A Preview of “Dancing with Hafez”
When asked what message she hopes to convey with Dancing with Hafez, Parya Saberi responds: “I feel like I’m dancing the message.” This is no small statement for an Iranian woman who grew up in post-revolutionary Iran, where “dancing the message” is effectively considered an illegal act. September 15–17, 2023 at San Francisco’s Dance Mission Theater, Saberi, who grew up learning to dance in underground spaces and performing at covert social gatherings, will share her message with the world.
While Saberi was working on her MFA in Dance at Saint Mary’s College of California, the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world. As the public sequestered themselves at home and flight after flight was grounded, Parya Saberi’s mother, a scholar of Iranian poetry, was on her way to Iran when her flight was canceled in Boston. In the midst of the chaos, Saberi found an opportunity to connect with her mother by reading works by the famous Iranian poet, Hafez.
“Every day at 8am PST, me in San Francisco and my mom in Boston, we would read Hafez. Hafez has nearly 500 poems, and it took us over 500 days to read all of his poetry, essentially the span of the pandemic. While reading it I gained this really deep appreciation for his poetry and how much movement is encapsulated. This cannot be translated because as soon it is translated a lot of the movement is lost. There is so much movement in Iranian poetry.”
It is out of these readings that the first iterations of Dancing with Hafez were born. What began as her MFA thesis, produced entirely online because of COVID-19 precautions, has evolved into a more in-depth work. The evening-length, immersive piece includes recognizable references and imagery related to Iranian culture, including gardens, poetry, architecture, and cultural dances. It also delves into issues of gender, beauty standards, restrictions, identity, and what it means to be “free.” As she embarked on the choreographic process, she also began reflecting on her life in Iran, and navigating the social and cultural complexities of identifying as “a dancer” in a place where corporeal expression is tightly regulated. She remembers her own confusion as underground performance-goers from an older generation watched her lively performances with tears in their eyes. Why were they crying? Many years later, Saberi found the answer:
“If you’ve been restricted all your life, you don’t know what it is like to not be restricted, but we realized we were trying to create something from this place of oppression which was probably really disheartening to people who had actually seen freedom.”
From this place of reflection, research which began with the poetry of her culture began to produce new questions for Saberi around diaspora, identity, and what “Contemporary Iranian Dance” might look like.
A crucial note here is that Iranian dance (and identity, for that matter) is anything but a monolith and cannot be unpacked in a single article. In order to contextualize Saberi’s work, it is important to situate it in the fairly recent (1950s) development and popularization of so-called classical dance, which carries with it the same implications that all classical forms bear: imperialism, coloniality, nationalism, and control. Iranian classical dances (not to be confused with folkloric or regional cultural dances), which paint a near-courtly vision of delicate movements and flowing dresses, are often upheld as a beacon of cultural preservation. However, this form only tells one part of the story. As with many art forms, the label of ‘classical’ is a suggestion that the nation which produced it has lineage, competency, and standing on the global stage. References to the ‘classical’ commonly conjure a natural association with the West such as (Western) classical music, classical (Western) philosophy. Considering the legacy of power which has, in recent history, largely passed through Western societies, it would follow that the integration and establishment of ‘classical’ forms legible to those in power would be part and parcel of any state’s quest for global recognition. Pre-revolution Iran was no different. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who ruled Iran from 1941–1979, made sweeping attempts to “modernize” the country to the global standard of the time. Pahlavi initiated many national projects with his eye on developing Iran as a global power, and one of those projects was the establishment of the Iranian National Ballet in 1958. The ballet largely produced Western classics such as Les Sylphides and the Nutcracker, which were choreographed and staged almost exclusively by choreographers from Europe and the United States. British ballet dancer Robert de Warren served as a primary choreographer, and was also commissioned to establish the National Folklore Society of Iran in 1970, which aimed to research, perform, and preserve the country’s regional dances. It is the legacy of Eurocentrism which prevailed in Iran that has motivated a proverbial “pendulum swing” for many Iranian artists. Saberi unpacks the ways in which these Eurocentric values impacted the development of Iranian dance:
“What’s kind of off-place to me in this whole thing is that the national ballet was also severely appropriated and took a big hit with Westerners who were trying to make the national ballet ‘up to snuff.’ Like somehow there’s something inherently wrong with Iranian dancing that needed to be ‘cleaned’ and ‘cleansed,’ The national ballet in itself is a form of self-hatred, we weren’t good enough and we needed a Westerner to come in and make us be better.”
Although Iran was never overtly colonized, the push to ‘modernize’ and to be accepted into the circle of powers which were controlled by Western societies caused a more internal expression of coloniality: “…to me Iran is an example of a covert colony, an unnamed colony, there is colonization on many sectors and levels of Iran, especially the arts.”
It is no surprise that while grappling with the post-revolution traumas, migrations, and sociopolitical realities, concerted, passionate efforts were (and continue to be) made to preserve Iranian culture. Saberi ruminates that this legacy, in some instances, leads to an emphasis on hyper-traditionalism, ironically sometimes most staunchly upheld by those who are not of Iranian heritage. This tendency towards a “fixed” definition of Iranian dance further complexifies contemporary explorations of Iranian identity in performance. Saberi adds:
“Many in the diaspora are afraid of losing the past that they’re so afraid to look to the future. For these people, keeping things frozen in time from 44 years ago is a better way of preserving art than trying to create and innovate in the diaspora.”
Saberi, however, is taking a different path. Dancing with Hafez is an untethered expression of her full identity, complete with an unflinching reckoning with cultural pain, mourning, and resistance. In her willingness to subvert tradition and commit to radical, embodied honesty, she has created something that belongs wholly to her:
“This is my dance. This is my Iranian contemporary dance. That can never be taken away from me and there’s no way anyone can appropriate that.”
This liberatory piece could not have come at a more poignant moment. Dancing with Hafez will be performed at the one year anniversary mark of the murder of Mahsa Amini by Iranian authorities. The Women, Life, Freedom movement that erupted in the wake of Amini’s death brought a renewed sense of solidarity and empowerment amongst (and with) Iranian women globally. Although it started as Saberi’s thesis and a personal connection, Dancing with Hafez has now become a contribution to that revolution. From performers, to musicians, to the production team, Saberi has prioritized keeping Dancing with Hafez as a woman-led performance while holding Iranian women at the center. Most notably, Saberi has produced this work in collaboration with co-director Suhaila Salimpour, who is a dance icon of Iranian Kurdish heritage. At the height of the Women, Life, Freedom protests in November 2022, Salimpour phoned a despondent Saberi. It was during that phone call that the plan to produce a full, live production of Dancing with Hafez was set in motion. Salimpour canceled her well-attended dance classes for the next couple of months, and offered Saberi the space to rehearse. Saberi has choreographed and together with Salimpour has staged the pieces in Dancing with Hafez on Suhaila Dance Company. These dancers, by way of rigorous study with Salimpour, have developed the cultural sensitivity and nuance required to embody this type of work.
Saberi says “It was very much a lifeline…like a gift.” Salimpour says that this was an easy decision to make, and although she and Saberi have had different experiences, they have found meaningful points of connection in this work:
“Our experiences were different but we are able to find overlap in the cross-cultural immigrant experience, and this comes through in the way we collaborate.”
Both artists are quick to underscore the ease, trust, and support that stems from this shared background and their years of working together.
Saberi says she wanted to work with Salimpour because “she is from the culture and really understands the background I’m coming from, so I don’t have to explain why I’m making some of the choices I’m making…she gets it. She also gets the need for contemporary Iranian dance and gets that to a deep degree. Suhaila is bringing in this ‘East meets West’ mentality…while she has this strong Eastern dance background, she also has Western dance sensibilities which can be applied in a theatrical setting. It’s almost like reverse cultural appropriation.”
This “reverse appropriation” of using the proscenium stage and Western dance concepts is a powerful way to (re)orient the viewer’s lens to highlight and center Iranian issues. Salimpour expounds on the importance of producing this piece in this way, at this particular moment in time:
“This show was birthed out of absolute frustration and anger and hopelessness, it is a complete political response, and dance is political. When I think of Eastern dance I think of community, I think of everyday movements, I think of everyday life, of the people. Even though it’s presented in a more Western movement and dance space, there are examples of what’s happening in our culture: the anger, the upheaval, the fight is all vibrating in this show. I don’t think you’re going to leave this theatre and say ‘oh that was so pretty.’ When words don’t work, when protests don’t work, when battles and arrests and beatings don’t work, this is what we have to do. To me, this is a necessity.”
In addition to Salimpour, Saberi has partnered with Bay Area leaders of Iranian dancers: Aisan Hoss, Shahrzad Khorsandi, and Aliah Najmabadi, each of whom will perform a movement study inspired by Iranian individuals who have lost their lives to the Iranian Regime. Each of these dancers has expertise in Iranian dance and the lived Iranian experience, and are using the dance forms of their culture to both preserve and innovate in the Iranian dance sphere.
Saberi’s work has a great amount of support from her community, including Jill Randall of Shawl-Anderson Dance Center (publicity), faculty at Saint Mary’s College including Cathy Davalos and Rogelio Lopez, a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission, and seed funding from Dancers’ Group.
Saberi’s piece unpacks what it means when imprisonment and control are not restricted to borders and boundaries, but are carried within the body. Dancing with Hafez offers a glimpse into working with legacies of grief and restriction, and that there is no triumphant moment where one “breaks free” of those legacies. After extended oppression, total freedom may never be possible, but perhaps a simple “happily ever after” ending doesn’t do justice to the difficult journey Saberi has taken to surmount those challenges. The ability to transform and transmute her experiences into moving art, where bodies dare to take the space they are historically denied, is exactly the empowered, self-determined victory that Saberi, and Iranian women, deserve.
Dancing with Hafez
September 15–17, 2023
Dance Mission Theater, San Francisco