“Habiba, did you already book your ticket to Lebanon? They are bombing Beyrouth again”
As I’m about to board my flight to Vienna, my phone screen flashes with a text, sent by my friend Diana. I stare at my phone and answer mechanically:
“I did dear, but it’s okay, let’s wait and see. If, at the first bomb dropped, we have to cancel our travels, we might never get to see our countries again”
As the words I sent sink in, a quiet anger moves me. I let it seep into my bones.
We are entering the sixteenth month of the genocide in Gaza and attacks on Lebanon, destroying everything in their way. Human lives, centuries of history, and, little by little, all hopes for the future and trust in the system. There have been many stages that we went through collectively. As the months go by though, what remains is an unfathomable feeling of despair.
We land in Vienna, and I head to Tanzquartier Wien, trying to shake off what still remains in my body and consciousness. I really am impatient to experience Ulduz Ahmadzadeh’s new piece. Her work has been very significant to me, as an art worker from the Iranian diaspora. In the last months, I must admit it sometimes became unbearable to sit down quietly to watch pieces that felt so disconnected from all that is unravelling in the world right now. All that abstraction and intellectual self-indulgence crystallized the major discrepancies in the realities we inhabit. Rare are the pieces that offer alleviation through these heavy times.
Yet, amidst it all, VASHT managed to move many souls, mine included. Ulduz’s work is a very precious one: a practice that resists erasure and simplistic narratives through flamboyant performances stemming from deeply rooted research. This time, the framework used is the one of the Silk Road, highlighting how much exchange and fluidity amongst borders have been instrumental in the emergence of dance forms.
The piece opens with the luring image of an androgynous djinn with hooves, swinging against a background of intricate carpets. I recognize some of them, stemming from Iran, but also, as I later found out, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. Many times before, Ulduz celebrated the region by defying narrow ideas of national identity.
The tone is already set. I let myself get hypnotized by the gentle balancing and the vibrant colours of the rugs. My meditative state is soon interrupted by loud explosions behind the carpets, clouds of dust bursting through their rich weaving.
These explosions, which were also resonating in many places at that very moment – outside the protected space of the theater –, were part of Ulduz’s sonic landscape growing up in Iran in the 1980s. My initial tension fades into awe as I realize the power of Ulduz’s gesture: these explosions, shaking up the carpets, don’t destroy them. They only dust them off. Ashes on the floor, and tears in my eyes as the idea sinks in.
The dancers – Desi Bonato, Naline Ferraz, Andrei Nistor, Adela Maharani and Abdennacer Leblalta – engage in a dexterous performance, leaving the entire audience in awe, following their every move. They pour their whole beings into this moment, and it’s a gesture that deserves to be saluted. The maximalist world they conjure – alongside the lush scenography imagined by Till Jasper Krappmann and the incredible soundscape composed by Pouya Ehsaei – is a beautifully crafted space to move through.
Beyond the delight of being immersed in this vision, there is deep meaning in seeing these movements brought to the stage: due to a lack of research, documentation, and archiving, as well as conflictual political contexts across the region, many of these dances are at risk of extinction. Some have become acts of resistance against systematic cultural repression; others are slowly being forgotten. Through the careful studying and teaching of them, Ulduz embraces her responsibility of transmission, and more importantly, offers these dances a life they were robbed of. A life of joyous and masterful embodiment, a life of bastardization and mixing.
Along with the dancers, the carpets come alive. VASHT offers a vision of the carpet as a shifting landscape, flowing from a moving mountain to a steady ground, a place to give birth on. The carpet as background and support for our life stories; the carpet as the story itself. The carpet as a moving entity that recounts all that we have been through: it moves as our bodies and stories do, across time and borders. It carries us, just as we carry it in return. Following the flow of the rugs, my mind immediately turns to the delicate work of Hussein Shikha, an Iraqi Belgian artist whose practice delves deeply into southern Iraqi carpets, which he sometimes animates into moving tapestries. His fascination with carpets stems from the long hours spent staring at them in his childhood home in Iraq, and later, throughout his multiple displacements. “When looking at carpets with great concentration for a long time,” he recalls, “you get a very dreamy effect and the visuals on the carpet start to move around a bit. I made up narratives in the fabrics and they started to become fantasy lands. That is how the textile came to life in my mind.” Wherever we go, carpets host parcels of home and incredible potential to tell our stories. He further writes:
“The carpet functions as a signifier of familiarity and togetherness, a gathering point with the possibility to find a home, and share knowledge, experience, and personal stories. It’s intergenerational. Mothers sit together with their children and share the way that they interact with the threads and reimagine the nature around them. Past, present and future are interwoven. It’s conceptual by default.”
Such practices help in finding solace in the diaspora – a scattered place that is often difficult to inhabit. Through the pain of displacement, art sometimes manages to recreate something that might otherwise seem lost. Artists speaking from this complex positionality open up a vision of what can be created from a place of distance – and, at the same time, how to keep returning, tirelessly. Keeping the thread going. These are deeply significant gestures, acts of resistance against apathy and erasure. Conflicting feelings of joy and grief are allowed to coexist there, just as they do in our minds.
Being present and witnessing the precision of each choreographed movement – gestures that are both homage to centuries-old traditions and a vision for a bastard future – made me, for a moment, feel rooted in the very place where I sat.
VASHT feels like a return to the weaving of a rug abruptly interrupted midway – each movement a thread, each progression a knot. A carpet that holds the potential to become our translocal territory, one we carry the responsibility to collectively entwine.
Maria Dogahe is programmer at Kaaitheater in Brussels.