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despite all moral prohibitions, the genre of “rhythmic movements ” (harikat-i mawzun) has brought dance to the service of Islamic theatrical culture in postrevolutionary Iran. Embodying chastity, modesty, and spirituality, harikat-i mawzun has sublimated the dancer from a religiously subaltern “evil-inciting self ” (nafs-i ʾammarah) to a respectable “contented self ” (nafs-i mutmaʾinnah) in the Islamic mystical tradition. Offering a genealogy of this theatrical dance from the early twentieth century to the present , this chapter explores the postrevolutionary genre of rhythmic movements (harikat-i mawzun) and investigates its evolution and transformation from the prerevolutionary “national dance” (raqs-i milli), a “high art” theatrical genre created and promoted during the Pahlavi period as an authentic Iranian national art form.1 It was approximately a decade after “dance” (raqs) was banned as an immoral cultural practice that a new mode of performance appeared on the formal stage in Iran. Cast as rhythmic movements (harikat-i mawzun), this new genre soon became a vehicle embodying the Islamic government’s religious and political ideology. Appropriated through a renaming and reshaping of the dancing subject, the genre of rhythmic movements was constructed to counter the previous associations of dance (raqs) with immorality, corruption , and “imitated modernity” (tajaddud-i taqlidi) largely instigated by the image of the unconstrained dancing subject of the popular entertainment scene of cabaret and European social dancing in the Pahlavi era, particularly the cabaret dancer. It is not solely the postrevolutionary rhythmic movements that distanced itself from the signifiers associated with the negative notions of dance; the Pahlavi era’s high-art dancer of raqs-i milli (national dance) also defamiliarized the image of its contemporaneous dancing subject of the popular scene, raqqas, in her polite representation of Iranian culture. This chapter traces the creation of the two artistic modes of Iranian theatchapter 8 from “evil-inciting” dance to chaste “rhythmic movements”: a genealogy of modern islamic dance-theatre in iran zeinab stellar 232 zeinab stellar rical dance in twentieth-century Iran, the Pahlavi-era Iranian national dance and the postrevolutionary rhythmic movements, and traces their dialogic relations to the press discourse of their times, as well as to the dances practiced in the popular urban entertainment scene prior to the Revolution. It explores the terminologies deployed to dissociate these artistic dance forms and their performers from those of popular dances, as well as the themes prevalent in these high-art theatrical dances. Focusing on the staged performing body as a physical site for theatrical representation, capable of manifesting the outward projections of constructed identities and ideal bodies and relations (Dolan 1992), this chapter examines the ways in which the appearance and actions of the dancing subjects in the artistic genres of national dance and rhythmic movements were constructed to defamiliarize the dancing body of the cabaret stage, associated with the “evil-inciting self.” Finally, through analyzing the performers’ bodily aesthetics, actions, ethics , and behaviors, and focusing on representations of gender performativity and relations on stage, this chapter examines the ways in which the performing body of the twentieth-century govermentalized Iranian theatrical space would relate to the regulatory social conventions of everyday life, and reflect the state’s biopolitics.2 “inciting dance” and its counters The negative view in Islam of dance as a manifestation of this-worldly pleasure (Hanna 1988), and the mere notion that dance falls in the category of “fun,” as described by Bayat (2007), point out that dance is often considered as a subversive activity that can distract Muslim society from piety. In her 1949 article “The Theatre and Ballet Arts in Iran,” Nilla Cram Cook, relating the prejudices against dance in the Middle East, asserted that “dance has degraded into a vulgar form of cabaret entertainment and has entirely lost its religious and national association” (Cram Cook 1949, 406). There are others who, like Cram Cook, presumed the high status of religious dances in pre-Islamic Iran (Ali-Akbari Baigi and Muhammadi 2000, 1326). The dance scholar Anthony Shay also recognizes the conflict over dance in most Muslim countries, asserting that within these societies, “the term dance can possibly bear powerfully negative or at least ambiguous connotations” (Shay 1995, 61). In his ethnographic study of the diasporic Iranian community in California, Shay coins the term “choreophobia” to refer specifically to the negative views of dance in the Iranian cultural sphere (Shay 1999). The public (modern) dancing body was exposed in Iran in the first half of the twentieth century...

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