Paris (AFP)
She is one of the few Sufi dancers to perform in public, and since the pandemic, she initiated this practice via Zoom.
While everything seems to have stopped, the gyrating movement is for Rana Gorgani a way of "giving meaning to existence".
Since her first tours on stage ten years ago, the 37-year-old Franco-Iranian has been surprising.
A whirling dervish?
This spiritual and ancestral dance is traditionally reserved for men, even if women engage in ceremonies behind closed doors, from Turkey to Afghanistan.
For a long time she thought "that it had to remain in a private setting," this petite woman with long black curly hair told AFP.
Until the day when she dares to take a few laps at an open-air festival in Montpellier, where she presented traditional Persian dances.
After "a few minutes, I panicked and stopped for a few seconds. As if subconsciously I was breaking a rule," she recalls.
"I left turning very quickly, I heard a thunderous applause, and at the end I said to myself 'everything is fine'.
People come to see her backstage with tears in their eyes to thank her.
"There was that click," said the dervish, asserting that with this practice "I am not showing, I am me".
- "Neither masculine nor feminine" -
In Sufism, a mystical view of Islam, "the soul is neither masculine nor feminine", she says.
To be a dervish and a woman does not "go against this spirituality".
"We shoot, man or woman, with a loose dress or a skirt; we say that the fabric that flies reveals the soul", explains Rana Gorgani.
A paradox has always interested him: in Muslim countries, male dervishes wear this skirt, a female symbol, in public, while women dance in secret.
"In Europe, I am lucky to be able to express myself artistically and freely", she says.
The Sufi dance is known under the name of Samâ (listening in Arabic), this "spiritual hearing" which makes it possible to reach "hâl" (state in Arabic, that is to say the state which leads to ecstasy), over rotations which are done "always on the left side, that of the heart, and in the direction of the rotation of the Earth around the Sun".
Rana Gorgani took the Sufi path at the age of 14, on the occasion of her first visit to her country of origin.
For many years, she learned by participating in many ceremonies in Iran but also in Turkey, often secretly.
In France, the one whose parents left Iran after the Islamic revolution left a career as an actress to devote herself to Samâ.
"Jalal al-Din Roumi said + several paths lead to God, I chose that of music and dance. + It was my case," she smiles, referring to the famous 13th century Sufi poet whose followers founded the Brotherhood of Whirling Dervishes.
- "Meditation in motion" -
She befriends dervishes in Turkey, cradle of the brotherhood, who say they "understand" her approach.
Since the pandemic, this graduate in dance anthropology and ethnomusicology has been giving lessons via Zoom, with each new moon and full moon.
To his surprise, the experience turned out to be "extremely intense", as his students had a need to "give meaning to existence" and "to connect with their inner being".
"About a hundred people from all over the world participated in the first session at the first containment, then I received more and more requests," she recalls.
With this "moving meditation", "I believe I have helped some people to reveal themselves to themselves."
She dares to dance to traditional music but also to the notes of the piano of her accomplice Simon Graichy, or to a song by Jacques Brel performed by the duo Bird on The Wire.
"Where I see states of grace," she said.
© 2021 AFP