Imagine there was no such thing as dance. Or not in public at least. No legal clubs or parties. No dance schools or opportunity to dance on stage without risk of punishment. A joke or a bad dream? No ‒ this has been the state of affairs since the 1979 revolution in Iran. Don’t Move explores the effects of such a situation on people whose passion and raison d’etre happens to be just that. How do they manage to dance despite the circumstances? What strategies do they invent to evade the censors damning glare? For as so many other things, dance still exists in the Islamic Republic, although it is forbidden.

The piece was inspired by an encounter with male and female dancers from Teheran who are not allowed to refer to themselves as such. Even the word “dance” itself must not be pronounced. If ‒ against all odds and subject to the most stringent conditions ‒ a piece of this nature does get to be performed, the official term is „rhythmic movement.“ Rehearsals take place in cleared living rooms or on attic floors among the rooftops. But despite these constraints, the desire to develop a dance piece across all the geographical, cultural and political barriers in cooperation with dancers based in Berlin has now borne fruit.

In Don’t Move, Modjgan Hashemian creates a connection between Teheran and Berlin with the purpose of discovering what danger moving bodies harbour and how social norms and limitations impress themselves on the body. The limits of what can be described as dance provided the common point of departure in this investigation. What drives us to dance in the first place? Does the body have its own emancipating potential that can influence social and hence political affairs?

That is life in Teheran. You don’t walk through town. You don’t move. You don’t actually need your legs. You become this legless creature. The most you ever walk is from one door to the next, which is seldom more than 10 metres away. There’s a rumour that the earth in this city is subject to a greater force of gravity than anywhere else. We call it „heavy earth“. All we do is sit. We don’t move anymore. That’s why I want to dance. S.R.

Modjgan Hashemian, dancer and choreographer grew up in Teheran and Berlin. Her piece Move in Patterns, based on childhood memories from the early days of the Islamic Revolution, was shown to great acclaim at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße in 2009. In the process of developing Don’t Move, she met a great variety of dancers in Iran (folk, classic Iranian dance, dance theatre) whose life and work, experience and stories all went into the making of this piece.

Choreography: Modjgan Hashemian

Dramaturg: Susanne Vincenz

Video/Stage/Costume: Isabel Robson, Heike Schuppelius

Music : Oliver Doerell,
Behruz Tavakol

Light design: Benjamin Schälike
Starring: Ashkan Afsharian, Derrick Amanatidis, Martin Hansen, Elahe Moonesi, Banafsheh Nejati, Maryam Nikandish, Jeanna Serikbeayeva, Anonymus