Abstract:
This practice-led PhD [research] is a solo performance experiment by a woman from Iran who lives and dances as a migrant, transgeographically.
The research echoes the migratory and nomadic transitions between the political question: How can I move without being seen?
And the critical: How can I be seen without moving? Dance in Iran is illegal. Discussing dance in relation to the choreophobic context of Iran
necessitates alternative modes and locations for movement. In response to these challenges and questions, and by moving nomadically
between local and global geopolitics, my solo experimentations are choreopolitical suggestions to spatialise alternatives for negotiating in
between paradoxical places and their politics. These alternative spatialisations are embodied through the following solo performances and
videographies: The Missing Score (2017-2018, live solo), Let the Wind Carry Us (2018, video documentation of the praxis), hamoom zànoonéh (2019,
documented in the written thesis), Effortless Power on the Edge (2019, live solo), and The Missing Score/ A Requiem for a Solo (2019, live solo).
Through the choreographic practice of solo performance, I reconsider and question partial and situated subjectivity as operating through the
concept of liminality: What sort(s) of corporeality is communicable choreographically in liminality? Where is the topography of this liminality? What
strategies can be practiced to resist and negotiate the conflictual struggles embedded in the liminal positionality? Ambiguity, uncertainty, and
simultaneity are the potentials of liminality that I experiment with to move counter to the politics of visibility.
Coming from the underground community of dance in Iran, I consider invisibility as a strategic mode of emergence as a dancing body,
politically safe and free. I am inspired by Iranian film artists such as Abbas Kiarostami as well as women photographers (Haleh Anvari and
Shadi Qadirian) and poets (Forough Farrokhzad) to spatialise a heterotopic space (Michael Foucault) for emerging as an alternative
corporeality within the normative spatio-temporalities. Politically and poetically, I am inspired by the works of the Iranian underground dance
community in terms of the strategies applied to deal with the risk of visibility. I draw upon Peggy Phelan’s ‘unmarked’ corporeality and
Elizabeth Grosz’s ungraspable space of ‘chora’ for philosophically spatializing a non-representational dance practice. Investigating a
disembodied and de-territorialised subjectivity, I draw on post-phenomenology (Suzan Kozel), Nomadology, and Becoming theory (Gilles
Deleuze and Rosi Braidotti) to resist being fixated/located and identified as a dancing subject. Through Saba Mahmood and Lila Abu-Lughod,