to fulfill her goal, Hoss addresses the concept of identity in postRevolutionary generation in her dance project Pleasant Pain in 2018. This project is of high importance for her, as her generation has a different attitude to many issues because of its life experiences in comparison to the pre-Revolutionary generation. Pleasant Pain addresses the notions of identity and home among the new generation of immigrants in north California. Based on interviews with thirty people who, like Hoss, were raised in Iran and left the country in the recent years, Pleasant Pain embodies the sense of belonging to home and the transformation of identity for the new generation of immigrants. Through this dance, she intends to let her audience enter the world of this generation and to bring contemporary dance to the stage by relying on Iranian music, gestures, and dance techniques, as well as Western techniques.14 The experiences and challenges existing in Iran have had a positive impact on Hoss and have resulted in difference and uniqueness in her choreographies. Thus, she believes that censorship and restrictions can serve as opportunities. Accordingly, she is concerned with the possibility of forgetting Iran as a source of inspiration when her connections with what is happening within Iran weaken. Hoss intentionally and knowingly does not 12

13 14

Shahnameh is the national epic of the Persian-speaking world and one of the longest epic poems in the world, written by Abolqasem Ferdowsi over 33 years (between 977 and 1010 CE). Personal Interview, November 2016 in Berkeley. (My translation) The dance project was in the research phase at the time of interview in 2016.

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bind herself to defined structures, and she departs from the fixed patterns of Iranian dance, with its limited movements and symmetries. She experiments in the free space provided for her in the US; without focusing solely on absorbing a specific audience. What stands on top of her list of priorities is innovation in choreography and connection to home. Hoss internalizes her personal life experiences inside and outside of her home and embodies those of her memories that remain with her. By sharing these memories through new forms of movement, Hoss invites the audience to her world of thoughts and experiences at home. In this way, she allows the audience to have immediate access to her world and makes a journey to explore her identity.

5.2

Transformation in Motion: Collecting from the Past and Adapting for the Present (the case of Shahrzad Khorsandi)

Shahrzad Khorsandi, the founder of Shahrzad Dance Academy, lives and works in San Francisco Bay Area. She was born in a family of dance and music in Isfahan. What she remembers as a child in relation to dance are memories of her dances in parties and ceremonies with music played from a small music player. Like most Iranian parents, her parents expected her to study engineering or medicine. At the age of eleven, almost a year after the 1979 Revolution, her family was forced to leave Iran for the US. Their departure was complicated, as her father had worked in the Pahlavi regime and, accordingly, was initially banned from leaving the country. However, Khorsandi’s family believed that this trip would be temporary and that they would be able to return as soon as the turmoil is ended. The dream of return was never realized, so after forty years of living in exile in northern California, Khorsandi believes that her parents are homeless. On one hand, they cannot return home, since there is no home left for them, as everything has changed. On the other hand, their children have grown up outside of Iran, and they do not share a common language and thoughts with the parents, which also intensifies this sense of homelessness. The first confrontation of Khorsandi with the Western dance occurred five years after arriving in the US. She was attending the dance classes in high school in the 10th grade instead of attending a physical education course and continued enthusiastically until the last year of her schooling. To enter university, she attended an audition at the Institute of the Arts in Califor-

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nia to gain admission to the Dance and Performance Arts program there. At the same time, she succeeded in receiving admission to the Physical Therapy School. Khorsandi explains that her application to the second major was mainly because of her doubt in her first choice. She was not sure whether the way she chooses to continue with dance was correct. Ultimately, however, she concludes that she cannot convince herself not to dance. She thinks that her interest in dance is something anchored within her, and she is unable to follow anything else in parallel. At university, she learned modern dance, ballet, and Graham’s technique. At the same time, she became familiar not only with anatomy, dance history, lighting, costume design, movement analysis, and understanding of kinesthetics, but also with African dances and modern jazz. She also holds an MA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University. While studying in Los Angeles and San Francisco, she taught modern techniques and choreography at universities and colleges. After graduation, however, she discovered that her choreographies did not satisfy her and that there is a flaw in them. She had the feeling that her modern vocabulary lacked something, and for this reason she had not found her voice yet. After experimenting with music and various vocabularies of movement, she realized that her work has a special feature: “It has been frequently mentioned by Western audiences that my work possesses different compositions, twists, and turns—a difference of which I was unaware.”15 , it was the starting point to realize of having Other body for Khorsandi. Even though she had no plan to return to her homeland, Khorsandi travelled to Iran after the end of the Iran–Iraq War: thirteen years after the forced migration. The impact of this return was so strong that, according to her, it determined her future career. During one month of spending time with family members in Iran, “emotionally, psychologically, and artistically a new door was opened for me.”16 On this journey, totally new perspectives were revealed to her that were previously unknown and unclear. Consequently, this enlightenment profoundly reshaped her future carrier. She explains her experience of being once again in Iran and its impact on her attitude to dance as follows: After returning to the US, it seemed as if I landed newly in this country: everything became ‘Iranized’ to me. I listened to Iranian music, and my dances turned to be Iranian. I was analysing the movements with the academic

15 16

Personal Interview, March 2015 in Berkeley. (My translation) Personal Interview, March 2015 in Berkeley. (My translation)

5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home

background, but after returning from Iran, I started to ask myself the question of what makes a movement an Iranian one? What is the difference between an American and an Iranian who both perform Iranian dance? What distinguishes them from each other, and why can’t the movements of an American dancing Persian dance be like those of an Iranian dancer? What is missing in her/his dance?17 Subsequently she devoted her time to investigating Iranian dance and music, and this investigation then became part of her professional identity. Despite the fact that Khorsandi grew up and was educated in modern dance in the US, she has an Iranian expression and voice. For her choreographies, she is looking for Iranian poetry and music and sees the possibility of expressing her feelings in the context of Persian language and culture, although she has almost no direct connection to what happens inside Iran. She has not sent a video of her work to anyone inside Iran, as she fears it would be a problem for her travel to Iran, due to the ban on dance in the country. Recently, she has been able to communicate with those who want to learn dance in Iran through her online courses, however. In her choreographies, she follows two approaches: In the first approach, she lets herself be inspired by music; in the second, she choreographs based on an idea or concept, and upon finishing the choreography, she searches for the suitable music. An example of the second approach is the choreography of Bam dance. The path into which Khorsandi stepped has both advantages and disadvantages. The experience of these years has shown her that being a ‘foreigner’ has not been an obstacle for her, at least in California. She believes that the Bay Area in which she is located is the only place in the whole of the US that embraces new ideas. It is the only location where she can present and expand the Iranian dance. Her first challenge in exile is audience demand. Contrary to Iranians inside Iran, who are more interested in modern, fusion, and contemporary dances, Iranians in diaspora tend more to traditional dance. Traditional dances are appealing due to their strangeness and unknownness in the new setting for non-Iranians, and on the other hand, a heterotopic dance scene can emerged, which connects the Iranian audience in diaspora to their past and their home. Hence, in events organized by Iranian-Americans, the organizers mostly do not seek to present an artistic work, but they rather

17

Ibid.

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want to bring historical and traditional dances to the stage. It means that the traditional dance is the only dance that covers the expectation of the audience. Therefore, like Hoss and Sayyad, Khorsandi has also challenges to preform three dance forms: traditional dances that satisfy the Iranian and American audience, the ethnic dances, which are mostly of interest to the Americans, and the artistic conceptual dance that matches their personal interests. This “somatic confusion” shall not be regarded “as a deficit but instead emphasizes its creative potential.”18 What has been more challenging over the years for Khorsandi, however, is Iranian dance itself. This form of dance has, in her opinion, been problematic. She outlines her view as follows: “Persian dance is generally not popular, and people do not know it. The kind of Iranian dance I do is somehow an Iranian ballet. Therefore, it was very difficult and time-consuming for me to incorporate it as a piece of art in the academy.”19 The purpose of Khorsandi, after becoming acquainted with Iranian dance and the subsequent change in her attitude, was to find a space in which to present Iranian dance as an academic course at the university. She has taught Iranian dance at the private college for three years, although not as a major, but as a sport and recreation session. She finds it exhausting to convince university departments that Iranian dance can be taught as a legitimate phenomenon. According to her, Iranian dance does possess a textbook and technique, and it therefore could become an academic major in the universities. Offering such a major is something that is now hard to imagine, as even well-known dances such as flamenco, Kathak, and Afro-American capoeira are less often offered as majors, due to the budget cuts at universities. It should be noted that these dances were never part of the main curriculum, and students attended classes on a voluntarily basis. Seemingly, these “ethnical” dances are used only in other disciplines, such as culture and anthropology, in order to help students to better understand a specific culture. To realize the aim of introducing Iranian dance into academia, Khorsandi has published a book entitled The Art of Persian Dance. This book is a collection of techniques and movements that she has taught to the trainees over twenty

18

19

Gabriele Brandstetter, Gerko Egert, and Holger Hartung (ed): Movements of Interweaving Dance and Corporeality in Times of Travel and Migration, Routledge, London and New York, First Published 2019, p. 4. (Retrieved June 15, 2019 from https://bookshelf.vi talsource.com/#/books/9781351128445) Personal Interview, March 2015 in Berkeley. (My translation)

5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home

years of training in her academy. She has created terminology for the Persian dance moves and poses, described the positioning of limbs and body and has depicted them. The Shahrzad technique is the name that Khorsandi has chosen for her method. She aims with this book to bring Iranian dance to the academic world and teach the Persian dance techniques to the enthusiasts. Khorsandi believes that there are transitions and shapes in Persian dance with which dancers are unfamiliar, and this knowledge can add to the movements and vocabulary of the dancer (e.g. diverse movements of the wrists). In this book, Khorsandi focuses on “classic Persian dance.” In the beginning of the book, she explains that the word “classic” does not refer to “an established and practiced method”; rather it is used to introduce Persian dance techniques “in a classical way with form and structure.” With this explanation, Khorsandi expresses that her technique is not rooted in history and is modern. Her use of the word “Persian” instead of “Iranian” is intentional: due to the tension between Iran and America, the word “Iranian” creates negative connotations and may be linked to today’s Iran, the Middle East, war, and nuclear armament, which are considered repulsive and dissuasive for in American society. The word “Persian,” in contrast, is poetic, has no political connotations, and refers to an ancient civilization with rich artistic and cultural characteristics that connects Khorsandi with her ancestors. Khorsandi specifically emphasizes the presentation and confirmation of Persian dance as art and connects her technique to those of other Iranian arts to achieve this very goal. She believes that the aesthetics of Persian dance are rooted in the aesthetics of Iranian culture, just like the architecture of the Iranian traditional buildings and its forms, such as arches, compositions, and framings. There are shared motifs in paintings, carpet weaving, and fabrics. When we look at a painting or a piece of fabric, we can find elements that make us name them Indian or Chinese, and not Iranian. As a matter of fact, these motifs are factors to recognize the authenticity of that object. There are boundaries by which you can differentiate Indian fabrics from Persian ones, such as twists or angles that differ, and the difference is mainly in the details.20 Detecting the aesthetics and translating them into movement is what Khorsandi does with Persian dance. For her, Persian dance is based in Persian aesthetics and is from Persian culture. For this reason, to create moves in Per20

Personal Interview, March 2015 in Berkeley. (My translation)

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sian dance, she always looks for motifs in other Iranian arts to turn them into movement. Khorsandi’s technique also avoids the associated dances being regarded as archaic or related to the past; at the same time, Khorsandi wants the dance to be identifiable as Iranian on first glance: a dance with Iranian aesthetics based on techniques, shapes, and body line. It is a dance that can be analyzed, named, learned, and taught. For this purpose, with the aid of photos, Khorsandi shows the different positions of arms, legs, head, body, and wrists, and she names the figures and patterns of the legs and movements of the arms in Farsi language: for example, Abshar (waterfall), Qalammu (paintbrush), Raha (release), Ravan (flowing), Ranesh (to be pushed a away), Shokoufeh (blossom), Parvaz (flight), Rounama, Delroba (heart and stealing), Pichak (ivy), Yek Gam (one step), Do Gam (two steps) and so forth.21 Khorsandi criticizes the teaching of ballet as a base technique for learning Iranian dance: I believes that ballet is not suitable for Iranian dance. For instance, the second position of arm movement in ballet is opposite the arm movement in Iranian dance, or in ballet the body does not have curvature and is instead completely straight, not free, a principle of movement that does not exist in Iranian dance. 22 Khorsandi raises the question of “why should we use Western ballet as the foundation of Iranian dance technique.” Furthermore, she asks, “when the body finds its language and makes it Persian for the stage, why should we not start with an Iranian technique as the foundation?”23 For Khorsandi, writing the book The Art of Persian Dance was a first step in change this approach. Khorsandi explains the development of her Persian dance technique through years of exploration and teaching. The exercises and descriptions in the book help the students to understand the essence of Persian aesthetics as they manifest in movement and, through diligent practice, one can gain mastery of the technique necessary 21 22 23

Shahrzad Khorsandi: The Art of Persian Dance, Self-published, Library of Congress Number: 2015900994, 2015. Personal Interview, March 2015 in Berkeley. (My translation) This does not mean that she declines ballet. She believes that utilization of ballet technique is suitable for strengthening the body and understanding the space. She adheres the technique in which the body has Iranian expression, but the posture and angle are adopted from ballet. Personal Interview, March 2015 in Berkeley. (My translation)

5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home

to express herself/himself within those aesthetic parameters. By learning to manipulate the body to form precise shapes and lines and produce dynamic nuance and transitions, one will achieve the type of movement flow distinct to this dance style.24

Figure 16: Khorsandi in Rounama pose, photo by Scott Belding, 2004

24

https://www.danceus.org/persian-dance/a-glimps-into-persian-dance-technique/ (Retrieved October 29, 2018)

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The focus of this book is on the movements of the hands, wrists, hips, shoulders, arms, feet and legs. The technique section is divided into three subsections: “Foundation Principles,” “Position of the Feet, Arms and Hands,” and “Fundamental Movement Vocabulary.” Here, Khorsandi uses pictures to introduce positions, motions, patterns, figures, shapes, bodylines, dialogue between the limbs, and geometric relationships in the body. She chooses Farsi names to introduce the movements. For example, in the Qalammu move (from the word for paint brush in Farsi), the focus is on the dancer’s arm fluid and wrist work. Rounama (a word formed from the combination of ‘face’ [rou] and ‘show’ [nama]) means ‘appearance.’ The Rounama move means, more specifically, showing the face. In this move, movement of the hands and arms is like a frame and puts the face in the center of attention. In the next section, Dynamics, the qualitative indicators of Iranian dance, such as movement qualities, temporal qualities, flow, pulse, swing, dynamics, variance and expression are explained. According to Khorsandi, Iranian dance has its own rhythm and flow. Its flow, shape, curve, warp, and eslimi [ornament] motif are what makes it interesting in the eyes of non-Iranians: A dance circles, smooth transitions, and various movements of the hand and head with no equivalent in Western dance. Learning Iranian dance requires knowledge of music and rhythm. As Iranian music and Iranian Dastgahs are very complicated,25 so too is Iranian dance.26 Without music, Iranian dance is meaningless. Understanding the components of Iranian music, such as pulses and phrasings, and recognizing the qualities of its dynamics are necessary to create relationships between music and the body. Iranian audience is familiar with this kind of music and its complexity. Learning Iranian dance, however, is highly time consuming and complicated for a non-Iranian, because he or she needs to learn dance and music at the same time. About the limited range of her audience, Khorsandi explains that these people are basically Americans who in a certain relationship with Iranians and Iran and become familiar with Iranian dance through their friends or through people interested in Middle East, its culture, and exotic and new phenomenon. Khorsandi performs mostly in multi-cultural or Middle Eastern music and dance festivals or in museums in which most of the audience are non-Iranians. In these settings, Iranian dance is also performed 25 26

Dastgah is a musical modal system of traditional Iranian music. Personal Interview, March 2015 in Berkeley. (My translation)

5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home

along with belly, Arabic, Turkish and Armenian dances. In addition, some of her performances are educational and performed in libraries. Her reason for not performing on the theater stages is the high costs: Stage performance is so expensive, and just a few artists allow themselves to do that. Getting a grant is very hard. The cost of a theater hall with stage services for a weekend is between 20,000 to 30,000 dollars. And it is absolutely impossible to attract 1,000 persons to come and see the performance. And then if it would be hardly possible to fill a small theater hall with the capacity of 200 persons, the ticket prices could never cover the costs.27 Another thing that Khorsandi criticizes is the superficial view of the Iranian community toward Iranian dance. Through the twenty years of her professional activity, both the dancers and her trainees in the Shahrzad Dance Academy have been mostly non-Iranian. According to her, Iranians lack passion for professional dance and do not have continuous commitment in this regard. They love Iranian dance, but the dance they prefer, which is called social dance, and is suitable only for parties. They attend dance classes to improve what they already know, and not for the sake of fundamental training or becoming a dancer in future. As a result, dance is obsolete among Iranians, and its boundary with art remains blurry. Based on her experience through these years, Khorsandi has observed that some people have the potential to improve their technique, but they think that what they know to the extent of dancing in a party is enough, and they do not feel the need to develop it; they have limits. These people are not familiar with the body and cannot perform professionally. Iranians basically think that dance is a self-taught skill that one can easily learn through watching videos. The problem with this approach, in Khorsandi’s opinion, is that they get used to certain movements, so when learning a new movement, their body is unable to respond. They need time to get used to a new movement and for that movement to become a part of their body. Practicing and surpassing this basic skill level is very difficult for Iranians, as their definition of and connection to dance is that their body should be free and lax to do whatever they want with the dance; just having fun with move-

27

Ibid.

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ment would be enough. This is how their connection with the dance is, they do not try to reform their limits or expand their movement.28 Khorsandi remembers that in her first years as a dance instructor Iranians’ approach to dance had been skepticism about whether it would be even possible to teach Iranian dance. They argued that when an Iranian is dancing to Iranian music, it is equal to Iranian dance, and if the dancer is not Iranian, the dancer is unable to perform Iranian dance. As such, the idea of the Iranian dance with technique did not previously exist. Khorsandi has tried especially to change the views of parents to have a different understanding of Iranian dance through training their children. She believes that people have low expectations of Iranian dance. The Iranian diaspora wants popular dance, and not a dance as an artistic, philosophical, or intellectual phenomenon. They attend the performances to see the colorful costumes, the spreading skirts, and to have fun. She mentions events in which the main program is intellectual and are held with the attendance of important people from high ranks of society, but they invite a dance group for the break time, so that it would be performed as the audience had dinner and tea, as a fun section that requires little thought. As a result, there is little space for her and the members of her academy in most of the shows, as the organizers are uninterested in Khorsandi’s style, and her group has tends not to perform in such events. Of course there are colorful and on-beat dances in Khorsandi’s repertoire as well as conceptual dances. To perform the latter, though, she always waits for the opportunity to come: for example, the 9/11, Bam, and Talkh-O-Shirin, which have a few fans, for basically the Iranians in the diaspora have rarely shown interest in observing and following the idea of the dancer on stage, and nonIranians are mostly interested in and attracted to the aesthetics of Iranian culture. Khorsandi considers Iran and America as home, and her answer to the question of nationality is dual, but being an Iranian is part of her identity. Khorsandi considers herself an exiled artist, as she has always tried to fight and to prove herself in this environment. She believes that theater stages and the academic environment inside Iran are literally suitable places for her to work, but as dance has left its original context and entered a setting in which there is little knowledge of dance, she has to work enormously to prepare the

28

Personal Interview, March 2015 in Berkeley. (My translation)

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setting to make it known, which is why she calls herself an exiled artist. Despite the difficulties and challenges Khorsandi has faced, she sees a new horizon opening up: “Good things have happened in recent years and the number of the people who work in this field has grown. It seems that a slow and gradual development is taking place.”29 She also considers social media a platform for being more observed and visible. Social media make easier the connections with the audience and dancers, especially inside of Iran and the elimination of the boundaries and help to increase recognition and education concerning Iranian dance in such ways. The following analyze two of Khorsandi’s choreography Bam and Talkh-OShirin to comprehend her choreography’s concept and method and to trace the reflection of the movements that she defined in her book The Art of Persian Dance. Bam is Khorsandi’s reaction to the Bam city earthquake disaster and the subsequent ruination of Arg-e-Bam. Arg-e-Bam was the largest adobe building in the world, located close to the Bam city in Kerman Province, southeast of Iran. The area of the Arg was about 180,000 square meters, surrounded by walls of 6 to 7 meters in height and 1,815 meters in length. This great citadel, located on the path of the Silk Road, was constructed in 5 B.C. and is listed as world heritage site by UNESCO.30 On December 26, 2003, a severe earthquake affected Bam city and its suburbs, and Arg-e-Bam was destroyed. About 30,000 persons were killed, and hundreds became homeless; the destruction of such an unmatched historic buildings made an impression on Iranians all over the world. Khorsandi brought the Bam dance on stage, in the third anniversary of this incident. In addition to staging some of her choreography there, she also danced in it. The music of the piece is called Earthquake by the Los Angelesbased Lian Ensemble. All the dancers were women and, except Khorsandi, nonIranians. The dance begins with photos of Arg-e-Bam before the destruction. The photos are displayed by a projector, and the narrator gives information about them in English. The stage then darkens for a moment, and the dancers come on stage. With the beginning of the music and in the dim light, four women dancers appear on the stage. One of them is standing on the right side, and the three others kneel to the left of the stage. The right arms of all 29 30

Personal Interview, March 2015 in Berkeley. (My translation) https://www.irantour.tours/iran-blog/what-to-see-in-iran/historical-works-that-introd uced-iran-to-tourists.html (Retrieved September 10, 2018)

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four dancers are by their heads, and their left arms reach towards the ground. They gaze at the ground. Three dancers in the Ranesh pose are half sitting, with a bent right knee. The solo dancer on the right remains standing, and the position of her arms and head is symmetric to the other three dancers. They open their arms and, turning their heads to the left, take their arms to their back, as their heads go forward. Their heads then move back, while their arms slowly and gently go to the Barchin move in the sagittal plane. In the next move, three dancers sit on the ground and turn their back to the third dancer by pivoting at the knee. Their arms are move smoothly on the sagittal plane. The dancers rise to a knee and sit several times, and again they turn to the audience, on their knees. They stretch their left legs to the side. Their arms are placed at their sides, and they go to Qalammu motion position (frontal in curve on the spiral plane).

Figure 17: Bam, ODC Theater, 2006.

(Screenshot from the video, taken by the author)

In the next movement, three kneeling dancers pivot on their left knees, while their face and eyes are toward the left side of stage. Their right arms stretch forward, and their left arms are raised to their ear and reach up towards the sky. The right dancer, who has been standing, kneels and turns her back to the other three dancers. The moves are still symmetric. As the music rhythm changes, all four dancers face the audience and stretch their

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arms at the same time; they immediately go to the Rounama pose. Then, while they reach their bodies and arms up, their right knees are put to the ground and their left knees face the left stage; they drag their right knees and lift them, and their left knees are dragged parallel. They press the left heel on the ground and stand up, just like two parallel lines and in one move. The three left dancers are standing, and unlike the beginning of the piece, the solo right dancer sits on the ground. While two of the dancers perform the Ranesh move by their ear, the other dancer leaves the stage slowly, and simultaneously the three other dancers enter from the right side of the stage, all three in a line, with slow steps. Their arms are remaining dropped as if they are holding a candle in each hand; their elbows are relaxed to create curvature in the arms. Now there are six women dancers on the semi-dark stage. They are wearing uniform clothes in the color of adobe, very loose over knee pants and long silk oblique tunics. The tunics are waist-length on one side, and on the other side they reach below the hip. In this part of the performance, with six dancers spread on the stage, the dance is sometimes a symmetrical duet and sometimes a solo, sometimes performed while standing and sometimes while sitting. When one of the dancers leaves the stage, two of the dancers from the five remaining dancers sit, and three others stand. The movements of their arms are done at 45 and 90 degrees. The Ranesh movement, either with the bent knee or in standing position, is observable in different directions. Along with the musical beat slowing down and the utilization of the stringed instruments instead of percussion, the dance movements also become longer and smoother and stop being single beats. Meanwhile another dancer leaves the stage. Two dancers sit, and the other two dancers, who are standing, embrace each other; the music becomes lugubrious, as if something horrible will happen. The other dancers slowly enter the stage, and when all seven dancers are on the stage, they start free dancing from movements and positions of Shahrzad technique. The togetherness of the components creates a unit. At the moment in which all seven dancers face the audience, some sitting and some standing, their arms are in the “Fourth position, side #2.” After a few seconds the dancers hold each other’s hands and start shaking slowly. Little by little, this shaking becomes faster and more visible, vibrating each of their bodies. In a moment, with the loud and earsplitting sound of the cymbal, the stage darkens, and each of the dancers are thrown to a corner, as if an earthquake has happened. All of them are scared; they twist around, fall down and rise again, go aimlessly to different directions on the stage and are confused. One of them carries another on the

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shoulder, as if she is hurt. The rest are fallen down, and a dancer goes hither and thither, scared, trembling, and in need of help. One of the other dancers, fallen to the ground, takes her final breaths, stretching her arm for help. No savior emerges, however, and her efforts are futile. She dies. The stage then darkens, and a dancer stands in the middle of the stage, scared and confused, while another lays exanimated beside her. The phrase “THE CITADEL AFTER THE QUAKE” is projected in the background. Now there is no sign of Arg-eBam and its grandeur; only a hill of dust remains. A dancer stands desperate and hopeless on the stage, as if she is in the middle of this ruin. Her body becomes a medium for reflecting the disaster. After a short pause, the stage darkens and with applause from the audience, the performance ends. Talkh-O-Shirin represents Khorsandi’s experience in modern dance choreography: a modern dance with Iranian twist. This dance is 25-minutes duet performed in 2006 in the ODC Theater of San Francisco. The theme of TalkhO-Shirin, which means Bittersweet, concerns about creation in a collection of paradoxes: a universal concept retrieved from mysticism and that has been reflected in Rumi’s poems. Rumi identifies paradox as a natural phenomenon, based on his dialectical thoughts. He believes that there is an opposite for everything, which is an acceptable natural fact: Hence the edifice of creation is (based) upon contraries Consequently, we are at war for weal and woe (Rumi) Khorsandi choreographs Talkh-O-Shirin for performance by of two nonIranian women dancers on a piece of music named Love (Amoon az Daste-Eshq) by Aldoush & the Human Exchange. This musical piece is a song about love and how it works through inner thoughts. At first glance, the concept of contradiction is presented in the costumes of the dancers, one being white and the other black. The dance begins on a semi-dark stage. Both of the dancers are at the back of the stage. The dancer in a black costume is prostrating, and the one in a white costume bends towards the ground with her back turned to the other. After a few seconds, both rise, while their arms are opened to their sides. Their hands and the wrists come up smoothly and gently and go to the “Fourth position side #2.” In this position, their arms rise on both sides, as if the dancers are carrying candles in their hands. Their elbows are relaxed, and the combination of the wrists, hands, and the elbows create a curvature. The arms slowly rest at the sides of the body, while the white-costumed dancer stands behind the black-costumed dancer, who sits on the ground. The black-costumed dancer

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half turns her head to the right and moves her hands to the right side in a Qalammu motion, while the white-costumed dancer repeats the same movement. This movement is performed immediately on the left side and over the head. This cycle of movements repeats several times. Suddenly, the whitecostumed dancer steps back (one step) and performs the Nasim movement (Nasim in Farsi means breeze).

Figure 18: Talkh-O-Shirin, ODC Theatre, 2006

(Screenshot from the video, taken by the author)

With respect this choice of name for the movement, Khorsandi explains, “It implies an unintentional quality, as if the hand is being moved by a breeze waving and rippling in space.”31 Concerning how to perform the movement, she says, “The movement is led by the wrist as it flexes and extends, and the hands and fingers contribute to rippling motion by allowing the wave to travel through hand out of the fingers.”32 In Talkh-O-Shirin, Khorsandi departs clearly from the clichés of Iranian dance, choosing simple, colorless costumes, no makeup, and choreography based on a piece of music by an alternative musician from the Iranian diaspora. An audience familiar with Iranian dance and music can follow that the rhythm of the movements, in

31 32

Shahrzad Khorsandi: The Art of Persian Dance, Self-published, Library of Congress Number: 2015900994, 2015, p. 65. Ibid.

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some parts, is not necessarily in harmony with the music. Although the figures and movements are completely derived from Iranian dance, the choreography and dance are contemporary. In the following movements, the whitecostumed dancer stands behind the black-costumed one. The black-costumed dancer sits on the ground, and both of them perform symmetrically the Arezu motion. Then, the kinetic energy transfers slowly towards the left hand, and after stretching that hand and putting it to their hearts, they move their heads and faces towards the ground, while the palm of the hand covers the face. Suddenly the white-costumed dancer goes to the left side of the stage with a leap in Arezu pose. The black-costumed dancer performs the same movement while sitting. She takes a distance from the white-costumed dancer with a spin and kneels on the other side of the stage. At the same time, the dancers situate themselves symmetrically on each side of the stage. They face each other from a distance, the right leg of the white-costumed dancer is one step forward from her body, and her right arm reaches towards the blackcostumed dancer, in prayer, as if the black-costumed dancer is her mirror. They approach each other after the spin and become a unit, although their movements are no longer symmetrical: one of them is totally motionless, and the other moves. When they become distanced from each other again, their moves become symmetrical again, as if in getting close to each other, their contradictions become visible. They stop for a moment when they are standing at a distance from each other on two far sides of the stage, and when the music becomes rhythmic, they use a combination of Ravan, Qalammu, Nasim, Barchin, and Parastoo movements in harmony with the music, with the very soft and smooth movements of the hands, wrists, and arms and the double steps movements of the legs. In this movement combination, the twists and turns of the Iranian dance are presented, so that the focus remains on the turns and twists of the movement and their abstractness. Here, the role of costumes in creating aesthetics is inconspicuous. After performing some symmetrical movements, the black-costumed dancer (now to the left) slowly and with some leaps, goes to the middle of the stage, while the white-costumed dancer stands at the end of the stage, motionless and in Tableau Vivant posture, and every now and then performing the symmetrical movements of the white-costumed dancer, who is sitting on the ground. The expression of the white-costumed dancer movements has reached the climax. Here, the dance is the translation of poetry and music. Some of the key characteristics of this piece are the dancers’ continuous twirling, becoming close and again, moving far from each other, uniting,

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performing symmetrical movements, changing places and roles, being in motion and immovable. After a short pause, and when the dancers are on two sides of the stage, the rhythm of the music becomes more dynamic, and the dancers change the rhythms of their movements based on the music. The stretched, turning, geometric, and full-twist movements of the arms are some of the characteristics of this part of the dance. The diverse movements of the legs, feet, and steps increase as the rhythm of the music becomes faster. The black-costumed dancer goes to the front of the stage, after performing a symmetrical dance. Here, the dance becomes a combination of getting closer and further to and from each other. The positions are diagonal, and the steps are in place. The highlight of the piece occurs when the music’s rhythm turns to 6/8 timing. Accompaniment with such a rhythm is difficult and challenging for a non-Iranian dancer. The movements of the head and arm and the spinning motions with this rhythm of music are very fast. The movement sequences of the arms and legs should be soft and long while fast and explosive. After its fast climax, the rhythm of music again slows. Both dancers are successful in performing the symmetries, and also the synchronous and immediate spinning, right stretches, changes of solo to duet and vice versa; they also succeed in performing a natural dance that is far from exaggeration. The diversity of the movements of the Talkh-O-Shirin dance shows that with codification, the techniques of Iranian dance can go beyond a defined traditional framework and thus have the capacity to be ‘updated’ or ‘different’ based on technique. Khorsandi, in this piece, shows that she has a different comprehension of Iranian dance and experiences in its performance. Embodying this dance, with two ‘non-Iranian’ bodies who have the modern and ballet background, she proves that Iranian dance has the capacity to become integrated into the body of the non-Iranian dancer, being performed in a minimal, monochrome costume, without makeup, and it can be performed in a way that is not exactly in symmetry with the rhythm of the music; its performance precondition is not necessarily happy or rhythmic music, but rather, it can be minimal and has a concept.  

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Figure 19: Delroba downward pose in the frontal plane in a duet (Talkh-O-Shirin)

(Screenshot from the video, taken by the author)

In choreographing Talkh-O-Shirin, Khorsandi conveys the message that ‘paradoxes’ can together give meaning to a ‘unity’. Contrary to the impression that ‘updating’ the dance depended on performing Western technique, Khorsandi proves that one can think and perform differently: the educated body in Western dance techniques can embody eastern dance techniques, and the result is a dance that belongs to no specific place; it is neither Eastern nor Western, but is a dance beyond place, belonging to the current time. This contemporary dance is the output of the cooperation of people who do not believe in borders, limits, or representing clichés through dance. Their solution is the experience of new forms in choreography and dance. Khorsandi has proved throughout her twenty years of activity in exile that despite the lack of interest from the Iranian diaspora in updating Iranian dance and presenting a different picture of it, experience and innovation can be prioritized in Iranian dance; she has done so.

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5.3

Experiment of Dancing in In-Between: Between Localization and Globalization, Between Tradition and Contemporaneity, Between Orient and Occident (the case of Banafsheh Sayyad)

Banafsheh Sayyad lives and works in Los Angeles. She is the initiator of the dance of Oneness and teaches this method actively at an international level. Sayyad was born to a cultured family in Iran. Her father, Parviz Sayyad, is one of the most well known actors and directors of pre-Revolution (1979) Iran. Due to the Revolution, the consequent social and political environment, and related limitations and barriers for her father’s activities, she and her family acquiesced to mandatory immigration and exile. Although Sayyad was raised in a family of art lovers, her parents did not let her attend dance classes. Therefore, to pursue her field of interest, Sayyad followed pursued self-education with her friends at home. In her dancing voyage, Sayyad experienced different techniques, and combining this knowledge, she has initiated the dance of Oneness: a technique based upon different movement methods, including modern, Iranian, whirling, flamenco, tai chi, Gurdjieff sacred movement and so on. Sayyad points to the flamenco dancing in Carlos Saura movies as the motivation for her for learning dance in her new home of Los Angeles. For Sayyad, the character of the strong woman who is simultaneously soft and elegant in flamenco compensates for what, in her opinion, Iranian dance lacks. The woman dancer does not need to be smiling, cute, or decorative to dance. Therefore, along with her studies in the field of literature in University of California Irvine, she started with flamenco and developed a passion for it. The flame that burns in her for flamenco dance, according to Sayyad, is never consumed fully and is always lit. After learning flamenco and after several performances in the university ensemble, she developed also an interest in tai chi, which has a completely different kinetic energy than does flamenco. The new status and observation of life from a different angle led her to a new identification with the body, understanding the unity and disappearance of its presence, that is reflected in tai chi. The presence and strength that get objectivity in flamenco were no longer the characteristics that would satisfy her. She was consolidated in a new place and had found herself. Sayyad elaborates, “Tai chi showed me the continuity and the merging in the greater and own boundaries. In tai chi I could get answers to the questions, What am I? What is here? And all

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the questions on blending and merging.”33 About her interest in tai chi and interweaving it with her former training, Sayyad says, “[Tai chi] was a real cure. I mean a connection with that unknown world and with what we call God, through movement. […] Then that these two [flamenco and tai chi] were interweaved and in between the Iranian dance became clear to me.” 34 She regards Iranian dance something between the physical presence of flamenco and the disappearance and spirituality of tai chi, and the echo of music. Persian dance is about melting and dissolving, like tai chi, but with a difference: Persian dance is about feminine melting. Although Sayyad has spent most time of her life outside of Iran, being Iranian and Iranian identity are very important for her. Therefore, after a long time of learning and performing flamenco enthusiastically, she thought that this movement technique was not specifically appropriate for her body as an Iranian. At the same time, she is aware of herself as an “Iranian” who has lived most of her life abroad. For becoming familiar with the thinking approach in choreography and performance of Western dance and, further, with the mindset of the Western audience, Sayyad entered UCLA (University of California) and studied the master’s program World Arts and Culture/Dance. She identifies presenting and introducing Iranian dance professionally as her other motivation for this decision. Sayyad’s fellow students were people of different backgrounds in dance: Chinese, Bali, African, Modern, Indian, and so on. Through practices for group performances, Sayyad became familiar with the techniques of these dances and, more importantly, learned choreography without music. Chinese medicine and healing through movement and dance are Sayyad’s other domain of interest. The point is that people are capable of healing their patients through collective movement. Sayyad calls her technique “contemporary mystical Persian dance.” She lists her inspirations as calligraphy and Persian literature, especially the mystical poems of Rumi. She embodies the Persian alphabet and writes the verses of poems through her body. (Figure 20) For Sayyad, dance is a mythical phenomenon with strong and free performers. Her approach to dance has omits reflection on the common clichés of Iranian dance in her dances, so her audience is usually comprised of non-Iranians and people interested in spirituality. Sayyad looks for a kind of dance for which there has been no pattern hitherto, and her ultimate objective in this specific kind of movement is to exhibit 33 34

Personal Interview, February 2015 in Los Angeles. (My translation) Ibid.

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the relationship of spirit, mind, and body. In the first place, she uses the dance technique to reaching a larger goal: calmness and consciousness of the body. At the next level, she tries to portray the feminine energy inside a person: the energy of goddesses.

Figure 20: Embodying the Persian alphabet in the film In the Fire of Grace

(Screenshot from the video, taken by the author)

Dance finds meaning with live music for Sayyad, so she started looking for Iranian musicians to perform in her workshop in the early years of her activity. At the beginning, no one accepted cooperation with her. Iranians think that dance is less valuable than is music, and a musician who cooperates with a dancer would sacrifice credit and dignity. Sayyad believes that for her, the most difficult step in entering the profession as a dancer and choreographer was fighting her own “shame” arising from her dance. Sayyad has also experienced many successes and failures in settling on her current dance attire. At the beginning of her work, she used to wear covering clothes, with long sleeves and pants, so that not even a small part of her body would be exposed. On the one hand, her shyness as an Iranian woman would persuade her to this sort of clothing, and on the other hand, she did not want the audience to focus on the part of her body that is not covered.35

35

As argued in chapter one, a “good” woman is a woman who is completely covered; she is motionless and silent.

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In her work, Sayyad considers being a foreigner to be positive in some sense, for her being exotic as an Iranian-American attracts a non-Iranian audience. She has never felt that she is an “immigrant” artist and has avoided this label. On the other hand, separation from Iranian identity is inevitable for her, since Iran has been vilified in America over the past forty years. Hence, she identifies herself and her dance with the word “Persian” rather than “Iranian.” With this language, she directs her dance to imaginary. Sayyad’s relationship with her homeland is not directly derived from contemporary Iran. Mystic and Iranian classic literature are sources of inspiration for her. Presence, emancipation and, the feeling of freedom are other points of emphasis for Sayyad. In her workshops, she teaches participants of different ages and nationalities how to reach these goals through movement. Sayyad’s performances in recent years have been limited to solo, improvised, and musically accompanied dances. She considers this choice, in a way, to arise from the financial pressure of the American market. Having a group requires a budget and a place to practice and rehearse, which is not possible due to the specific range of her audience and the lack of financial capacity. Furthermore, she believes that creation in the moment with live music is a challenge for a dancer, which attracts her. Presence and creation in the moment, the feelings of audience, and the setting of the performance differ in each performance, leading her to improvise. Sayyad believes that being an Iranian woman dancer is a unique challenge, “as one has to carry the passivity that had been women’s quality for so long silence, a good woman is hidden. So I carried this resistance with me.”36 According to her, dancing progressively became a medium of resistance to passivity and a way of embodying her authentic feminine power. For this reason, she incorporates whirling, traditionally a male practice, in dance of Oneness, to present a strong image for the dancer. Whirling is all about control, stillness, grounded and cantered that bring all the movement modalities for Sayyad together. The dance of Oneness is an interwoven dance technique. This dance is an accumulation of Sayyad’s training, education, and experience in an environment with a hybridity of diverse cultures and religions. Sayyad fuses and reflects on various experiences and educated techniques. Juxtaposition contradictions, she creates a sense of balance between them. Through this sense

36

In dialogue with Andrew Harvey in the film “In the Fire of Grace: Dancing Rumi’s Journey of the soul dance.”

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of balance, and with inspiration from the poems of Rumi and from mysticism, Sayyad has established the dance of Oneness. Dance of Oneness can be regarded as a synthesis of all of dance movements in which Sayyad has been trained. All of these techniques have formed her life from being Iranian living in a Muslim society to becoming an Iranian of the world, as she had to leave the country of her birth as a teenager because of 1979 Revolution and lived in a number of different places before her family settled in California. The dance of Oneness, from Sayyad’s point of view, is about cultivating facades of what it means to be a divine human. She argues further, In dance of Oneness I drew qualities that I feel activate being a true human being from various modalities that informed it. For example, flamenco cultivates groundedness. It gives us confidence, passion, courage and the qualities of the empowered feminine. Tai-chi cultivates fluidity, peace, and compassion, where Chinese medicine brings the dimension of science and the energy of the body […]. And in Persian dance, we learn to embody the sensual grace of the divine feminine. The whirling opens us to embodied love, to devotion, and adoration. And trance sweeps us into the unknown and unknowing. So the dance of Oneness is a spiritual path, whereas the different styles relate to each other in a way that they address the different aspects of human being.37 For these reasons, Sayyad does not consider any of these techniques separately, and regards her method as completed by their merging. According the information on Sayyad’s personal website, one can categorize the dance of Oneness in three dimensions: The first dimension is the art of dance movements, including precise techniques and self-expression. The second is embodying wisdom in teachings from the Sufi tradition, especially from Rumi and divine feminine teachings. The third dimension is healing, which comes from embodying teachings of wisdom in dance but also from learning and living the knowledge of the chakras and the knowledge of embodiment in Chinese medicine.38 By means of all these techniques and tools, the goal of Sayyad is to integrate heart, mind, and soul in the body and to help people ground their souls and their minds and liberate themselves in their bodies. Regarding the internal process of the performance of the dance

37 38

Personal Interview, February 2015 in Los Angeles. (My translation) https://banafsheh.org (Retrieved October 21, 2018)

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of Oneness, Sayyad discusses her creative process and inspiration with Alexis Cohen as part of her online series Art Medicine Master Class: Inner landscape is most important for me. I open myself, I release what hold me back, so that whatever needs to come through me for the public that I am performing, can come through. So basically it is being a channel. Being a channel, who is just ready and surrendered enough? So that whatever is needed can come through. Sometimes what is needed is for public sometimes is for the location, for the land. So many different things happen and I just really watch it. So the best that I can aim for, is to be danced, to be available for the dance to come through […]. Releasing as much as gets in the way. Release as much as blockages. To get knowing that I am a channel. I am representing something invisible. What I would like to bring through dance is invitation to look and listen and feel with inner sense, to be open to what is unseen and invisible. So for me that is beloved.39 She explains in another interview the way she makes a dance piece: Letting, going, emptying and seeing what appears. Basically it is putting music on and letting the music come on, so randomly; but it is from a collection that I love and then going in to trance and letting the movement emerge from that. Then is an order that emerges. From this trance that is seeming chaotic emerges a total balance.40 Sayyad talks with Andrew Harvey in a dance and poetry film under the title In the Fire of Grace: Dancing Rumi’s Journey of the Soul Dance:41 The film has six parts, entitled Falling in Love, The Call, Rumi, Dark Night, Union and The Lover. In the beginning of each part, Sayyad performs a short piece of dance. The film begins with a recitation by Harvey from one of Rumi’s poem, which accompanies Sayyad’s dancing. Creation, Construction: I am dancing for both Body is not veiled from soul neither soul from body (Rumi) 39 40 41

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=X7KQ4X57tWo (Retrieved November 15 2018) https://www.unityonlineradio.org/soul-directed-life/banafsheh-sayyad-embodying-div ine-ecstatic-sacred-dance (Retrieved October 11, 2018) Andrew Harvey is a British author and religious scholar, who lives in Nevada. He is the founding director of the Institute for Sacred Activism and author of texts that deal especially with spirituality and meditations.

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The film continues by displaying the earth as a whirling globe, while the body of the globe is formed from the letters of the Persian alphabet. While dancing, Sayyad’s body unites with the whirling earth as melting into it. Sayyad’s body is here the medium that reflecting the poem letters, whose their combinations are mystical words. The short piece of dance, Falling in Love, is choreographed and, contrary to most of Sayyad’s other performances, is not improvised. The choreography of this part is set to the music of Davood Azad, who works in Iran. This traditional mystical music is arranged based on a Rumi’s poem named Mastan Salamat Mikonand (those who are drunk salute you) and accompanied by instruments such as the tar, kamanche, tanbour and daf. The costume of the dancer is yellow, sleeveless, long and tight on the upper part of the body, loose from the waist down, with many pleats. At the beginning of the dance, her arms are on her chest in the position of self-hugging. In the next movement, she spreads the energy that she has taken from the earth through her whole body. While she is stretching her arms along her head, her head, face, and the neck turn toward the sky. Her arms move slowly above her head, in the position of praying and pleading. The right arm is stretched, touching the ear, toward the sky. It acts as an axis around which Sayyad turns while looking at the sky. While her left hand is stretched in a gesture of longing, it starts twisting from the wrist. When the rhythm of music changes and reaches its fastest tempo, the dance also becomes faster. After three twists of her hand, and going up and down her head and upper body from both sides, in a last move, Sayyad suddenly slams the ground with her hands and raises her head toward the sky with a turn. Here, the continuous movements of the Dervish that are performed in a soft and smooth way are combined with Iranian classical dance and its symmetries. The movements of the hands and arms are very soft, light and flexible, as if there are no bones in her body. Simultaneously, her neck is stretched toward the sky and creates the impression of longing. The stage on which the dance is performed is white, and the lighting works as if there are sky, clouds, and sun in the background. The clouds are like waves that the sun reflects through, and Sayyad dances among these waves of sun. The wavy movements of the hands are soft, light, and feather-like. Sayyad links the movements to each other, with regard to the change in the rhythm of music: the whirling of Dervish dance and classical Iranian dance, the light influence of tai chi, and the powerful presence of flamenco are perceptible. The words of the lyrics are embodied and translated into movement; after the instrumental music finishes, the singer starts to sing:

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Those who are drunk salute you Make their existence your servant. (Rumi)

Figure 21: Combination of the two dance techniques: Flamenco and Iranian Dance in Falling in Love, in the film In the Fire of Grace

(Screenshot from the video, taken by the author)

Sayyad’s stretched, longing, and symmetrical movements towards the sky are like those of a lover who asks for attention of her/his beloved. Alternate and soft whirling in the loose yellow costume with the pleats of the skirt, contribute to the aesthetics of the dance. A powerful presence, being seen, and holding the brim of the skirt (as in flamenco) are put together with the application of the Iranian dance figures in this piece. Here, one significant point of interest is Sayyad’s facial expression, which changes based on the performance of each movement: pleading and modesty in whirling movements, calmness in tai chi, pride and focus in flamenco, and femininity in Iranian dance. The dance finishes with self-hugging and in the bowing position and finally with the turning of her head toward the sky, stretching her arms to both sides. In Union, an improvised piece in the film In the Fire of Grace, the dance starts with the accompaniment of the daf and tombak.42 Here, sama (Sufi whirling), which is traditionally a masculine dance, becomes feminine. The white and

42

Zarbang, live recording Production of 2011.

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long sleeved dance clothes of the men are being replaced with a loose, sleeveless dress. Based on the change in the rhythm of music, the mode of Sayyad’s movements also changes. Whenever there is a pause in the music, she pauses too. The softness of music is reflected in her movements, and the movements are limited to the symmetrical ones of the upper body, head, hands, and waist. The shawl plays the role of the partner and helps to create the setting. Liberty, softness, and smoothness of movement are some of obvious characteristics of this dance. Abundant successive fast whirling, sacred movements, and the hiding of her face behind her hair, while whirling, create an image that suggests the dance and the dancer are one, and the dancer does not exist externally: The dancer disappears intentionally in the dance, which is ultimate perfection according to Sayyad. This is the objective Sayyad pursues in the dance of Oneness. In another part of the film, The Lover, Sayyad claims that the dance and dancer become united: “Being the lover is living the opposite in the one.” The name of the dance of Oneness is also derived from the poems of Rumi: being one, seeing one, wanting one, and not being belonging to a specific place: My place is placeless, my trace is traceless, no body, no soul, I am from the soul of souls. I have chased out duality, lived the two worlds as one. One I seek, one I know, one I see, one I call. (Rumi) Here, Sayyad adds dance to the poem: I call to one I dance one Dance as if no one watching you. (Rumi) To succeed in achieving this Oneness, Sayyad fuses opposites together in her dance: severity, wildness, elegance, and being in the moment. She also uses her body and heart to express herself. Reaching perfection and seeking the self and God are the objectives that Sayyad pursues, not only in her performances, but also in her workshops. These workshops are offered online and in person, individually or in groups, in different parts of Europe, America, Canada, and Turkey. The practice of the dance of Oneness differs in each context: “It depends on the need of the person. Sometimes it is to help more with embodiment, to help ground the soul, ground one’s spirituality in the body. Sometimes it is to set up a movement practice for practitioners to do daily practice to balance different kinds of energy. And sometimes is literally dance

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technique,”43 Sayyad explains. To know more about Sayyad´s technique and to understand the experience of practitioners with the dance of Oneness, I observed a 3-hour workshop of her dance of Oneness in Los Angeles in February of 2015. The workshop’s location is a large square hall with large windows, placed on a hill in Franklin Canyon, Beverly Hills Park. Thirty participants were present in the workshop. Seventy percent of these participants were non-Iranians in different age ranges, and most were women. A musician and a singer also accompanied the workshop with live music. Iranian elements and fabrics were used to decorate the hall. In the first part of the workshop, after introducing herself and her musicians, Sayyad gave an introduction to the dance of Oneness and the participants introduced themselves and talked about their motivations for taking part in the workshop. Most of the people identified their interest in spirituality and separation from the physical world. The ones with the experience in Sayyad’s former workshops sought a deeper relationship with what is traditionally called the “beloved.” In her introduction to the philosophy of Sufism and the nature of Sufi whirling, Sayyad explained the application of this term in the context of Sufism and the poems of Rumi. She explained that she considers the dancer as lover, the God as beloved, and the dance of Oneness as a sacred dance and a medium to embody beloved. The session began with warm-up exercises and free-style dancing. The movements commenced with soft flowing and continued with shaking and explosive movements; finally, when approaching the level of ecstasy, the participants returned to a state of calmness. Sayyad lead the participants stepby-step and emphasized making one’s own space, own movement, and own rhythm, regarding the heart as center of the focus. The focus of the next session was on whirling. The right arms of the dancers reached towards the sky, and the left arms faced the ground. They whirled continuously, without pause. At the beginning, the steps were short, and the right foot drew a circle in four movements before two other steps were taken. It seemed here that the technique was solely to reaching one goal: seeking God and the self through dance. In each part, Sayyad read the poems of Rumi, first in Farsi, and then their translation in English. The whirling and the free style dance components of the workshop took half an hour. Participants with different background created sacred geometrical movements and concentrated on their movements as if there were no other people around them. They danced as if nobody was 43

Personal Interview, February 2015 in Los Angeles. (My translation)

5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home

watching them. This session finished with feedback from participants and their explanations of their experiences. The spirituality of the workshop, gaining energy from other participants and from the space, the way Sayyad made them dance gradually and supported them in becoming familiar with their bodies and inner energy were some of the highlights that participants identified.

Figure 22: Union, in the film In the Fire of Grace

(Screenshot from the video, taken by the author)

In following her pursuit of stabilizing and spreading the dance of Oneness, Sayyad is been successful in presenting it as a module in Wisdom University. Banafsheh Sayyad and Andrew Harvey have cooperated as faculty members to offer a course called “Mystical Andalusia: Garden Amidst the Flames, Ibn Arabi, Rumi and the Dance of Oneness” as a part of Wisdom University in Spain in 2017. The explanation if this training course on the website of the Wisdom University is as follows: Although they lived nearly 1,000 years ago, Ibn Arabi’s path of gnosis and Rumi’s vision of sacred passion can galvanize our hearts and minds in our time of complexity, turbulence, and uncertainty. Dive into their transformative knowledge of the divine and practice of love and surrender through the Dance of Oneness. Immerse yourself in a sacred field of empowering grace that supports you in living with reverence and light from your deepest passion in the very midst of life. Ignite your creative flame, ground and embody your passion and what makes you most ALIVE through a weaving

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of sacred dance set to world music, Sama/whirling, zambra/flamenco, freestyle dance, zikr/chanting, meditation, yoga, Sufi teachings, poetry, history, philosophy and excursions to the sacred sites of Andalusia. Uncover the connection between the flame of flamenco and the flame of the Sufi Sama/whirling. We will explore flamenco as the spirit of Shams and the meeting of the East as represented by Rumi and the West as represented by Ibn Arabi.44 Furthermore, Sayyad has started to officially train the dancers. She offers a program to offer certification in the dance of Oneness. To be an instructor, one has to “complete 200 hours of training plus 61 hours of teacher training. As a certified Dance of Oneness instructor you are responsible for guiding students into a conscious presence in their bodies and effectively teach Dance of Oneness technique.”45 By giving a defined curriculum, Sayyad demonstrates her tendency to publish her method and make it accessible to interested people. Sayyad’s multi-purpose efforts in making the dance of Oneness known and spreading it demonstrate her determination to stabilize and register her technique, which is not limited to her, although the creation of this technique has depended greatly Sayyad’s own life experience. As a teenager, Sayyad was grown up in a mixture of her grandmother’s spirituality, her parent’s artistic world and the radical religious setting of post-Revolution Iran. Then, she and her family were subject to mandatory immigration and settled in Los Angeles, a city with inhabitants from different religions and diverse cultures and unfinished demands on innovation. By tracing her motivations to experience different techniques and the path that she has taken to create the dance of Oneness, one can observe the influence of her life experience among contradictions in religion, culture, and location. As such, Sayyad moves not only between different techniques and modalities—not only between fully grounded and fully surrounded, lucidity and trance, or alienation and belonging—but in between various dualities and dichotomies, such as East versus West, traditional versus contemporary, Tehran versus Los Angeles, and local versus global. The accumulation of these life experiences, which are sometimes contradictory and in-between, has led Sayyad to gain the skill of relating and con-

44 45

http://www.ubiquityuniversity.org/wisdom-school/Andalusia2017.htm (September 14, 2018). https://banafsheh.org (Retrieved September 8, 2018)

5. Transformation and Reconnection to Home

necting contradictions and applying them for her own use in dance. Extracting the specific characteristics of each technique and interweaving them, her experience is both individual and unique. In this way, she creates the Oneness dance: a dance that is not Iranian and traditional, but is hybrid and contemporary and derived from the needs of its creator and followers, who seek spirituality and self-knowledge through dance. Her followers are global, not limited to the Iranian diaspora or the borders of America.

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Conclusion

As the research has demonstrated, consideration of exile is crucial for the study of the field of Iranian dance and dance in Iran. Exile has made the case of contemporary Iranian dance unique. Exile is a feeling, not necessarily a place, and it basically arises from history and is not dependent on geography. Exile can change the things. They do not have the same dimension, the same weight, and the same definition as previous anymore, which is why the exile can lead to the reconstruction of identity. This book, by means of analyzing the factors involved in the exile of the dance and its complicated consequences, has studied this sort of reconstruction and change of the form and the content of Iranian dance, and consequently the transformation in the working method of Iranian women dancers. This book takes a critical look at the history of Iranian dance. To accomplish this examination, turning points in which a change in the type of exile of dance has occurred have been studied: the turning and critical points that, according to Benjamin, should be reviewed, revised, and rethought in Jetztzeit to be understood. The results of the analysis of this research confirm that with more studies conducted to understand the current situation of Iranian dance and deeper research into its history, one faces newer and more unpredictable challenges. This book, referring to the discourses from the fields of dance, gender, cultural, and political studies, as well as philosophy, demonstrates that research concerning Iranian women dancers should not be limited to the dance discourses, but factors such as class, politics, colonization, and immigration should also be considered. The results of the data analysis verify that with the intervention of the Iranian and American power institutions and its exploitation of dance, a misunderstanding arose from the cultural differences in East and West and in a certain view of dance and women dancers, the suspension between tradition and modernity, the interpretation of ballet as a symbol of the modernity of dance, a perpetual understanding of the

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West as the source of inspiration, American literature in the field of Iranian dance, considering women dancers as Others inside and out of Iran, and finally, mandatory immigration, are the factors enforcing the marginalization, foreignness, and exile of Iranian dance and women dancers. The body of the Iranian female dancer, over time, and through moving to several places, has followed a transformative process: She has danced in parties, as an amateur, behind closed doors, and for only female audiences, and she has danced as a professional, in court, and in the presence of highranking political men. The common characteristic of all these performances is solo dancing, improvised with and accompanied by live music. Later, in the public domain, due to the absence of women, the men wearing feminine clothes would dance in parties and ceremonies. They imitated the makeup, hairstyles, and performance of the movements, so that distinguishing them from women dancers was difficult. Women’s dance in private gatherings and parties gradually became narrative and entrenched in a theatrical nature; the performances generally included the nakedness of some parts of the body, erotic and grotesque movements, and exaggeration. In these kinds of performances, women used to talk openly about their wishes, sexuality, and limitations in an ironical form. With a change in the political system, the emergence of the power of Pahlavi, the implementation of laws such as unveiling (Kashfe-Hijab), and women appearing in public places, women dancers of hired musical bands in the first half of the twentieth century found an opportunity to appear in the public gatherings and parties. This appearance, due to consideration of these women as “low class” and “not honorable,” left them marginalized and rejected in a new way, however. The modernization of Iran in the Pahlavi era was an important turning point in the changing application of the woman body in dance. In this era, the women dancers were divided between insiders and outsiders, and their bodies mediate for the realization of the political objectives of the ruling system. In the post Second World War milieu, and in line with the America’s plans for the country’s modernization, a new group of women dancers was introduced and emerged: very young dancers from the upper class. Ballet became an inseparable part of dance, and for the first time, the combination of tradition and modernity was reflected in dance. The woman dancer became the portrait of an ideal Iranian woman, and for the first time she went on the stage outside of Iran, as a cultural representative. With the presence of the American choreographers, exoticism and Orientalism were observed on the stages of Iranian dance for the first time, and this setting became a reflec-

Conclusion

tion of rural life and miniature paintings, or a platform for echoing Iranian history and civilization. Parallel to the appearance of the women dancers confirmed by the political power, some of the women dancers of the hired musical groups continued their activities in cabarets and cafés. The change of the performative venue of this group of dancers did not create a change in the recognition of their situation, and remained in an inferior social position and on the margins. The grotesque and exaggerated movements of the half-naked bodies of these cabarets and cafés dancers were contradicted the norms specified by the politics of the ideal and classical female dancer. Very few women dancers from cabarets and cafés became famous and appeared in the Film- Farsi Movies, which were very popular. The presence in another media means that considering them as Others did not lead to their complete elimination. As Butler declares, what does not fit the dominant norms is not excluded totally, but rather marginalized: “What remains ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unsayable’ within the terms of an existing cultural form is not necessarily what is excluded from the matrix of intelligibility within that form; on the contrary, it is the marginalized, not the excluded.”1 The 1979 Revolution had the same results for both above-mentioned groups of dancers. These women were forced into exile to survive, either staying at home and quitting work in their home country or settling in places miles from their home country. This trend persists even forty years after the 1979 Revolution. Being exotic, Oriental, ethnic, traditional and the cliché of an Oriental woman dancer are some of the labels resulted from this relocation. The research conducted in this book demonstrates clearly that the role of migration, amongst other factors, is more effective in the transformation of dance and the introduction of a new generation of dancers. One can observe that California, while being a place for exile the dance and dancers, has created a historical opportunity for revitalization and expansion of Iranian dance, due to it containing the largest population of Iranian diaspora in the world. The women dancers taken into account in this study have used the lack of knowledge of Iranian dance in America to experience and present Iranian dance with individual techniques. They have turned being in exile and far from home, with all its challenges, into an opportunity. As the research has verified, in process of the transformation of Iranian dance, America and American actors have played a decisive role, whether by importing ballet as a 1

Judith Butler: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 2010, p. 180. p. 98.

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crucial factor in the modernization of dance in Iran or by presenting Iranian dance as an exotic dance form after the settling of the Iranian immigrants in the US. American dance institutes involved in the presentation of Iranian dance embody Iranian dance through the women bodies covered in exotic costumes and heavy makeup. With the creation of beautiful, colorful, and dreamlike images these institutes succeeded in reconnecting Iranian immigrants to their homes. This connection was made in the years that the lives of these immigrants were filled with disappointment due to the 1979 Revolution and the Iran–Iraq war and when these new comers were dealing with the difficulties of residing in a new place and the trauma of being homeless. The results of the analysis of the interviews show that the opportunity to be in America or California has created a setting for Iranian women dancers to find themselves anew. They found the space to transform themselves and to present a new image of the Iranian dance, taking advantage from modern knowledge of dance, the free environment, and the hybrid setting. Moving bodies in exile create different identities and present various reflections of the individual experiences of the dancers. These bodies in exile are no longer traditionally defined bodies, but new bodies that shall be experienced and defined anew. Those new bodies create new choreographies, and their main characteristic in the context of exile is their relationship with the homeland. These connections are traceable through the choreographies of Aisan Hoss, Shahrzad Khorsandi, and Banafsheh Sayyad, and they are performed in different forms and styles. These three dancers’ variety of dance styles, including theatrical, spiritual, modern, and contemporary, are the result of their experimental approach. The plurality of styles and innovations typify a new genre of Iranian dance to be consolidated. The diversity of styles and the effort to be seen differently signify their willingness to liberate themselves from labels such as Oriental and traditional and to solidify their own individual styles. As these dancers and choreographers are alive and active in today’s world, they are therefore subject to change, facing changes in their surrounding environment, lifestyles, audiences, and perceptions of dance. The discussed women dancers and choreographers in this study benefit from the liminality stage. In this stage, individuals undergo a positive change in order to deal with a crisis. Their structures, norms, and ideas are suspended for a short time, so that after finding some mechanisms and solutions, these ideas and structures are upgraded to higher levels. Thus, liminality through the creation of structure would turn order to chaos and create a new order from the core of this chaos. It is clear that, on the same basis and due to being

Conclusion

in a determinative stage of liminality, the dancers of this research have succeeded in destroying old structures and creating new ones. The new dances are not necessarily aligned with Western standards and categories. As such, their style and technique are mostly described as “fusion” or “exotic” rather than contemporary or experimental. The technique and style of Aisan Hoss, Shahrzad Khorsandi and Banafsheh Sayyd has the potential to impact Iranian dance in the diaspora and in Iran. This kind of dance can establish itself as a new style because while it is new, it possesses elements of Iranianness. This style of dance is contemporary and belongs to the present time, based on modern techniques, while its music, themes, and parts of its movements are distilled from Iranian dance and culture. These dancers can realize such presentations due to their relative freedom in the US. The new image is based on experimentation and differs from the dominant and mainstream ethnic and Oriental images. Such experimental dancers maintain their distance from originality, authenticity, and the traditional interpretations of Iranian dance, without completely forgetting or ignoring it. They review and rewrite inherited past dance, and despite all challenges and stereotypes, they create new innovative and productive dances in exile, which are merely productions of relocation and exile in the US. The current situation of Iranian dance in California presents a turning point in the formation of Iran’s contemporary dance. The dancers in this study, despite the impossibility of traveling to Iran, are connected to people who are interested in dance pedagogy inside Iran through taking advantage of the possibilities of cyberspace and social media. Providing online courses and dialogue, they transfer their techniques and knowledge to Iran, especially in the current time of pandemic. Some of the online trainees have also held underground courses and shared their knowledge with participants. This mutual effect of the dancers in America being inspired by Iran’s setting and then sharing their knowledge and techniques with people inside Iran is a unique and special condition: Neither the dance trainer nor the trainee have the possibility to travel, move, or be present in each other’s locations, but their dance is yet in transition and bridges their separation. As such, future research should focus on studying the situation of contemporary dance inside Iran and the level of influence of Californian women dancers on it, as well as how Iranian dance, passing through the cyberspace and sharing its techniques with the trainees inside Iran, has been translated, interpreted, and transformed. The results of such research may provide a more perfect image

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of contemporary Iranian dance, which is mostly formed by the mediatized version of it. I regard the dancers taken into account in this research as contemporary women dancers who apply and integrate Iranian dance aesthetics in their choreographies. By interweaving different dance techniques, which seem to be confusing at first glance, these dancers have established themselves as glocal dancers, I suggest. These glocal dancers utilize the multidimensional advantages of globalization, such as cooperation with international groups, moving freely across borders (except those of Iran) to train trainees and access various new techniques. At the same time, to remain in the market they combine techniques and manipulate and reconceptualize Iranian dance aesthetics, based on local audience’s expectations and the performance environment. It should not be neglected that all three dancers—Aisan Hoss, Shahrzad Khorsandi, and Banafsheh Sayyad—are trained in Western and modern dance. Therefore, they exhibit indicators of this training, such as improvisation, musical accompaniment, use of a selection of costumes, simple and repeated movements, experimentation, the creation of personal and expressive techniques, the avoidance of labeling, and an emphasis on presenting a serious dance. These qualities can be seen in the choreographies of modern dance pioneers in America and have inspired these dancers. The difference in the styles of these dancers while they all benefit from the aesthetics of the Iranian dance, and the changes in the style of the dancers over time are two criticisms that can be argued based on being affected by the characteristics of the modern dance. Hoss belongs to Iran’s post-1979 Revolution generation and immigrated to California in 2013. Homeland for Hoss is associated with religion, darkness, the hijab, and sorrowful songs. Hoss’s early choreographies, which were created and performed in the first years of her immigration, clearly relate to Iran’s internal atmosphere. Through these very personal choreographies she fills the vacuum of being far from home and tries to not lose her sense of belonging to Iran. In this stage, inspirations from religious rituals performed in Iran are essential to her choreography. The subject of identity, migration, and loss are bolder in her more recent performances. In this way, dance is a reflection of Hoss’ life experiences in which home, relocation, and her transformations and challenges as an immigrant are illustrated. Since her immigration, Hoss has acted as an Iranian classical dancer in Ballet Afsaneh. She has changed her professional path after understanding and discovering the new environment of her residence, and she has experimented with

Conclusion

independent choreographies by taking advantage of cooperation with nonIranian dancers. Integrating the aesthetics of Iranian dance into the bodies of the dancers with Western backgrounds, she depicts a new image of Iranian dance. Khorsandi and Sayyad belong to the second generation of immigrants in America and have lived for many years there. This long time spent away from their homeland has led to them distancing themselves from the Iran’s current situation. The traditional architecture, literature, and Iranian classical music for Khorsandi—and the poetry, mysticism, spirituality and calligraphy for Sayyad—are the sources of inspiration that they relate to the history of Iran. For these two dancers, inspiration from the past has provided the context for a transformation. The accumulation of the memories and the experiences of these dancers have remained in their bodily memory and serve as a source of inspiration even after years of their exile from home and influencing their current dances. Although the utilization of Iranian dance aesthetics by Khorsandi and Sayyad, and their approaches more generally, are completely different, they have experienced the same process of expanding their techniques. Both were first trained in Western dance techniques and then started to work professionally with Iranian dance. The current stable condition of these two dancers is a result of experience and the encounter of body with diverse techniques over time. After years, these three dancers have succeeded in establishing themselves by setting up a dance academy (Khorsandi), defining an individual dance vocabulary (Khorsandi, Sayyad), publishing a textbook (Khorsandi), mapping Iranian dance movements with an appropriate naming system (Khorsandi), training new dancers and multipliers (Khorsandi, Sayyad, Hoss), and choreographing for non-Iranian dancers (Khorsandi, Hoss). Being in the US has provided Iranian women dancers with a free environment in which to work, away from the restrictive regulations with which they would have to contend inside Iran. Therefore, it gives an introduction to the approach they are following in the free capitalist and customer-oriented atmosphere of the US, which is always seeking innovation and novelty. Contrary to hegemonic representational systems, the mentioned dancers do not tend to highlight and essentialize the dichotomy of East versus West. Their productions are bricolage and hybrid, reflecting their interest in integration in their new home. Their exile has made way for them to incorporate, assimilate, modify, and appropriate Western dance styles and approaches and to create a space in which they can move free of their chains. Living at the border of two dance cultures has created the opportunity for them to be creators

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of a new dance style that does not belong to East or West but is instead the interwoven result of the developments of the contemporary world.

List of Figures Figure 1: Women covered in chadors at the beginning of the twentieth century (Photo: Antoin Sevruguin) ...................................................... 38 Figure 2: Womens dress code after unveiling law .................................... 41 Figure 3: A female Motreb band ................................................... 60 Figure 4: Jamileh dancing in the movie Outcast in 1970s (Translated from the Farsi title Rande Shode) ...................................................... 65 Figure 5: The women of Naser al- Din Shah Qajar’s harem in ballet tutus ............ 69 Figure 6: The Caravan, rehearsing outside ......................................... 75 Figure 7: Prayer of Darius, Haideh Ahmadzadeh. ................................... 77 Figure 8: Nesta Ramezani pictured on the cover of her book The Dance of the Rose and the Nightingale ...................................................... 79 Figure 9: Ruth St. Denis in The Peacock ............................................ 99 Figure 10: La Meri incorporating classical Indian dance into the ballet Swan Lake, Photo by Jack Mitchell, 1951................................................... 101 Figure 11: Roya (The Dream), choreography by Ballet Afsaneh, 2011 ................. 109 Figure 12: Identity Theft: Dance and Choreography by Aisan Hoss .................. 144 Figure 13: Identity Theft: An autobiographical choreography ........................ 145 Figure 14: Yiel(D)isinherit: Choreographing of home’s memories...................... 147 Figure 15: Shedding Skin: Carrying the past with all its heaviness ................... 149 Figure 16: Khorsandi in Rounama pose, photo by Scott Belding, 2004.................157 Figure 17: Bam, ODC Theater, 2006. ................................................ 162 Figure 18: Talkh-O-Shirin, ODC Theatre, 2006 ...................................... 165 Figure 19: Delroba downward pose in the frontal plane in a duet (Talkh-O-Shirin) .... 168 Figure 20: Embodying the Persian alphabet in the film In the Fire of Grace ........... 171 Figure 21: Combination of the two dance techniques: Flamenco and Iranian Dance in Falling in Love, in the film In the Fire of Grace .............................176 Figure 22: Union, in the film In the Fire of Grace..................................... 179

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