Sorour Darabi (IR, 1990)

Residency period: May-June 2025

sorourdarabi.flywheelsites.com

Currently based in Paris, Sorour Darabi is an Iranian choreographer and performer whose work questions notions of transformation through time, co-habitation with the environment, language, gender identity, sexuality, affection, and vulnerability. Very active in Iran, he was part of the underground association ICCD whose Untimely Festival in Tehran hosted his works before his departure for France in 2013. His latest project, the contemporary opera Mille et Une Nuits revisits the notion of “night” through Scheherazade’s perspective.

A graduate from the Master Ex.e.r.ce at ICI-CCN in Montpellier, Darabi has presented his work in several theaters and festivals in France and beyond, including Palais de Tokyo, Lafayette Anticipations and Centre Pompidou in Paris, Arsenic in Lausanne, Zürcher Theater Spektakel in Zürich, Tanzquartier and Wiener Festwochen in Vienna, and Sophiensaele and Trauma Bar und Kino in Berlin. In addition to his creations, Darabi regularly gives workshops for advanced or professional artists and dancers.

For his residency at La Becque, Sorour Darabi will offer to create a short film, entitled Drowning Garden, exploring the poetical vision of a fluid utopia. Starting with a reflected image of a garden on water, his main inspirations for Drowning Garden comes from pre-modern Persian poetry and literature, where queerness is depicted as a mysterious form of love intertwined with nature and divinity. The title, Drowning Garden, draws the potential for a virtual deconstruction from a real image, but also hints at a metaphor of a drowning world, an ecological crack of doom.

Sorour Darabi, Palais de Tokyo, photo Sara Barcaroli