Over Nastaran
Actress & theatre producer
Nastaran Razawi Khorasani (Iran, 1987) graduated from the Maastricht Theater Academy. She is both a theater maker and an actress and has performed at the Ro Theater, International Theater Amsterdam, Maas theater and dance. Her work is also shown internationally, including Theater der Welt (Offenbach Frankfurt), Transform Festival in Leeds, Theater Commons Tokyo and Zürcher Theater Spektakel. In 2024 and 2025 she will tour her successful performances Songs for no one and This is not a dance. In the coming years, Nastaran will be associated with Theater Rotterdam as a maker. Together with Davy Pieters she forms the maker duo Kobe. Scroll below for more information about the nominations and awards Nastaran received for her work.
In 2014 she won the Gouden Krekel for the most impressive stage performance. In 2020 she was nominated for the Dutch Young Audience Dance Days Prize. Her performance Songs for no one received the BNG Bank Theaterprijs twice (2020 and 2021) and was selected for Het TheaterFestival Vlaanderen 2022 and Theater der Welt in Frankfurt-Offenbach 2023. In 2023 she was nominated for the Gieskes-Strijbis Podium Prize. Songs for no one has been nominated for the Patronage Prize and the Audience Prize in the context of the Zürcher Theater Spectacle 2024.
This is not a dance is one of the four nominees for the VSCD Mime/Performance Prize 2024. From the VSCD jury report:
“With This is not a dance Nastaran Razawi Khorasani is building on her exciting documentary-performative oeuvre, in which she links a journalistic approach to a physical visual language. For this performance she starts from an interesting subject: the ban on dance in Iran. Perhaps unimaginable to many, but through well-measured interviews, Razawi Khorasani manages to make the far-reaching implications of this tangible. It is amazing how she brings the two worlds together in this performance. Her own body acts as a projection screen for their words, with her physical expression and presence on the floor overwhelming. The impressive light and music design by Minna Tiikkainen and Joost Maaskant suggests that movement (and therefore possibly dance) is everywhere: in the effective scenography of Peter van Til, in the non-dancing, dancing body of Razawi Khorasani, and as we are expertly whipped up to a thrilling climax, also within ourselves. This is not a dance is a tribute to the body that wants to move. A tribute to the art that must be made. This form of resistance is very commendable and makes a deep impression.”
