Man anam ke rostam bovad pahlavan - Ali Moini, dancer and choreographer with Iranian roots, is connected on stage to a life-size puppet, a kind of robot. Each of his movements is passed on to his counterpart via hundreds of cables. But who is directing whom here? Who is subject, who is object? When does the machine become human and the human artificial? Moini himself has to perform a very idiosyncratic dance in order to correctly steer the impressive manikin, whose immense presence fascinates and almost has a hypnotic effect. The play with the doppelganger thematizes the complexity of human nature, the multi-layered connections between life and death. The title of this extraordinary, grandiose man-machine duet quotes an Iranian proverb that says we owe our own success to our ability to imitate another talented person.
Text source and further information: https://www.mousonturm.de/events/man-anam-ke-rostam-bovad-pahlavan-ich-verdanke-rostam-meinem-ruhm/
