Zahra Shahab

Identity in flux

AS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST WHO USES SOUND, VIDEO, costuming and dance to create her artistic works, Zahra Shahab imagines her work first in fantastical, animated scenes in her head. “I reach for whatever discipline to communicate what I want to communicate,” says the Vancouver-based artist. Shahab is an alumna of University of Calgary, Modus

Operandi Training Program and Emily Carr University. She often collaborates with other artists who are, as she puts it, “masterful in their craft” to bring her vision to life. A recent collaboration with videographer Arya Hawker involved using video editing software. “It’s fun doing things you can’t do in choreography,” she explains. Working with software allowed Shahab to make the dancers onscreen disappear, reappear and defy the laws of gravity.

Dance remains her primary vector for creation and exploration. Shahab is “fascinated,” as she puts it, with how “the body can intentionally change little details” that can then “open doors to other worlds within the performer.” “I was able to crack open parts of myself that I hadn’t been able to access in real life,” she says. Her fascination with change stems from a childhood curiosity about death and a “desire for something else.” Now, she understands curiosity and desire as a search for the unseen – “the life that’s happening underneath the life.” For her, performance facilitates access to that space, where a performer can become unencumbered with the societal pressures that supress aspects of their identity.

Currently, Shahab is choreographing a full-length work to premiere at Vancouver’s New Works Performance in January. The work, I am gone from the metal when the metal hits the mould, takes its name from a line in Robert Bringhurst’s poem Deuteronomy. The choreography is a “conversation between a trio and a solo,” in collaboration with dance artist Katie Green. The title connotes continual transformation. “As soon as an identity is crystalized, it becomes something else,” Shahab explains. “Nothing is complete.” For her, the idea of constant becoming is at the heart of queer theory, which has helped shaped her adulthood: “What queer theory is to me is identity in flux and the freedom of possibility that comes with that.”

For this work, Shahab has chosen only women of colour for her cast. “I’ve been interested in white supremacy and the embodiment of internalized racism,” she reflects. “[As a woman of colour], you don’t realize how it affects the way you move in the world.” In her solo, Shahab will dance a “parade of characters she’s had in her body,” ones that that have facilitated her movement through spaces she doesn’t feel “legitimate” in. After dropping out of one character and before taking up another, she will stand in front of the audience in a “raw state,” a glimpse of what exists in her “unseen world.”