Iranian dancer fights to move. (News).

An Iranian-American dancer who lives and works in Los Angeles was recently convicted of dancing, or--as it was called at his trial in Teheran--"promoting corruption among young people," wire services reported on July 8. Mohamad Khordadian had been arrested in May as he attempted to leave Iran after a visit. His sentence is a ban on giving dance classes for life and a ten-year suspended jail term; he was also denied an exit visa from Iran for ten years. The 46-year-old Khordadian was expected to appeal the verdict.

Khordadian is best known for performing a kind of Iranian pop-belly dance in his nightclub-review-style videos, which are widely circulated in Iran. In Southern California, he also performs at social occasions and is seen on Persian-language TV. While dancing is not technically banned in Iran, the context of dance performances is key in defining whether or not they are deemed acceptable by hard-line Islamic clerics, who wield great power in that country. Folk dance is tolerated, and social dancing goes on in private (often with guards keeping a lookout), but men and women who are not close relatives are not permitted to dance near each other, and even figures of ballet dancers in Degas reproductions are blacked out.

Such attitudes toward dance in the Islamic world have been summarized as "choreophobia" by Dr. Anthony Shay, Iranian specialist and founder of the Avaz International Dance Theatre in Los Angeles. Shay says he coined the term to describe "ambivalent and negative feelings about dance."

No statement about Khordadian was forthcoming from the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations, Iran's only official presence in the United States. Press officer Hosein Nosrat said that the case was not "a major story." However, for some dance scholars, it calls attention to the need to explore and publicize issues of human rights as they relate to dance. Dancers have been oppressed in Various political contexts, most recently in Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime banned music and dance, making it punishable in some cases by death.

Only recently has much attention been paid to the fact that Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts." Dance historian Naomi Jackson of Arizona State University is now editing an anthology of essays on dance and human rights and hopes eventually to start a nonprofit organization committed to such issues. "Dance," she says, "is symbolic of a person's freedom to move freely in a society, so when that's taken away, everyone should be up in arms."

Reactions to the Khordadian verdict can be addressed to Javad Zarif, deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, Permanent Representative of Iran to the United Nations, 622 Third Avenue, 34th Floor, New York, NY 10017; or by email to [e-mail].