Where does that spark come from, the one that suddenly throws the body into motion? Armin Hokmi has been digging into this puzzle since Shiraz, and it now runs through Bazm (Repertoire), his piece for eleven dancers. Where you might expect an act of memory, he chooses the opposite path: no gestures dug up from the past, no archives brought back to life. What draws him in is the instant just before — that inner push already asking to dance, while nothing has yet taken shape or turned into language. Out of this starting impulse, sometimes held in, sometimes overflowing and intensely physical, a kind of trick repertoire emerges: he picks up ways of dancing long kept at the margins and suddenly tips them over into "Bazm," free to go wherever they please.
The word, in Persian, says exactly that: an event that slips off course, drifting away from what it was meant to be. Rather than freezing the gesture, then, Hokmi tries to set it off. Drawing on the rhythms and forms he explored in his recent research, he weaves fresh passages between what has already been danced and what might yet be. The result: a body that is at once an instrument and entirely free, its energy rising from the heart and pushing back, gesture after gesture, the limits of what is possible.