Moving in the Shadows
at the Dance Studies
Center of Iran

Elaheh Hatami

In Iran, dance is banned in institutions and public spaces, yet a vibrant contemporary dance scene continues to thrive in private and informal settings. The Dance Studies Center of Iran in Tehran is one example of this phenomenon. Launched in 2025 by a group of artists, the center seeks to provide a space for research, exchange, and experimentation, engaging with the Iranian dance scene while navigating precarious circumstances and complex relationships with the international dance community.

With the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran’s political and social order fundamentally changed. The role of the body in public space changed with it: where people could move, how they could move, and who was allowed to see them became increasingly regulated by the state and religious norms. Dance institutions closed, public performances were banned, and dancing between men and women became subject to increasing restrictions. Under certain circumstances, such acts could lead to prosecution and punishment. 

Yet dance did not disappear – it simply changed location. As a result, Iran’s contemporary dance scene today exists primarily in private homes and informal spaces. It navigates the boundaries between what is permitted and what is forbidden: rehearsals take place in private, audiences are made up of trusted circles, choreography is transmitted informally, and practices develop outside official stages.

The Dance Studies Center emerged in this context. Established in early 2025 by Saye Theater Group, it is a collective space for reading, research, translation, workshops, experimentation, and informal performances. 

Founded in Tehran in 2001 by theater students Sara Rasoulinejad, Mehdi Mashhour, and others, Saye Theater is an independent, non-profit platform for contemporary theater, choreography, artistic research, and experimental performance. Over the past two decades, the group has developed performances, workshops, seminars, publications, translation projects, and international artistic exchanges, often working with independent performance spaces and unconventional venues outside Iran’s official theater system. Its work has also been presented internationally at festivals such as OFF Avignon and Newcastle Fringe.

By participating in such events, members of Saye Theater Group gradually came to recognise dance as an important practice in the contemporary performance landscape. Encounters with artists in Australia, France, and elsewhere deepened their interest in movement, while also making them aware that they lacked the vocabulary to fully understand and engage with the work they encountered. The Dance Studies Center grew out of this shared interest, or need, to study dance and develop a language for thinking and speaking about movement.

Today, this work brings together approximately twenty members who meet twice a week within a collective and decentralised structure. Together, they explore questions related to dance and develop their own research projects, including an ongoing project on contemporary dance and choreography in Europe and the United States over the past 30 years. Their research primarily consists of collective reading, as well as translating books and key texts in the field of dance studies.

The Dance Studies Center initiative responds to a wider structural gap: While dance and dance-related practices occupy an important aesthetic and political space in Iran, contemporary dance lacks the academic, educational, and economic infrastructure that exists around theater. “On the one hand, [this lack of infrastructure] creates considerable precarity,” says Morteza Bakhtiari, a dance maker and member of the center. “On the other, it means that dance is not entirely shaped by a single institutional or governmental model.” 

With no established market or comprehensive network of institutions to sustain the Iranian dance field, what emerges are small ecosystems that are fragile, temporary, and mostly built by artists. “Even within a relatively short period of time, the conditions of movement, access and participation can change dramatically,” says Mohsen Khedri, a choreographer and researcher at the Center. While this can positively foster diversity in terms of the approaches, bodies, and forms present in the field, the costs of precarity remain real: organisations like The Dance Studies Center operate with minimal financial resources, relying on members’ contributions, volunteer labour, and the generosity of artists and workshop leaders. 

The Dance Studies Center not only strives to compensate for the absence of an established dance institution in Iran but also asks fundamental questions about the nature of choreography itself. “Choreography is too often reduced to organising movement and producing harmonious performances,” says Bakhtiari. “At the Center, choreography can become a way of constructing knowledge and thinking through bodies. When audiences ask, ‘But this isn’t dance?’, that question itself becomes part of the research.”

This approach is closely connected to the changing understanding of the body in Iranian society. “Embodied practices and contemporary dance classes have become far more widespread than they were ten years ago, both in Tehran and elsewhere,” says Khedri, connecting this development to the broader social changes following the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising of September 2022. “The body has become increasingly visible as a social and political question,” he says. “Who has the right to one’s body, and under what conditions can it appear in public space?”

The center’s research does not take place outside the social conditions that shape dance; it is intrinsically entangled with them. And this relationship becomes particularly clear during periods of political repression, internet disruption – the internet being one of the Center’s principal tools for research, communication, and exchange – and uncertainty in Iran.

After the nationwide protests that began in late December 2025 and intensified in January 2026, for example, Iranian authorities responded with a violent crackdown involving killings, mass arrests, and restrictions on internet access. The situation was further transformed by the war that began in February 2026, bringing new disruptions, insecurity, displacement, and restrictions on communication. Against this backdrop, continuing to meet through the framework of the centre was not simply a matter of maintaining a programme. It meant sustaining space for collective research, exchange, and embodied practice under increasingly precarious conditions.

While there is a political dimension to this persistence, the center does not want to define itself solely through resistance. Rasoulinejad is critical of the expectation, particularly in international festival contexts, that Iranian artists should primarily speak about oppression, control, and restricted bodies. “[Iranian artists] should also be able to address other subjects and participate in broader global conversations. Independence does not necessarily mean producing art explicitly ‘about’ resistance. It can also mean creating the conditions in which artists are able to think beyond the categories imposed upon them.”

The question of independence has become a central theme within the center’s research. It emerged in particular during Jérôme Bel Tehran: Autobiographical Choreography presented at Farvardin Art House in Tehran in September 2025. Performed by Sara Rasoulinejad, the work drew on Jérôme Bel’s Jérôme Bel (2021), an “auto-bio-choreography” in which a local proxy performer narrates the French choreographer’s artistic life, doubts, and catalogue of works on stage. Following the performance, the group were inspired to examine what happens when an informal artistic ecosystem becomes more established and visible. What risks emerge from greater visibility? How can an independent scene become sustainable without reproducing the institutional structures from which it has deliberately remained separate? These questions went on to inform subsequent choreographic events  in which the center examined its own practices, structures, and the possibility of sustaining an independent dance ecology.

In Persian, “Saye” means “shadow.” For the group, the shadows have become a space from which to work. Through developing the Dance Studies Center, Saye does not seek to make an invisible dance scene visible by fitting it into an existing institutional model. Instead, it looks to create another kind of visibility – one built through collective research, embodied knowledge, and the possibility of staying together at a time when everything remains vulnerable.

Elaheh Hatami (PhD) is a Berlin-based dance scholar and author of Glocal Bodies: Dancers in Exile and Politics of Place: A Critical Study of Contemporary Iranian Dance (Transcript, 2022). Her work has been published, among others, in tanz magazine, Schirn Kunsthalle Magazine, and Contemporary Theater Review. She is the initiator of the Dance Archive in Exile project.

Saye Theater group
learn more

Global Bodies, Dancers in Exile and Politics of Place: A Critical Study of Contemporary Iranian Dance
Elaheh Hatami, transcript, 2022.