“It was a unique moment, unimaginable! » At 79, the American choreographer Carolyn Carlson still remembers the world premiere, on August 17, 1977, of her ballet Human Called Being, at the Shiraz-Persepolis Arts Festival, Iran. She sees her dancers again in black tights standing ready on the stage erected in front of the bas-reliefs of the royal necropolis of Naqsh-e Rostam, not far from the thousand-year-old ruins of Persepolis, the capital of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, one of greatest of antiquity. She describes the helicopter which lands near the stage, Empress Farah Pahlavi, who comes out of it, her hair held back in a bun, escorted by her bodyguards, taking her place in the audience.
The show can begin, twenty minutes of dancing tense by soaring music. At the same time, about sixty kilometers away, in the coolness of a garden in the great city of Shiraz, other spectators applaud the dancers from Bengal who interpret the poetic stories of the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata, the two fundamental poems Hindus. A little before midnight, by the light of the oil lamps, everyone ends up converging at the Hāfezieh, the tomb of the great Persian poet Hafez, to let themselves be intoxicated by the local musicians and the scents swirling in the evening air.
Cast dancers in leotards
Carolyn Carlson hasn’t forgotten anything about “this funny time”. This summer evening, she could not imagine that she was living the last flames of a legendary event, organized for eleven years (1967-1977), 700 kilometers from Tehran, in the ocher setting of Persepolis as in the courtyards of Shiraz fragrant with jasmine, where the greatest Iranian bards met the cream of the Western avant-garde of the 1970s. The list of headliners is dizzying: directors Peter Brook, Bob Wilson and Tadeusz Kantor, composers John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Olivier Messiaen, choreographers Maurice Béjart and Merce Cunningham, pianist Martha Argerich, violinist Yehudi Menuhin…
As cosmopolitan as the Festival d’Automne in Paris, which it precedes by five years, this event was more open to all scenic forms than the Festival d’Avignon, created twenty years earlier, or its regional competitor, the Baalbek International Festival, Lebanon, launched in 1956. “A unique moment of discussion, passion, even protest, in a country where it is usually not good to raise your voice”, summarized, in 1972, the critic Henry-Louis de La Grange in The new observer.
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