From sneaking into underground basements in Tehran [...] to learning to dance with almost no words in Northern California, I had done everything I could.
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| “Dancing Couple (Tanzpaar)”, by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Courtesy Guernica. |
After the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the rise of Islamists under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini, dancing and singing were banned by his decree. People were divided: Khomeini’s supporters believed they could see the Ayatollah’s image on the moon, while others, by contrast, were captivated by Michael Jackson’s invention of the moonwalk.
All the dance clubs were repurposed after the revolution. One former Tehranian nightclub and restaurant-bar, Chattanooga, was well-known and featured in many films. But after the revolution, it became a storage place; its doors and walls all plastered over, it was now filled from floor to ceiling with cables and wires. This was my workplace for years. I would walk through tangled spools to the back of the hall, where I’d sit in a small room behind a computer, doing accounting for the company that sold the wires around me. There was no sign of music, and no sign of dancers. The only smells were of plastic and dust.
Tape players existed with the justification that they were for listening to the Quran or religious prayers. The Hezbollahi—religious vigilantes who acted as moral enforcers—would set up checkpoints on the streets and ask to pop the trunks of vehicles to look for good speakers or sound systems. It was easier than checking inside houses. If someone had a tape player that was clearly high quality—suggesting it could play non-religious music—they would stab its surface with knives.
In order to stay safe, families who didn’t align with the government would hang up thick curtains during their parties, so the insides of their homes couldn’t be seen by the Hezbollahi. They would nail rugs to the walls so the sound wouldn’t escape. One or two people would be stationed outside the garden or house to warn others if any officers showed up. There was always an older sober person at the party keeping watch, ready to pay off the authorities if needed so the gathering could go on unhindered. Others were in charge of hiding alcoholic drinks—possession of which could lead to lashes or imprisonment.
Women would cautiously ride in cars to these parties only if accompanied by their fathers or brothers. They wore loose manteaus and covered their faces and hair with scarves; once they arrived, they would remove these layers. Life inside and outside the home were completely different. But even with all this, fear remained. Women danced with women, and men with men.
The party music was all smuggled in from Los Angeles. Whenever a VHS tape of a music video was shown, people would catch a glimpse of what dancing looked like and mimic it however they could. But they didn’t really have any experience—and so, gradually, dance lost its identity as an art form in Iran. It lingered only at private gatherings, where people would move their bodies in ways that barely resembled dance—rigid, mechanical, almost comical. Among women, when no men were present, the motions often became exaggerated: they shook their chests and hips in playful bursts, more caricature than expression. Men, on the other hand, would throw their arms wide open and turn their wrists and fingers awkwardly, as if reaching up to fix a lamp on the ceiling rather than surrendering to the music.
These gestures carried no emotion, no artistry—just the shadow of something that had once been alive. Like many other activities, dancing was pushed into the back rooms of homes and became something mostly associated with women. After the revolution, opportunities for women outside the home had steadily contracted—public resources had diminished, restrictions had multiplied, and their presence in society had narrowed. Unlike men, who could still move freely in the public sphere, women were confined more and more to the domestic space, and poured their attention into what remained within reach: household rituals, gatherings, and the other small corners of self-expression that were still permitted. It was in these private spaces that dance survived, but only as a faint echo of its former self.
After the revolution, the war with Iraq consumed nearly a decade of life from 1980 to 1988, and in those years, joy disappeared. Every public message was one of sacrifice, mourning, and victory; there was little space for anything resembling leisure. Laughter, music, and movement felt almost treasonous beside the endless funerals and rhetoric of martyrdom. Only after the war ended did a slow, fragile shift begin. As the country turned from survival to reconstruction, small pockets of relief quietly reappeared. In a gender-segregated world, dance crept back into women-only gyms under borrowed names: “aerobics,” “exercise,” “stretching.” These activities were never openly acknowledged as dance, but within the walls of the gyms, women allowed themselves the forbidden rhythm of movement, and a hesitant return to pleasure after years of stillness.
The offerings at male-only gyms were limited to body-building, but I was not interested in that. In Iran’s patriarchal regime, men were cast in an almost-mythic role: they occupied the positions of power in government and society, and were treated as symbols of strength and control. Within this framework, dance was seen as diminishing of masculinity—it softened a man’s image by breaking down the stern façade expected of him, and introduced vulnerability. He might look silly. He might embarrass himself. History carried a shadow of this attitude: in the Qajar era, male dancing had existed, but only within men’s gatherings where the dancer often became an object of desire or ridicule. During the Pahlavi era, this view began to shift as Iran sought a relationship with the West by exhibiting new behaviors, including dancing. Men began to appear on stage as performers, entertainers, and even artists, as dancing was allowed to take on a more public and respectable form. But after the Islamic Revolution, the old suspicions returned from lingering collective memories, hardened by new religious restrictions, and the notion of men dancing once again became unthinkable. To move with rhythm and grace was to risk surrendering authority—to risk being seen not as a leader, but as someone less.
Despite this, I wanted to dance. One of my university classmates was a female trainer at a women-only gym. A few of us agreed to chip in to organize a small, private, co-ed salsa-dancing class that she would teach. After hours, when everyone had gone home from work, we would sneak into a building where one of the basement floors had been designed specifically for this purpose—it was soundproof enough that music wouldn’t leak outside and be overheard by government agents. We tried not to draw attention to ourselves, never arriving together but at different times, each quietly descending the stairs. We were told to bring extra shoes, scrubbed clean, so that we wouldn’t dirty the polished floor. Beneath the stern faces of Khomeini and Khamenei—the previous and current supreme leaders of the Islamic Republic, whose portraits were required in every public space—a stereo system had been set up. All the walls had mirrors, and my friend, in a crop top with a piercing glinting in her bellybutton, asked us to stand before them. There were three women and three of us men—all of us in our twenties, trying not to catch our own reflections, our bodies stiff and self-conscious.
My friend demonstrated the first move: spreading our arms to either side, then pressing our chests forward in rhythm. We tried to imitate her, but our gestures looked awkward and comical. We laughed nervously, embarrassed by how strange our bodies seemed in the mirror, and by how far this was from anything we’d been taught to do in public. The class was less about dancing than about confronting ourselves—confronting a freedom that felt both thrilling and forbidden.
The six of us attended a few more sessions. Several of the other participants were terrified that if the morality police found out, they would be imprisoned or flogged, so they gave up and stopped coming. I also had concerns. I was about to emigrate to the United States, and everything worried me—if I had been caught in these classes, it might have jeopardized my departure. So I gave up as well.
*
After immigrating to the U.S., the first thing I did was enroll in a college. But though I was surrounded by people there, of all ages and from all corners of the world, it was obvious we were each alone: language stood like a wall between us. We couldn’t connect, couldn’t break through the silence of our shared isolation. I remember passing other international students from non-English speaking countries on campus; we would nod politely and sometimes exchange a hesitant smile, but the words never came.
Loneliness and limited English weren’t my only worries—at twenty-seven, I was also losing my eyesight day by day, unmistakably. An autoimmune disease, Pars Planitis, was tightening its grip, turning each glance that I took at this unfamiliar land into a blur. Faces, streets, and even gestures in this new culture became shadows that I couldn’t quite read. At first it was like peering through fog; then, like living with a flashlight seared into my eyes until finally, the light itself went out.
Right in front of the college’s language classrooms, where I took ESL lessons, was the music department building. One day, I saw a group of people sitting on its front staircase, changing into black and white shoes. Then they all went inside. I followed them. I had barely walked a few steps when I started hearing music. Then I heard a woman’s voice counting: “Two, three, four, and one…” She’d repeat it on the beat.
I followed the voice to the entrance of a large hall that several people were leaving and entering. The mirrors on its walls caught my eye. It reminded me of my classes in Iran, but this was a real dance studio that called itself one. I was standing right in front of its door!
From that day on, after every language class, I would go and stand at the door of that room. The third time, the same woman I had heard the first time—likely the instructor—came over and asked, “Can I help you?” Shyly and with some effort, because I still struggled with English, I told her that I wanted to take the class. Even though several sessions had already passed, she allowed me to register.
My vision was limited by this time. I could see the teacher—but only the bottom part of her body, from about a hand’s width below her knees down to the floor. Because her shoes and the dance studio’s floor were the same color, they blended in my vision and I couldn’t see how her feet were moving. I lowered my head, trying to follow the routine by watching the other students’ feet, but the instructor kept walking over to me, saying, “Chin up!”
At the time, I didn’t use a cane, nor had I informed the college administration of my vision issues. This was because I was mistaken in my personal definition of blindness. In fact, legal blindness is defined by the sharpness of one’s vision, but I had assumed that it meant total darkness, a world gone black. Since my vision had “only” been swallowed by fog—I could no longer recognize objects or faces clearly, but they hadn’t completely disappeared—I didn’t believe that I was truly blind. By the time I realized that I qualified for a white cane and finally applied for it, I was placed on a long waitlist for a mobility course. This would teach us various important techniques for how to use the cane—like increasing the range of our tapping so that it was wider than our shoulders, and listening to the sounds of traffic beyond trusting the traffic lights.
I was afraid that the dance instructor wouldn’t let me participate in her classes without the white cane. So eventually, I went to the back of her class and told her that I couldn’t see well—or, more accurately, that I had low vision. I wasn’t sure if she understood, because my English was still very poor. I explained that I couldn’t follow her footwork from a distance and kept falling behind. From then on, she would notice when I had difficulties in her lessons and ask her assistant to help me. Sometimes, the assistant would quietly guide me out into the hallway in the middle of the classes, away from the mirrors and music, to explain step by step how to position my hands and legs, using words instead of movements for me to follow.
That was how the sessions progressed. But it was clear that most of the students were already familiar with dancing—or at least, that’s how it seemed to me—and I couldn’t keep up with them. The extra help before and after classes, and even those whispered instructions in the hallway, weren’t enough; I didn’t want to always stumble through borrowed steps, half a beat behind. What I longed for was to catch the true tempo of the music, to feel its pulse from within, and to let my movements arise from that rhythm. I wanted guidance that would help me to not just mimic the dance, but surrender to the music until it became inseparable from my body.
If I could master the proper foundations of dancing, I thought, the details would likely come more easily to me. I told my instructor that I wanted to learn more, and she wrote down some information on a piece of paper. When I brought this home and scanned it to enlarge it on my computer screen, I saw that it contained the address and phone number for Nancy’s Dance Club.
Nancy and her husband owned a dance studio located next to a coffee shop, a sandwich place, and a pharmacy. The idea of a dance school situated alongside such stores that people frequented everyday was beyond anything I had imagined; in Iran, such a place could not have existed. To see it here, open to the street like a bakery or bookstore, made me realize how ordinary freedom was in this new world, and how extraordinary it still felt to me.
Nancy and her husband had been together since college. She had learned to dance from him; I became her student just as they were approaching their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Her dance studio had a calm atmosphere and she would decorate the space for different occasions, like Halloween or New Year’s. Classes were held throughout the week, and on weekends, there were dance parties.
Even though moving in a dim—or better said, misty—environment felt a bit scary to me, dancing gave me confidence. The day I first approached Nancy, she was in the middle of teaching. I told her I was a student and wanted to learn how to dance, though I could barely see. Nancy asked gently, “How can I guide you?” I explained that it was fine for her to touch me and show me how to move. Sometimes I would place my hand on her shoes to feel the steps she was taking, or on her arm and shoulder to sense the rhythm of her body. With so little vision, these touches became my way of seeing, and that was how I began to understand the dances.
I took both group and private lessons. I could only afford to attend one session a week, plus the weekend public dance parties. To pay for them, I used my student loan. It might not have seemed like a sensible use of funds, but dancing was the only way I could connect with others. Because of my limited English and failing eyesight, I couldn’t rely on words or facial expressions to understand people; the only senses left to me were touch and movement. And so I began to recognize and remember others through the way they danced: the pressure of a hand, the rhythm of a step, the energy of a body in motion. I tried to guess their feelings and even their characters through those gestures, and when I succeeded, it felt like I had finally found a language of my own.
Every day, I would take the bus to college. When I arrived, all the classroom doors would still be closed and the hallways would be empty—perfect for practicing dancing. So before class, I would rehearse for thirty to forty minutes. And each weekend, I attended the studio’s parties. If Nancy was there, she would go and bring me a partner, and I’d enter the floor. But if she wasn’t there and I didn’t recognize anyone, I’d have no choice but to sit quietly in a corner and just listen to the music. I didn’t know how to approach someone and ask for a dance. Because I was blind, in a crowded area like a dance club, it was challenging to walk around without bumping into people, much less find a partner.
Gradually, my dancing got better. At first, my motions were stiff and unnatural. Nancy would say, “Relax.” I had to learn the shape of each form—Nancy patiently taped the floor of the studio to mark where my feet should go. Then I would sit on the ground, and place my hand on her foot to feel when she lifted her weight onto her toes or the ball of her foot. Another concept I had to internalize was rhythm—not moving too fast or too slow. Nancy would say, “Listen carefully to the music.” My sense of the beat began to grow.
What I needed to learn was form: how to make my body feel like one integrated whole even while each part could still move independently. My aim was to train each part of my body to listen and respond to the music, then keep them in harmony—until the most magnificent moment, when another dancer joined me and our two bodies moved as one to the rhythm. Eventually, I learned that if someone danced with me and I was to lead, I had to know how to guide them from one move to the next.
Many people, upon realizing that I couldn’t see well, would hold onto me tightly—not to dance with me better, but in an overprotective way. Yet most of the time, my blindness wasn’t an obstacle, or even noticeable unless I carried my white cane. Those who knew how to dance trusted me. I gave it my all, trying to use my body language to guide their movements gently. Dance was a language in which no one misunderstood me. Or perhaps more accurately, it was a language in which I understood everything—without having to pretend, and without having to nod aimlessly just to seem polite. It restored my confidence—the confidence of someone who had migrated while gradually losing his vision and who, because he didn’t speak English well, often felt lost. So much is communicated through eye contact, but through dance, I had another kind of contact: physical contact, like holding a hand, for example. Once again, I felt connected to people.
Nancy’s studio was the kind of place I had long dreamed of being in. It was the first space where I felt that such a connection in the body was truly possible—where movement wasn’t just a series of steps, but a dialogue between breath, rhythm, and sound. In that room, the music could enter me fully, and my body could answer it without hesitation. Nancy taught me dance movements, and with those movements, I could create a sequence—like sentences in a story—that expressed a certain emotion or mood. The person dancing with me would follow those sentences, one by one.
There was just one obstacle that occasionally caused me trouble: the soles of my feet were flat, and when I danced on the balls of my feet, my ankles would ache. I didn’t pay much attention to this. But sometimes the swelling would get so bad that my ankles would completely disappear beneath the puffiness, and I’d limp the whole of the next day. After a few months, Nancy suggested that I get a proper pair of dance shoes: black and white ones called “Verifeis.”
By then, I had started to resemble those who knew how to move their bodies symmetrically, with order and precision. Eventually, many people realized that I danced well. But I was insatiable—I wanted to dance so much at every party that by bedtime, I’d have to soak my feet in warm saltwater.
Nancy’s studio was small. From overhearing others, I learned that the city had a much larger dance hall where they held parties three times a month. Clumsily and shyly, I tried to ask someone I had danced with a few times if they could take me there. On the night when we went with two or three others, the ride took about an hour. Without a car, it would’ve been impossible for me to get there; no one else close to me was interested in dancing. So what these classmates were doing for me was incredibly valuable.
As was the custom at these gatherings, an instructor was teaching a couple of simple steps so that newcomers could join in. At one point, her microphone cut out, and I realized her voice had been coming from almost directly behind me. The entire time, I had been facing the wrong direction—toward the speaker system—thinking I was looking at her. I felt lonely because I was different than the others. I couldn’t keep up with them; I didn’t even know when I had made a mistake, and it was hard for people to come up to me and tell me so. I tried to stand respectfully outside the dance floor and listen to the music, but that night, I wasn’t really in the mood. Nancy wasn’t around, and my classmates had gotten lost in the crowd, forgetting that I needed help to find a partner. On nights like this when luck wasn’t with me and I ended up not dancing, I would start to feel, once more, an otherness, like I didn’t belong. I was silent on the drive home.
When I next saw Nancy in class, she asked how my experience had been at the larger dance hall. I awkwardly explained that I couldn’t navigate the crowd and find someone to dance with for every song, since each dance required a new partner. I said I also had this problem at her parties, and sometimes, even in her classes. She nodded and said, “I’ll think about it.” Part of the problem was that I couldn’t tell from someone’s voice whether I had danced with them before or not, since it was difficult for me to distinguish between tones in English. Maybe the person’s face, hair color, clothing, or eye color could have completed the image in my mind—but with all voices sounding unfamiliar to me because of the language barrier and loud music, I could only recognize people by their scent. And in the small town where I lived, people didn’t really wear perfume.
For these reasons, I was hesitant to go to Nancy’s Halloween dance party even after having studied with her for several months. I knew it would be hard for me to ask people to dance, and was nervous that I would be on my own. But I told myself that at the very least, I could just go to listen to the music—and that small excuse was enough to convince me. I made it to the party. When I saw Nancy there, she said something to me and laughed. It was loud and I couldn’t hear, but I laughed along as she walked away, then came back with a small piece of paper and stuck it to my chest. I felt too awkward and shy to ask her what it said, but whatever it did, it worked. Like a lighthouse, I would turn toward every voice I heard so they could see my chest—and I danced with partners the whole night.
Afterwards, I folded the paper and took it home. When I scanned it to enlarge it and read it on my computer screen, I saw that it said: “Wanna dance with me?” I laughed—how simple and clear.
For nearly two years, I took dance lessons with Nancy consistently. I wanted to compete somewhere to officially record my achievement—I’d always had a desire to obtain certificates for what I’d done in life. I told Nancy, and she said that I could apply for the Bronze Certificate in Cha-Cha, but would have to choreograph a routine with fifteen moves and perform it within a set time. If I made a mistake, I’d get one chance to fix it.
We practiced together every week for three months. The lessons weren’t cheap, and I had burned through nearly all the money from my student loan. If I didn’t pass the test, I would have no one to blame but myself for the ordeal.
The exam was on a Friday evening. People often give themselves pep talks in the mirror before such moments. For me, I looked at the mirror in my room before going to the exam, and saw only the blurred image of a man who was around thirty years old—who was stubborn, and who simply wanted to dance. From sneaking into underground basements in Tehran—where at any moment I could have been arrested and either fined or flogged—to learning to dance with almost no words in Northern California, I had done everything I could.
There wasn’t much in that mirror, except for a man who had been determined.
In the summer of 2018, I earned the Bronze Certificate in Cha-Cha. It’s probably sitting in some forgotten corner of my home now. I don’t even feel like looking for it. But I know that it’s there.
Via Guernica
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