Baba Karam Lessons (2011-2016-2018)

In Baba Karam Lessons, a performance series inspired by the lineage of Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons, I teach audiences how to do a popular Iranian party dance caricaturing working-class street toughs from the south side “slums” of Tehran. Baba Karam is complexly layered within Iranian culture in the way that it questions class, gender and sexuality. It is a caricature of something danced by street tough men called “jahel” and the dance has historically been performed by women in drag wearing suits and hats to fit the image of the jahel — resisting both gender and class constrictions. 

Baba Karam Lessons have been presented in various settings since their inception. In a Santa Monica gallery in 2011, the installation for the dance included all of the costume items and two mirrors with directions for the dance written on them to teach a largely American audience the dance.  In 2016, a planned dance performance at Discostan, a SWANA club night at a local bar in Cypress Park that draws both a SWANA diasporic and general art audience,   included a group of five artists of various cultures and gender-identities in full costume who I taught the dance to engaging a party audience teaching and activating all people in dancing Baba Karam.  In 2018, I presented Baba Karam Lessons at the Hammer Museum as the character of Amir Khoshgele for an invited public program for the Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions exhibition. The performance started outside as I walked and interacted with people oin the street (many of whom were well familiar with Baba Karam) in full character on Westwood Boulevard in Tehrangeles and led them to the performance and lesson inside the museum.