Your work is intended as a homage to the Shiraz Arts Festival, which lasted from 1967 to 1977, but it is also very abstract. How did you develop this connection?

The creative process took two years. We started by immersing ourselves in what was the remainder of the festival, learning the dances for which archival materials were accessible. There were works by Maurice Béjard, Merce Cunningham, Kathakali dance groups, the National Algerian Ballet… We had no intention of using them on stage, but it formed our consciousness of the festival, and we were embodying movements without knowing whether we would use them. I guess we were finding ways to form a relationship with the event. At some point, I had the central idea of having a hand placed in front of the face, the reason behind this choice needs a longer discussion. But this became the central gesture of the work, which was then built around it almost like doing craftwork: by articulating the physicality of it, exploring how it relates to musicality, trying to understand the volume and attitude, observing which articulations are working. The idea was to build a memory of the festival and fabricate a dance that we imagined could have happened at it.

You have to understand that this work is both a dance piece and a revival of another event. At the moment the audience is watching it, it is also taking place, in a sense, at a different place. This is the conceptual premise of reviving the Shiraz festival, and beyond the ideas behind the piece, it has the potential to be appreciated by the audience as an experience in this moment. I had to constantly go back and forth to understand the relationship we were drawing between the historical event and what we were producing. Were we portraying it, describing it, representing it? I realized that I was never going to find a specific answer to that question and probably the audience would have to draw a relationship between what they see and what the piece proposes itself to be. But since I didn’t want to fully withdraw from the responsibility of answering the question, I integrated my different answers into different elements of the piece.

How did you work on the relationship between narrative and abstraction?

As an example, the dancers all come from different training influences, and I considered them all as different works in a festival. One of the results that I found interesting was forming a group that has a shared vocabulary but whose particularities are also very visible. It does not represent a community, but it creates the potential for togetherness. That refers back to the festival, which trusted in the autonomy of the works that it programmed and their capacity to generate something together about which people did not necessarily have preconceived ideas.

Another example is that the movements create a series of highly specific forms. We explored how to generate possibilities for spatial relationships without requiring people to be in a dictated formation; it’s more like a passage that we go through together. This relationship to space that we cultivated also relates to the idea of the festival, which presented pieces in unconventional places, very close to each other, to create convergences between the works and the audiences. That gave me the idea that the space should be fluid, with movements that may seem indeterminate but then come together in constellations.

How did the diverse aesthetic approaches included in the Shiraz Arts Festival ultimately influence the choreographic language of the piece?

My previous work on internationalism informs a lot of Shiraz. I’m interested in frames for what we do that make it possible to create new choreographic languages. I didn’t want there to be any available form of authentication for the practice that you see. No one can say whether it’s an Iranian dance, a folk dance, and so on. I wanted to avoid readings that are too easy and prevent the adoption of a position that interprets the piece through an ethnographic or stylistic lens. Because I’ve noticed that people from a non-European background, including me, are often perceived solely through the lens of cultural identity or personal background. I therefore try to find a way to avoid established frames of analysis for works by people of colour and to avoid dance becoming only in service of reaffirmation of the individual.

I don’t dance to become visible nor does the dance have to necessarily confirm anything in relation to me. What I enjoy about dance is that it enables me to hide, to disappear. For me, it offers the possibility of empowerment not through appearing but through disappearing. The desire to affirm this also led to the recurring gesture of a hand in front of a face.

Back to the show

Interview with Armin Hokmi

More news

Interview with Serge Aimé Coulibaly

Interview with Charlie Khalil Prince and Olivia Tapiero

Interview with Harald Beharie