When dancing is dangerous

'An open, shameless gratification of sexual desire,' - and that's just waltzing. As an Iranian dancer gets a suspended sentence and is banned from leaving the country, Michael Seaver writes about how dance has long been viewed with suspicion as a corrupting influence that leads to sin.

The website reveals one of those blank web pages: "Mohamed Khordadian's official website is going through a major reconstruction." Hardly surprising as the American-Iranian pop-dancer's popularity has been steadily growing among the 80,000 Iranian immigrants in the Los Angeles area, with his videos selling out in shops in the Iranian Southland district. Classically trained, he was a member of the Niavarian Ballet Company in Tehran but fled to the US after the 1979 Islamic revolution, where he formed a dance company and a school. A new website should promote these achievements but it could be "under construction" for sometime yet.

Earlier this year, he returned to Iran for the first time in more than 20 years to visit his ailing father, but before boarding the plane to return home he was arrested on charges of "inciting and encouraging depravity among young people".

At his trial in July, the judge upheld the charges after viewing a video of his dances. He received a 10-year suspended jail sentence, a lifetime ban on teaching or performing dance and cannot leave Iran for 10 years. The US was described as "a provocative environment that could lead him to repeat the offences".

Videos of Khordanian's dances, which are available on the black market in Iran and beamed in by satellite channels, are harmless and slightly tacky belly dance-salsa fusion. But they do show men and women dancing together, most famously in the "Arabic Dance", and since such mixing is forbidden, these videos are seen as a corrupting influence on Iran's youth and justify his sentence. Despite President Mohammad Khatami's attempts to introduce reform since his election in 1997, there is plenty of evidence of continued hard-line approaches to morality, particularly within the judiciary. Recent reports have emerged of new security patrols in black four-wheel drives patrolling Tehran, separating any men and women who are mixing publicly.

While it's easy to dismiss Khordadian's case as another case of illogical repressive Islamic laws, there are many examples within the Christian Church of dance being blamed as a corrupting influence. Throughout history, Christian dogma has seesawed between accepting dance as a worthy activity, even suitable for worship, and as a corrupting activity that inevitably leads to sin. The civilisation of dance began with Plato who in his Laws made the distinction between peasant dances and the more "noble kind of dancing", and since he influenced much Christian thought, the attitude to dance in early Medieval Europe differed little from that of Antiquity. Dance was an important element in Christian-Gnostic mysticism in the third century and was later accepted by the official church.

But dance soon slipped back to barbarity and the church preached against dance through the Middle Ages until Renaissance thought demanded a return to the classical thought of Graeco-Roman antiquity. The Jesuits made use of dance for educational and theological purposes and the dancing and stage effects of the Jesuit College of Louis-le-Grand in Paris were said to be better and more numerous than the Théâtre Français. Although students regularly gave performances for the French Court, much criticism was levelled at the Jesuits for their use of ballet, and they responded to this criticism through a ballet, P.C. Porée's L'homme instruit par les spectacles, performed in Paris in 1726.

The primary difficulty with the church lay in the body itself and its occasion to sin through dance. The dilemma lay between the power of dance to unleash carefree improper behaviour and its ability to combine people together in joint worship.

"Disorderly dancing" was unthinking and gave freedom to the body, freedom that couldn't be trusted.

The arrival of the waltz in the early 19th century and the polka in the 1840s brought new difficulties to adversaries of dance. Unlike the group square dances, the closed position of the couple in the waltz was offensive. Writing in Dance of Death, American Ambrose Bierce wrote that the "modern waltz is not merely 'suggestive'. . . but an open and shameless gratification of sexual desire and a cooler of burning lust". Presbyterian Reverend Hiram Collins Haydn claimed that "three quarters of abandoned girls in New York were ruined by dancing". (Abandoned women referred to those who became prostitutes and/or pregnant.) Women were seen as either pious and corruptible or as temptresses by the invariably male opponents. Salomé was frequently quoted as proof of the art form's corruptibility.

In Ireland, the Catholic Church was wary of Irish dancing. It condemned dancing on religious holidays (it was unruly behaviour) and in some parishes the travelling dancing masters had to get the permission of the priest in order to set up a school. In the 20th century, priests denounced theatre dance performances by Anna Pavlova and Joan Denise Moriarty, whose tutu-clad Swanhilda was described as "a semi-nude female figure that has offended against all normal codes of decency".

Ballet was also indicted in Baptist Jesse Marvin Gaskin's 1945 book Modern Dance on Trial.

"Sex and the dance are inseparable," he wrote. "The ballet, for example, loses its appeal when clothes are put on the dancer. It is the base, vulgar display of nudity that appeals to the cheap-minded admirer. The ballet violates Paul's injunction to dress modestly."

Even in the 21st century, dance still finds opposition. Last year, the small town of Pound, Virginia, banned public dancing, a situation reminiscent of the 1984 film Footloose, in which Kevin Bacon defies a similar prohibition. "I can never see a time when dancing can be approved of, especially with people who are not married," said Tim Shepherd, an evangelist for the Church of Christ in Pound, last August. "Dancing is one of those things that entices. It imitates sexual contact." Some Christian colleges in the US still forbid dancing. Liberty University in Lynchburg is one example, where the student handbook lists "attendance at a dance" among misdemeanours such as "gambling" and "entering the space above ceiling tiles". The penalty is six reprimands and a $35 fine.

US Attorney General John Ashcroft is a member of the religiously conservative Assemblies of God Church, which prohibits dancing because it is sexually suggestive. He doesn't dance at any social balls (even the inauguration ball) and is even careful not to sway when singing hymns as that could be regarded as dance.

Closer to home, nudity still causes problems and the fallout from Jerome Bel's performance during the International Dance Festival in Dublin in May continues - with questions recently sent to the Minister of Tourism, Arts and Sport by Fine Gael TD Olivia Mitchell regarding the nudity and urination onstage.

But does dance have any protection? Some think that it's defended within Article No. 27 of the 1948 United Nations' Declaration of Universal Human Rights, which states that "everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts".

American critic Jennifer Fisher recently wrote: "That statement just about covers it. The truth is that dance can be about communication, rumination and celebration. It embodies ideas about religion, politics, culture, individuality, survival and more.

Is dance dangerous? The governments and religions that try to control and ban it think so. The Kordadian case is not just about one dancer. Before him, people have died for the right to dance or, sometimes, they have just died inside without it."