Keeping up with the Iranians

Shortly after the Iranian revolution in 1979, the new leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini equated music with opium and issued a ban on it in the country. As a result, many people, especially artists, fled to Los Angeles to find new ways to make a living. One way for expats to pursue their art was to record in the music genre Dāmbuli Dimbol, which also produced style-defining dances. They danced to it at so-called mehmoonis, festive gatherings in private. Today, the iconic sound unites the Iranians beyond the borders of California.

Keeping up with the Iranians traces this eventful musical history from a queer perspective and brings an unforgettable party to Ballhof Eins.The stars of the evening: none other than the world-famous singers Setareh and Poupak, the currently undisputed number one in the charts pianist Fereshteh, and the well-known choreographer Dancing Dina, who will be travelling all the way from ‘Tehrangeles’. With kitschy aesthetics, cake, groovy sounds as well as plenty of hip-swinging and hairspray, the dance party performance unites stories about joy and celebration as a way of collective resistance in everyday life. 

By the way... We have good news for all those who can't get enough of this intoxicating mehmooni: the party continues in our festival centre!

Sepideh Khodarahmi is a choreographer, dancer and actor educated at the University of Stage and Music in Gothenburg, the Hogeschool for the Arts in Amsterdam and the Broadway Dance Center in New York. Sepideh has been exploring drag as expression since 2016, both as a performer and teacher. They are occupied with topics such as destruction, cakesitting, hypergender, eroticism, intimacy, queerness, and power. In their work, sensuality is a recurring element and method. Sepideh has worked with Marina Abramovic, Hooman Sharifi and Dinis Machado to name a few and performed on internationally prestigious stages such as The Royal Theatre in Stockholm and Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisboa.

Afrang Nordlöf Malekian is an Iranian-Swedish artist, whose work engages with the dreams and aspirations of silenced, muted, or unnoticed creators, actors, and makers of history. Their practice seeks to explore how the language of unrealized utopias reappears, returns, and transforms into a flexible, scattered force that advances collective efforts. Through performances and installations grounded in archival research, Nordlöf Malekian’s work creates spaces where these quiet dreams can be heard, expanded upon, and ideally, realized. By blurring the borders between fiction and history, their work aims to generate alternative futures, composing documents and performances they wishes had existed in specific historical contexts. Afrang Nordlöf Malekian has exhibited at the 10th Berlin Biennale, the Moderna Museet, West Den Haag and the Tensta konsthall, among others.