Early on in the introduction of her book, Ida Meftahi notes that “dancing bodies have provided evidence for competing representations of modernity, urbanity, and Islam throughout the twentieth century.” In the following seven chapters of this refreshingly innovative book she provides the evidence.
The story begins in the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution, when modernizers turned to theater to propagate an Iranian nationalism that aimed at moral regeneration. Often based on the tales contained in classical Persian poetry, many plays and operettas included dance scenes. The modernists’ conceptions of women’s emancipation precluded assigning female roles to men, as had been the traditional practice, but few Muslim women were ready to go on stage. Directors and theater companies solved the problem by hiring non-Muslim women, some natives of Iran, others immigrants fleeing the Bolshevik revolution. With time, Muslim women’s inhibitions lessened and they began to appear on stage. The “national dance style” that emerged in the 1940s was in many ways an “invented tradition,” as it evinced only limited continuity with the vernacular dancing of earlier times: women dancers had to be chaste but charming, and their stage presence was meant to visualize a progressive interpretation of Iranian history. This development culminated in the founding of a National Ballet Company in 1956 but ended abruptly with the revolution of 1979.
The next chapter discusses the circumstances surrounding the continued activities of the so-called mutribs, musicians who had dominated musical life before the advent of the modernists’ cultural hegemony. Nationalists and Marxists agreed that they represented illiteracy and backwardness and that their art was mubtazal (degenerate). Their time was not up yet, however, for they came to perform in the cafés around Lālehzār Street in central Tehran after the practitioners of “national dance” left these for more “respectable” state-sponsored venues.
Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the figure of the cabaret dancer, the former focusing on live performances on stage, the latter on the depiction of cabarets in the popular films of pre-revolutionary Iran, the much derided film-e fārsi. These chapters have the great merit of rescuing a number of remarkable women from oblivion and telling the stories of their lives, thereby shattering the myth that all those who answered Terpsichore’s call were somehow connected to prostitution. It is interesting to note that although Iran’s self-consciously cosmopolitan elites consigned the cabaret dancer and her art to “low brow” culture, the cabaret scene was very much open to foreign influences and anything but nativist: foreign dancers performed in Iran, and Iranian artists dabbled in Egyptian, Indian, even Hawai’ian dance forms; cabarets were thus sites of transcultural aesthetic bricolage.
The last two chapters of the book chronicle the Islamist backlash against women’s dancing and the responses post-revolutionary puritanism has evoked among women artists. Chapter 6 introduces us to the religious reaction to Pahlavi secularism as it pertains to dance and music by extensively quoting from Islamic publications that could flourish in the relatively liberal political climate that characterized the years between Reza Shah’s abdication and Mosaddeq’s fall. While the discussion of the 1940s is rich, one wishes more attention had been given to the 1960s and 1970s, when cabarets became an obsession with writers like Ali Shariati, as they seemingly encapsulated all that was wrong with the lifestyles and preoccupations of the country’s pre-revolutionary elites. Chapter 7 discusses a new dance form that dare not speak its name—harikat-i mawzun (rhythmic movements). It is ironic that as artists struggle to conform to the rules and constraints imposed by the state on artistic expression, they need to fall back on some of the movements and gestures of the national dance discussed in the opening chapter of the book.
The above brief summaries do not adequately capture the richness of the text. A number of themes wend their way throughout the book. Examples are the construction of an opposition between “low” and “high” brow culture, the impact of Marxist-inspired notions of “committed” art and the concomitant disdain for “art for art’s sake,” and the ever-present specters of moral degeneracy captured by the terms ibtizāl and fahshā. In addition, the book provides a valuable documentary record, replete with illustrations from the author’s personal collection, of plays, operettas, ballets, and films few people have heard of. Based on personal interviews and long-forgotten written sources that had a wide readership in their own time, this elegantly presented book is another product of what might legitimately be called the Toronto school of socio-cultural Iranian history.
