A title is always a gateway into a performance for the audience. With Bazm (Repertoire), I want to create a tension between the familiarity implied by the word “repertoire” and the uncertainty evoked by the Persian word “bazm.”

Bazm contains the possibility of the unexpected. Bazm speaks to the ways in which eleven performers might, perhaps, stray from an initial objective. There is an idea of uncertainty here, along with a rich spectrum of possible emotions whose boundaries are porous and that is what interests me.

Questioning the notion of repertoire and the ways in which it is constructed and legitimized, Armin Hokmi places at the center of his work the act of looking and the ways in which our gaze encounters the stage, shaped both by the experience of what is already known and by a sensitivity to the presence of uncertainty.

Bazm (Repertoire) seeks to transmit while simultaneously inhabiting the space of the untranslatable.

From his critically acclaimed 2024 work Shiraz to Bazm (Repertoire), Armin Hokmi continues his rigorous exploration of dance’s deeper dimensions: “Each piece is a way for me to engage with the fundamental question of choreographic vocabulary. Or rather, how, within a collective entity, can each individual be given a crucial role while no one possesses the knowledge of the whole?”

Working in synchronicity, the eleven performers of Bazm (Repertoire) collectively reconfigure a mode of being within matter and time. Through lines, geometric forms, and movement, dance reclaims its fundamental role: transforming the way the eye perceives the body.

To conceive of dance is to conceive of an indeterminate form, one in which performers gradually commit themselves, step by step, to a process of transcendence. Much like in nature, whose visible beauty also rests upon a certain degree of uncertainty.