Ali Asghar Dashti & Nasim Ahmadpour – “We Came To Dance” (Kunstenfestivaldesarts)

“Can we fundamentally give a dancer an order to stop moving? […] Is dance not defined as the potential movement within the dancer’s stillness?” These questions, read aloud in a calculated calm, resound throughout We Came to Dance.

Iranian director Ali Asghar Dashti and playwright Nasim Ahmadpour introduce the performance as a socio-performative action, a contract between the audience members and the four readers on stage, which may or may not be the actual people credited as the makers and performers of this piece. I say readers, for these individuals deliberately refrain from performing a character or even their self; they don’t really engage with the audience, either. Nothing is spontaneous or contingent, not even an involuntary gesture. Everything that appears or does not appear is already proscribed by the projected hypertext, leaving nothing to chance. 

Right off the bat, We Came to Dance sets up the experiential conditions for what it seeks to discuss: The ban on dance in Iran. Specifically, a wave of censorship in 2022 targeted contemporary dancers in Iran and forced them to post a recantation on their social media platforms. Dashti and Ahmadpour take off from this recent prohibition and follow the broader censorship on dance and performance after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Since Dashti and Ahmadpour are not from the dance world, they invite choreographer Mostafa Shabkhan as a specialist. However, their account drifts back to theatre as they invoke Pourazari’s namesake, Hamid Samandarian, who deflected attacks on his company in the 1980s by opening a restaurant as a stand-in for theatre. Pourazari tells us how Samandarian was denied to stage Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo (1938/43)—a masterpiece on the masking of truth across experiment, expression, and expulsion that Brecht had penned during his exile from Nazi Germany. Pourazari recalls watching this sham restaurant from outside its windows as a teenager, speculating on how the actors of Samandarian company might have just as well rehearsed and staged the play in between serving meals to customers. A brief series of gestures was etched in Pourazari’s memory from that “unactualized event” of performing Galileo’s trial in Tehran—a little choreography of turning the head, stamping one foot, and pointing a finger to the ground. This dance of “eppur si muove” becomes a refrain in between other descriptions of dancing in the supertitles, such as a Nawruz celebration or the bouncy joy of Iranian police officers at the World Cup victory, spiraling further the mise-en-abîme of censorship. 

“Dashti and Ahmadpour put the entire performance machinery to a halt and refuse taking its expressivity or presence for granted.”

Dashti and Ahmadpour put the entire performance machinery to a halt and refuse taking its expressivity or presence for granted. They remove almost everything to be seen; the vitality of bodies and motions are entirely described in words, which introduces a precarity to them beyond the ephemerality or virtuality of dance much philosophized in the Western literature. The movement is still “potentially” there, but the meaning of potential is more akin to everyone being potentially a criminal under authoritarian regimes. As such, the artists are adamant to not let go of this illicit potentiality by exercising their borrowed freedom to dance: “It is only sentimental when you dance on behalf of those who can’t.” 

Although they frame the work with judicial and documentary terms such as “expert opinion” or “faithful report,” Dashti and Ahmadpour are not relying on the forensic “truth effect” of real-life interviews or images. Thus, they avoid the trap of giving accounts of selves and pandering to the non-Iranian audience’s need to feel (somewhat self-congratulatory) empathy. However, I was heavy with some puzzlements as I walked out the theatre (and into the Beursplein where P.A.R.T.S. students had been doing very patterned movements in very public view earlier that day). Are the reasons and structures for the ban on dance and the censorship on theatre interchangeable in Iran? Is “artistic dance,” dance that is choreographed by individuals to be shown and watched by others, suppressed in the same way as other forms of ritual or celebratory dances among a collective? What is the scope of public dance, considering other recent arrests of people who happened to shake it up outdoors or posted videos of their bedroom choreographies? What about traditional dance forms? How did the censorship identify “contemporary” dancers in 2022—was it about dance as a Western import? What about the role of gender and sexuality in this, since elsewhere I heard it formulated as ban on women’s dancing? 

Dashti and Ahmadpour conflate all such distinctions I seek to parse out. Perhaps, it is because the authority doesn’t care about any of these questions since arbitrariness is its nature. It has to neither justify its orders nor clarify what counts as dance, which comes in handy when the political tides change and prerogatives are granted. Yet I had a lingering need to ask when and how movement actually, and not potentially, becomes dance that which must be prevented or punished, by the artists’ or the censor’s standard. 

Instead, We Came to Dance arrests dance ontologically by relaying it in language. Interestingly, this is tantamount to the notion of choreography in Western modernity that many artists and theorists have criticized, as arbitrary codes to be executed by a presumable universal body in hypothetical space and time. While the censored contemporary dancers in Iran may have been influenced by these very critiques, Dashti’s and Ahmadpour’s exhausting dance is of different kind, of protesting in solidarity with dancers in Iran by exiling themselves behind the tables in Brussels. As Ahmadpour reads, “You can’t abolish dance by limiting movement,” I am reminded of both Iranian choreographer Tanin Torabi’s pedestrian actions on streets as fugitive dances and Steve Paxton’s Small Dance in which he just stood up negotiating gravity contra the directive to perform under late capitalism. In other words, I am intrigued by this strange mirroring between the resilience of artists under ban on “patterned and public movement” and the postmodern critique of choreography that defined “contemporary” in Euro-American dance. We Came to Dance closes with words “truth is revealed,” which echoes the Ancient Greek term aletheia, the truth as unveiling or remembering. However, the piece’s reversal on choreographing and policing bodies ends up in a total eclipse between different regimes of power, which is as telling as perplexing. I am still wondering if this strange coincidence of opposites was felt by other members of the KFDA audience.

This article appeared in ETCETERA on June 13, 2024, and has been reposted with permission. To read the original article, please click here.