TARAB

In Arab and Iranian culture, “tarab” happens when a body is gripped by the music, and physical sensation is enhanced. This heightened moment, when body and music unite, is a door to ecstasy and enchanted sensuality. In TARAB, the last part of a trilogy, Ulduz Ahmadzadeh focuses on unexplored and, in some places, forbidden movement material and odd rhythmic patterns of Pre-Islamic, Middle Eastern cultural heritage. Dance and music material that has undergone multiple forms of Eurocolonial and Islamic translations, in which women, from being the primary holders, got either reduced to sexualised oriental entertainer-dancers or forbidden from practising them all together. Accompanied by the complex rhythms of the virtuoso percussionist Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, seven dancers embody these millennia-old movement materials. TARAB is about imagining a possible dialogue between those dance worlds and the contemporary dance language without shying away from the colonial dynamics between the two.