Choral dances are documented in Iran on ceramics from as early the Neolithic and the Chalcolithic periods (PICTURE  1). Central to Iranian culture and belief from the Sasanian period prior to Islam, choral dances were probably scheduled to agricultural and seasonal feasts, as exemplifies a seventh-century silver plate from Toharistan showing a circle of female dancers. The dancers holding vessels and plants celebrate the Sasanian goddess Anahita personifying water, fertility and vegetation, evoking perhaps also the seven principal Zoroastrian feasts of Iran (PICTURE  2). The choral dance of spring and renewal was perpetuated into the Islamic era in a tenth-century ceramic bowl from Eastern Iran (PICTURE  3) with female dancers in a circle holding a garland of palmettes, their hair tresses strewn with flowers.

One kind of such choral dance, called dastaband in Persian and daʿkasa in Arabic is defined by Firuzabadi’s (d. 1415) dictionary as “a performance of the Magians (laʿb al-majūs) when they are gyrating, having taken one another by the hand [in a manner] like dancing the dastaband”. The  term made-up of the Persian words dast, ‘hand’ and band, ‘holding’  transmits its form. Dastaband dances were staged under the Umayyads and the Abbasids, the prince-poet Ibn al-Muʿtazz (d. 908) likening wine amphoras stacked in a row to Persian dancers performing it [LINKED TEXT 1]. Yet it was not exclusive to Persians, as Isfahani’s Book of Songs describes Greek slavegirls with golden crosses on their necks performing the dastaband for the Abbasid caliph al-Maʾmun (r. 813-833) with palm leaves and olives in their hands connoting lushness. 

A series of glazed ceramic ewers and vases from the Seljuq period made in western Iran in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries depicts choral dancing (PICTURE 4-5). Whether the dancers holding hands on these vessels correspond to the dastaband of the texts remains unclear. The dancers on the monochrome-glazed vessels are molded in relief and shown in various poses:  leaping, stepping, or bending one leg. While they could be female or male, a very distinctive feature of the performance is the ‘chain handhold’ whereby each dancer entangles his arms and links his hands not with the adjacent companion, but with the successive dancer on his sides. The ‘human chain’ formed thus conveys magic security and cyclical repetition where the dancers orbit. The dancers’ Seljuq identity is betrayed by their round faces, headdresses and garments, namely: the rounded felt-cap (kulāh) and qaftans (qabāʾ) worn over wide trousers – costumes typical of Seljuq military elites. This elite association, however, is negated by the vessels’ mediocre quality and often careless execution implying popular mass-production.  The ewers probably served as water-containers, while the vases could have been flower-pots. An identical ‘chain handhold’ dance is depicted also on a few thirteenth-fourteenth-century metal candlesticks from Anatolia, albeit with the performers there static. The distinctive ‘chain handhold’ dance survived into later medieval and modern times in Byzantine and Ottoman dances of Greece and the Balkans (PICTURE  6). Restricted to Seljuq ceramic ewers and candlesticks, the ‘chain handhold’ dance is persistently with water, fire and light, elements central to the traditional Iranian feasts of Nawruz and Mihrajan that persisted under Islam and in whose rituals those ewers and vases might have been used.

From the twelfth/thirteenth century Islamic choral dance were associated with the ecstatic samāʿ dance performed by the Sufi mystics. The mystic Jalāl al-Dīn al-Rūmī (1207 – 1273), who also founded the Mevlevi order of the ‘Whirling Dervishes’, associates in his poems the Sufis’ dance with the cosmic motion of the universe and the atoms [LINKED TEXT 2]. The cosmic dance is echoed in the same period in Kashan ceramic bowl (PICTURE  7) the dancers excitingly gesticulating with their hands, inserted amongst symbols of the seven planets and signs of the zodiac. Later illustration of Behzad’s school from Eastern Iran fuses the traditional Iranian chorus dance with the mystic Islamic samāʿ showing dervishes rapt in ecstatic sleeve dance in two circles against a blooming field (PICTURE  8). Whereas the Iranian choral dance signaled regeneration of life and nature, the Islamic samāʿ aspired to annihilation (fanāʾ) of the mystic’s soul and its unification with Allah and the cosmos – that choral dance symbolizes. 

Bibliography

Sawa, George Dimitri, Musical and Socio-Cultural Anecdotes from Kitāb al-Aghānī al-Kabīr: Annotated Translations and Commentaries (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 315-316, note 17.

Ventrone, Giovanna, “Una brocca selgiuchide con scena di danza,” Arte orientale in Italia, i (1971),                  pp. 31-46.

Watson, Oliver, Ceramics of Iran: Islamic Pottery from the Sarikhani Collection (New Haven: Yale UP, 2020), pp. 128-129, no. 67; pp. 194-195, no. 97.

Canby, Sheila et al. (eds.), Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs [Exhibition Catalogue, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 27 - July 24 2016] (New-York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016), pp. 162-63, nos. 92-93.

Grenet, Francois “Extracts from a Calendar of Zoroastrian Feasts: A New Interpretation of the ‘Soltikoff’ Bactrian Silver Plate in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris,” In The Zoroastrian Flame: Exploring Religion, History and Tradition, eds. A. Williams, S. Stewart & A. Hintze (London: Tauris, 2016), pp. 205–222.

[LINKED TEXT 1].

Abbasid poet-prince Ibn al-Muʿtazz (d. 908): 

“The wine jars are like a row of men                                                                                                                         

drawn up to dance a dastaband.”

D. S. Rice, “Deacon or Drink: Some Paintings from Samarra Re-Examined,”  Arabica, v (1958), p. 27.

[LINKED TEXT 2]

Jalāl al-Dīn al-Rūmī (1207 – 1273), Mathnāvī:

“When you dance the whole universe dances.
All the realms spun around you in endless celebration.
Your soul loses its grip.
Your body sheds its fatigue.
Hearing my hands clap and my drum beat,
You begin to whirl.”