A cathartic feminist dance ritual
Situating ZĀĀR in its context as a part of a long-term research project and within its original cosmological landscape
The Iranian-Austrian choreographer Ulduz Ahmadzadeh, as a researcher, draws on rare documentation and, as a dancer, on her own embodied memories of dancing marginalized and mostly forbidden indigenous dances from the Persian plateau. For this piece, she travels south, from the Persian Gulf to the African continent, to encounter healing rituals called ZĀĀR. According to the local communities, spirits in the form of the wind possess people by entering their bodies through their mouths and noses, and only a prolonged collective dance to the sound of relentlessly repeated drumming can make them speak and reveal their wishes so that the possessed may find peace.
Ulduz Ahmadzadeh’s dramaturgical engagement with these stories and oral dance histories, fusing them with various dance materials from the South and West Asian traditions as well as with contemporary dance elements, offers a staged contemporary dance performance that intentionally challenges the Western modern aesthetics we are so often exposed to in Central Europe. Audiences familiar with ATASH عطش’s previous pieces can indeed trace the common dance language and musical rhythmic patterns that weave them together.
A feminist choreographer with decolonial intentions
Often the leaders of the ritual are women and called Māmā Zār.
ZĀĀR is performed by the dance group PARASOL, which this year is composed of five female bodies of mixed ethnic and racial origin: Helena Araújo, Elda Gallo, Yoh Morishita, Jennie-love Navoret and Viltė Švarplytė. “Possessed” by the wind, not only do they gradually immerse themselves in a relentlessly ecstatic dance, but their own bodies transform into percussion instruments that keep up and change between complex rhythmic patterns and metrics throughout the hour-long performance. In the midst of the almost hypnotic staging, the dancers, dressed in mesmerizing handmade costumes by Till Jasper Krappmann, radiate feminine strength through their unique and collective movements, postures, gazes and energy, based on an embodied feminist solidarity of the kind mostly forgotten and undervalued in colonial/modern societies. Acknowledging my many privileges, as a feminist woman, a mother, a dancer, a physical human body, I still feel the urge to join these five witches in their cathartic ritual and heal with them our different yet interconnected wounds inflicted by colonial patriarchy. Without romanticizing or exoticizing such dances or the communities that practice them, it honestly saddens me to be reminded of the fact that I live in a so-called modern society where dance is not an inseparable part of life. It makes me sad that when “possessed” by “bad (colonial/patriarchal) spirits” that make us depressed, the modern bodies numb their pain by going to therapy and taking pills instead of joining hands in a collective dance.
Challenging contemporary dance education
This year, the PARASOL dance group was tested in endurance and musicality and had the unique opportunity to dance movement material, learn about musical patterns, and dance cosmologies that fall outside of the canon of dance history, and hence they are rarely, if ever, explored in contemporary dance schools.
Despite that, dance cannot and should not be separated from migration, the role of migration has been systematically ignored in the development of contemporary dance in the so-called West. Is this history of dance built on migrant/mobile bodies reflected in the curricula of contemporary dance schools? In the case of Iranian dances, as Elaheh Hatami explains, especially when we talk about Iranian contemporary dance, we cannot take the factors of migration and exile out of the picture. They are inextricable parts of it.[1]
Exile, both in terms of migration and in terms of exclusion and marginalization at home. Dance and mobility are deeply connected not only because dance has to do with movement or the absence of movement, but because mobile bodies, migrant bodies have shaped the histories of what we now call contemporary dance. However, dance institutions such as TQW should by no means settle with having migrant dancers and choreographers diversifying the contemporary dance scene. The real decolonial gesture would be to offer funding opportunities and infrastructure to carry out “mobile dance projects” that create dance dialogues not only between contemporary dance and other(ed) dances but also between the so-called peripheries themselves.
An invitation
ZĀĀR invites us to delve into the beauty and complexity of dance materials that have been practiced for millennia by indigenous communities in different geographical peripheries.
Actively engaging with dances that fall outside of the contemporary dance canon can help contemporary dance to be self-reflexive about its own history, which is less linear and more complicated and diverse than we might think today. A respectful engagement with these dances and all the pluriverses they carry and enact can facilitate the destabilization of the assumed linearity of both the genealogies of contemporary dance and its tendency to exist and thrive in its opposition to and negation of those dances that fall outside of the “genealogy of contemporaneity”[2]. Moreover, the practice of these dances outside of their original contexts can help us to destabilize the colonial borders according to which Europe, and the Global North in general, are assumed to be and should remain predominately white, modern and supposedly “progressive” in contrast to the “traditional” others.
[1] Hatami, Elaheh (2022). Glocal Bodies: Dancers in Exile and Politics of Place: A Critical Study of Contemporary Iranian Dance (Vol. 62). transcript Verla.
[2] Vázquez, Rolando (2020). Vistas of modernity: decolonial aesthesis and the end of the contemporary. Amsterdam: Mondriaan Fund.
Maria Vlachou is a researcher in gender studies, particularly focusing on the intersections between decolonial feminisms and critical migration studies. She is also a passionate advocate of collective, processual, creative and slow research that takes embodied everyday experience and memory as its entry points. Together with her feminist collective Loving Coalitions, she publishes articles on feminist issues, fusing academic writing with creative forms of writing such as poetry, fiction, automatic writing, stories and memoirs. She is also a mother, yoga teacher and dance lover. Current institutional affiliation: Guest Lecturer of Gender Studies at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Klagenfurt. @alice.in_yogaland