Poitiers Archives - Dancephere

July 3rd – 4th, 2025 Festival de la Cité, Lausanne
August 21st – 22nd, 2025 Dansens Hus, Oslo
August 26th, 2025 Mladi Levi International Festival, Ljubljana
September 6th, 2025 Neimenster, Luxembourg
September 24th, 2025 SIDance International Dance Festival, Seoul
October 15th, 2025 Romaeuropa Festival, Rome
October 17th, 2025 IDFT, Tirana
October 24th – 25ht, 2025 Tanzhaus NRW, Düsseldorf
November 7th – 8th, 2025 Pavillon ADC, Geneva
November 14th – 15th, 2025 Sadler’s Wells, London
March 10th – 11th, 2026 POLE SUD CDCN, Strasbourg
March 13th, 2026 Le Carreau, Forbach
March 17th – 18th, 2026 Maison de la Danse, Lyon
March 21st, 2026 CNDC, Angers
March 25th – 28th, 2026 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris
March 31st – April 1st, 2026 Festival À Corps, Poitiers

60 minutes

A Revelation

Shiraz is a choreography for six dancers, weaving together a fabric of movements and gestures. Their insistent energy, moments of convergence and passage through ephemeral constellations are what takes center stage in this performance. A pulsating dance imbued with a sense of enchantment and longing, coiling and uncoiling to the pulsating beat of a capturing music.

The starting point for this piece is the Shiraz Arts Festival. A festival for live arts that took place between 1967 and 1977 in south of Iran and radically rethought the relationship to the audience and modalities of framing art works. Armin Hokmi, together with the team, places it into our present day in the form of a revival, by giving it a new appearance through a dance performance. Shiraz is both a homage and a fictional setting. It seeks to reimagine the ambitions of the festival and its love for the live arts, their autonomy as art forms and their common roots across geographical borders.

Shiraz is created out of a devotion to a notion of dance and choreography that emphasizes their power to ignite joy, bring about experiences of delving into sensuous worlds, and their ability to transform perception and our modes of affective engagement with live performance.

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Between Fear and Hope

What if you grew up in a war zone? How does that impact your identity?

“Can you still hear the bombs? I can hear them.”

What if you grew up in a war zone? How do you cope as a child when you are exposed to political conflict on a daily basis?

The choreographer and performer Samaa Wakim grew up in the occupied Palestinian territories. During this solo dance performance, she asks herself how these experiences impact her identity. Through movement and sound, she remembers her youth and the imaginary world she created in order to survive. Driven by her own sounds and live music by Samar Haddad King, she goes back and forth between fear and hope, between sounds that used to scare her and sounds that used to bring her comfort.