Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier - Performance Review: "Andaruni" (اندرونی, Within) by Maryam Malmir (May 1, 2026, UCR Arts166, Riverside, California)

 

Performance Review: Andaruni (اندرونی, Within) by Maryam Malmir

April 30 & May 1, 2026 | ARTS 166 Performance Lab, UC Riverside

Author: Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier (Hispanic Studies / Black Studies)

Maryam Malmir’s Andaruni (اندرونی, Within) operates in the register of what we could call “metamorphic image”—a variation of quality without the stabilizing capture of narrative translation. Here, the image does not serve the word. Movement does not illustrate. Force does not resolve into clear meaning.

The choreography, co-performed by Maryam Malmir and Carly Embry, unfolds as bodily figurations—from poses according command to tremors, whispers and songs, distensions and de-contractions of bodies and their affects. A catastrophic fold where body and technique fail to accommodate each other, where culture’s inscription on flesh meets flesh’s resistance. The performers’ bodies carry the weight of Qajar-era photographic archives—19th-century Iranian women rendered frozen, framed, possessed by the colonial-patriarchal gaze. But these bodies do not simply reproduce that capture. They erode it from within. The choreography translates 19th-century andaruni patriarchal system (the “inner house”, women’s quarters in traditional Persian residential architecture, in contrast to the biruni, public, male-oriented outer area) into a mathematical maze (in the era of cybernetic governmentality), where bodies become entangled data—opening deviance, glitch, and disobedience against fixed meaning and sacrificial social roles.

The dance is tactile, opaque, chiaroscuro. Low lighting creates zones of indeterminacy. Alongside with the technical reproducibility of cultural poses, movements emerge as involuntary memory: a hand lifting halfway and stopping, a spine curving not toward expression but toward some sort of withdrawal. According to a spectral voice-command, the performers repeat and accelerate phrases with difference. Repetition here is Deleuzian: despite the imperative of mimesis without deviance, each return is a miracle of non-coincidence.

Alexandra “Sasha” Korotneva —who had already showed their work as a noise machine operator and dancer in the piece Forgotten Science by Salon collective, in June, 2025—amazes us with interactive sound and image-movement machines that are not a mere accompaniment. They co-constitute the metamorphic medium itself. If the mathematical organization of interaction operates as a device for capturing bodies and their desires—through mathematically calibrated systems and real-time video processing—the glitch, that rupture in the smooth surface of digital reproduction, operates as a political aesthetic. The projection of different languages onto the dancers’ bodies writes the interdicts of social and cultural normalization directly onto living flesh. But the sovereign gaze of the archive stutters, and Sasha’s sound and video projection design produces layers of processed music and noise that do not illustrate the dance but rather enter into reciprocal alignment-and-misalignment with it. The body and the machine hesitate in mutual resistance and coupling.

In my view, what is most striking about Andaruni is its refusal to resolve into legibility. The spectator trained in narrative-industrial diegesis does not find the subject clearly, does not see where it is all going. This is not lack of clarity but rather an affirmative opacity—a constellation of signs conspiring against plain reading. The work stages the overcodification of bodies by patriarchal, archival, and technological power, but more importantly, it stages the interruption of that capture. In the breach between body and code, in the disobedience of a gesture that cannot be fully assimilated, in the unmanageable encounter between dancers, machines, and archive, Andaruni discloses a queer entanglement of forces and affects that escapes the apparatus of easy representation and disrupt normative economies of meaning and desire. The audience leaves not with a message but with an experience—something that exceeds them.

Riverside, May 1, 2026.