In Arab and Iranian culture TARAB happens when a body is gripped by the music and physical sensation is enhanced. This heightened moment, when the body and music unite, is a door to ecstasy and enchanted sensuality. In TARAB, the third part of a trilogy, Ulduz Ahmadzadeh / ATASH عطش contemporary dance company focus on unexplored, under-represented and in some places forbidden movement material and odd rhythmic patterns of Pre-Islamic, Middle Eastern cultural heritage.
The Iranian-Austrian choreographer explores dance and music material that have undergone multiple forms of euro-colonial and Islamic translations, and hence processes of alienation, during which women from being the main holders of these cosmologies got either reduced to sexualized oriental entertainer-dancers or forbidden from practicing them all together. TARAB is about the eternal friction between euro-modern knowledges and the “Other”/ “non-scientific primordial knowledges” – legends, myth, magic, healing ceremonies, non-euro-modern cosmologies. Accompanied by the complex rhythms of the virtuoso percussionist Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, five dancers embody these millennia-old movement materials. TARAB is also ethically, reflexively and humbly imagining possible dialogues between those dance worlds and the contemporary dance language without shying away from the colonial dynamics between the two.
TARAB is not only a story about displacement and suppression. It is about reviving ancestral memories. It is about listening to all these Middle Eastern folks who keep reclaiming and keep dancing them in underground collective circles.
Concept, choreography Ulduz Ahmadzadeh Concept, scenography Till Krappmann Composition, live music Mohammad Reza Mortazavi Dance, choreography (original cast) Desi Bonato, Naline Ferraz, Flora Virag, Luca Major, Ofer Dayani, Axel Hampusson, Jassi Murad Light design Jan Wielander Production Julia Haas, Mascha Mölkner Scenography in collaboration with Alice Ursini
co-produced by Tanzquartier Wien | Financed and supported by Stadt Wien & BMKÖS
© Roya Keshavarz
