Figure of Speech, from the lecture The Uncertainty Principle, Tate Modern, London March 2007.

Adelaide Bannerman

Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty… A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world-such seems to be the schema. It does not impose itself on me; it is rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the world – definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world.

The Fact of Blackness, Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon 

The abbreviation DPG objectifies and makes nondescript any immediate significance that the location or the building being referred to might relate to the dance. It is indeed a personalised critique that at once co-opts and resolutely dances against a shifting gaze: it is a consideration of the repercussions of that shift felt by the individual that the dance brings into alignment and figuration the sovereignty of the interior voice.

With her back towards the building and estranged from its activities we witness female solipsism in public space; her listening body in the foreground moving to a sung female solo. The registration of image and disembodied voice pulsate discordantly in visual and aural qualitys clearly at its strongest moments of clarity when the image is fully saturated and the vocal is distinct. This 'coming into being" is suggestive of the photographic process the object or body in development towards completion, Fanon continues to remark:

But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled and the movements the attitudes the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self.

Dancing In The Village DPG I + II can be viewed to combatively choreograph itself away from the agendas and limitations accorded to the female body imposed by Iranian and European cultural narratives. Indeed it becomes a deployment of dance as a form of political expression in Kheirkhah's defence. Simultaneously Kheirkhah reclaims the Orientalist interpretation of rags sharqi (belly dancing) and misaligns a nationalist and patriarchal framework in her protest, as she dances in solidarity with the lone female voice singing in Arabic (Kheirkhah's first language is Farsi, Persian) challenging the homogenising effect of Europe's perceptions of the middle east' and also the 'inappropriateness' of Kheirkhah's uncovered head in view of Islam Kheirkhahts movements accrue to become an ethical reflection, a dance of conscience.

Adelaide Bannerman: 2009.