Following its world premiere at Montpellier Danse Festival on June 25, Bazm (Repertoire) will make its German debut at Radialsystem in July. As an entry point to the piece, we’re asked to look beyond the repertoires that we already know and value in the field of dance, meaning choreographer Armin Hokmi could be offering something entirely unique. The work circles back to the origins of the meaning of ‘bazm’, a Farsi word which translates as a gathering, a party or a way of navigating the aftermath of a period of conflict, where spontaneity permits anything to materialise. Hokmi cheekily suggests it could “allow some of the most stupid, ridiculous things to pop through”.
This piece unites Hokmi’s biggest ensemble to date. Eleven dancers will translate Hokmi’s movements and dance vocabulary into dynamic group choreography. Active within the field of performance since 2009, Hokmi holds a BA in acting from the Norwegian Theatre Academy and an MA in solo dance authorship from HZT Berlin. He brings these different disciplines into his practice, allowing him to explore and expand how contemporary dance is framed and presented, as well as to interrogate the audience’s experience within it. While continuing a world tour with his previous piece, Shiraz, a work which used the historic Shiraz Arts Festival in Iran to frame an exploration of contemporary performance, Bazm (Repertoire) reframes a concept from Hokmi’s homeland. We caught up with him in the studio to see the piece taking shape.
What was the initial starting point for Bazm (Repertoire)? Is it a continuation of previous ideas or something completely new?
I feel like there are very different entry points for every work we make. For this one, there are shared commitments: excitement about finding a language, removing language and constructing one with the group. And to feel that we fabricated something together. When I look back at previous creations, I see that we pursued this same goal, but without directly addressing it. The way we worked with the material or the way we made the material had a similar goal, but it was always done through starting with another idea. I had no clarity for this one, whereas in previous pieces, I had clarity about the movement quite early on. Here, it was coming from something very, very rough. I tried to just observe this thought in my body for a long time, and then to understand, okay, how does it materialise in this world?
Do you typically start a piece by bringing other artists and collaborators together from the beginning? Or is there work you do before you bring other bodies into your work?
One of my primary interests is figuring out how to get people excited for dance, even when they don’t have any prior interest in it.
Normally I start on my own, but a reflection of other things I’ve spent time working on with other people is what suddenly brings me somewhere. Or I’ve seen or observed something about my own state of affairs that I sense needs to surface or needs a channel to go through. And at the beginning, I normally start alone, just to acknowledge what kind of obsession I’m going to end up with. I think for me, it always comes from the obsession. And from there, I understand how it’s going to be transmitted. Because that’s usually the space where something materialises – it’s going to materialise through bodies. Especially when I’m going to work with a group of dancers, the work is going to be very different from what I imagined in the end. I start that transmission process quite early, and I do it in small bits for one or two years before something goes on stage.
The central question to the work is: How can we think of a dance repertoire beyond what it normally is? What does that mean for audiences that don’t have an understanding of a dance repertoire?
One of my primary interests is figuring out how to get people excited for dance, even when they don’t have any prior interest in it. If I like dance, that could be due to many things: because it brings joy, because it looks good, because it’s something I feel in awe of, because I’m quite blown away by it. There are ways in which dance becomes a spectacle of something that’s out of reach, and that’s why it’s very intriguing for us to see. Or sometimes it’s so refined and it’s placed in high-culture environments, so it makes me feel as if I’m part of witnessing something that’s important to the pillars of our society. I think that answers the question of how to get the audience interested in dance.
You have 11 dancers in this piece. How did you arrive at that number? And what effects do more bodies have?
The first work I did was with one dancer, then it was three, then it was seven and now it’s even bigger. I’m always interested in my projects from a competence-building perspective, because I’m still learning how to choreograph with every work that I do. I like it when there’s a new situation to deal with. Once you have a certain number of dancers, there are different problems to deal with, because crowd dynamics are much more prone to appear. I had never worked with a larger group of people and I was always suspicious of large group dynamics being the main material within performance. So for me, it’s about finding ways of how to deal with those dynamics. I also realised that when you have more people, you can deal with a lot of more parallel situations on stage. Constellations somehow become their own entities. I thought this work could benefit from parallel dynamics. I thought that it should also be more porous, a bit more open to influence. When the vessel is a bit bigger, it’s also somehow prone to more influences.
In that process, do you have to disregard a lot of previous ideas or choreography to adapt to different forms and new bodies?
Well, I’d say that it finds new faces. It kind of reformulates, either because someone does it differently, or because someone does it and it settles into a different register. For example, take something I thought should be in the music, then I think, “Okay, that aspect of the music could be implemented in a different element. Maybe it should show up in the costumes.” I try to open a lot of registers for things to channel through in the work. Not everything has to be in the place where we initially imagined it should be. If I were to see a movement I liked, I’d ask myself, “Why am I fascinated by this? Why is it interesting? Is it the movement itself? Is it because of how it makes you feel?” It’s just about playing with that space and finding where to place it. With almost every piece, when I look back at the end, I feel like we’ve done everything we thought about. It’s not always necessarily the initial idea, but it has materialised in a register, in a layer or in a moment. It’s also a good feeling to feel like everything we’ve worked on was there. It wasn’t for nothing.
Your dancers all have different technical backgrounds, but you’re making work that speaks more to presence than technique. Could you talk about that?
There are ways in which dance becomes a spectacle of something that is out of reach, and that’s why it’s very intriguing for us to see.
I think an issue that’s embedded within contemporary dance is that there’s no pregiven vocabulary. There are many approaches with preexisting vocabularies, which are just things we get accustomed to by hearing them in workshops, by learning from a certain choreographer or from a teaching tradition. Whenever you’re conceiving of a work in the contemporary scene, there’s no basis to say that we have a shared language. We might have shared skills or techniques for learning the material, but we would always have very different approaches to how we learn it. And especially working in the independent field, you always deal with people who have had very different trajectories. In that sense, the team that I tend to work with is a mixture of people with very different brains, who have come to the team in very different ways, but who still have shared common skills that they have developed through learning very different vocabularies. Sometimes it becomes very difficult to bring the team closer to each other, but at the same time, that’s just where we are. If we want to work with new ideas that have no preexisting technical tradition, it requires that work.
Could you tell me how you arrived at the title Bazm?
‘Bazm’ is a Farsi word. I suppose the closest translation would be ‘gathering’. It refers to a sort of celebratory event. It can connote a celebration that involves poetry, dance, music and such, so it’s something like a communal experience. One thing I found in my research was that after times of war, when there were too many consecutive wars, people forgot how to rely on each other. In Iranian history, ‘razm’ meant the conflict, the war, the battlefield and ‘bazm’ was the event that would come after. That means that it wasn’t necessarily a celebration of winning or the sadness of losing; it was just a way to try to move forward. If you extend this idea into choreography, into how we conceive of groups and how forms of reliance and forms of response within the groups are imagined, it could allow for new possibilities rather than relying on an existing structure. It’s in those moments, when there’s a vacuum, that the most stupid, ridiculous things pop through.
Bazm (Repertoire), July 23-26, Radialsystem
