being

An ode to dazzling but difficult to reach Iran.

When the Icelandic choreographer Bára Sigfúsdóttir went to Iran for the first time to present her solo On the other side of a sand dune at a hidden festival for contemporary dance, her environment reacted with concern ; not in the least because dance is forbidden by law there.

Yet Sigfúsdóttir came back enlightened instead of disillusioned : her newest creation being is an ode to the dazzling Iran she was allowed to see with her own eyes, made for and with the Iranian artists Masoumeh Jalalieh and Alireza Mirmohammadi. She got acquainted with them during an improvisation workshop at – and this is not an unimportant detail – The Invisible (!) Centre of Contemporary Dance in Teheran.

The performance is an exploration of the body as a link in the dialogue between East and West. It is deployed as a poetic instrument that builds a bridge between both performers as well as between performers and audience in more than one way.

As such being also links up perfectly with earlier work of Sigfúsdóttir, which always alludes to multi-layered sensations and experiences from one particular element – in this case : a body.

Bára Sigfúsdóttir graduated from P.A.R.T.S. in 2011 and was outstanding with THE LOVER, a solo that deals with the genesis of Man and nature and was shown a.o. at Theater aan Zee en TheaterFestival. Last year – together with the Norwegian composer Eivind Lonning – she made the experimental gem TIDE which floats on the continuously improvised dialogue between dance and music.