Sina Saberi

[Iran]

Embodying the Gap

© Mostafa Kazemi Motlaq

History is constantly retold and reshaped, narrated by many voices and through many bodies.
some of us choose to tell our own stories as part of the collective history with our body & through movement. How do we do it? What do we depend on? past stories through that which is written and what we are told? What if the stories are erased and distanced so much from the truth? How do we discover our identity despite all that has been used and imposed to camouflage the source?

In this workshop we go through a very brief history of ‘the gap’ which exists in the life of the Persian art form of dance. We get familiar with tools of embodying this gap. Most of these tools are esoteric means. We depend on our senses and our physical memory to go through a personal process of remembering. We then try to go through a transition of collective embodiment of the ritual, depending on these very basic elements in time and space & with the help of sound & imagination.

Sina Saberi

Born in 1988 Tehran and coming from a background of literature, teaching and communication, Sina came to the performing arts in 2012. First as a performer in various Iranian productions of theater and soon after to physical theater and ultimately to movement. In 2014 he created his first solo work, on two feet that looks at the untrained body with an urgency to move. It became a starting point for a research that poses many questions about the 40-year gap that the art form of dance has been dealing with in Iran.

These questions took the form of a practice that explores dance and movement in a context that doesn’t welcome these notions. In 2016, he made Prelude, a short dance piece desiring to embody the invisible progression of the Persian dance. In 2017, he made Damnoosh, a critique of his own position as the exotified dance artist from Iran, where dance is “forbidden”. Since 2017, he has been in the creative process of the third part of this trilogy, basis for being.

Sina is in collaboration with several artists and authors from around the world, merging practice through different disciplines and communities. He co-founded MaHa dance projects in 2014 that is the founder of the ‘body movement’ initiative in Iran. In 2017 he established Kahkeshān, a community-based organization dedicated to dance research and creation.