The Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan and Ranga Shankara is presenting a unique dance-theatre performance: Return to Sender - Letters from Tentland, directed and choreographed by Helena Waldmann on September 7 at 7.30 pm at Ranga Shankara.  

Return to Sender - Letters from Tentland is a dance performance conceived by the choreographer Helena Waldman and executed with six Iranian women living in exile in Germany. The piece is a follow-up to Letters from Tentland with which Waldmann created a worldwide furore in 2005. 

Supported by the Goethe-Institut and the Dramatic Arts Center Tehran, Helena Waldmann was the first western choreographer to produce and perform a piece in the Islamic republic. Dancing inside tents that concealed more than any chador, the Iranian dancers explored the possibilities and limits of freedom.

Following the runaway success of the first production, The Iranian Letters from Tentland will now be answered by Iranian women in exile. In Return to Sender - Letters from Tentland, the women try to fathom the imagined freedom of exile, the tents become a symbol of life on the move.

The women in exile disappear into the tents left behind by their compatriots from Tehran. Both groups use the tents to veil their yearning. For the former, the tent symbolises their unstable lives and is also a piece of home they can never rid themselves of. They walk a tight rope between the two cultures and are jolted on either side.

The tents whirl like a wind blowing from two directions, fold and unfold only to be torn open like envelopes out of which fall letters from exile. Trapped messages in movement that speak of home as a puzzle of memories, of imminent deportation, of being caught in the middle, of being different.

And between the lines we read how they struggle against existential fear, how they try not to succumb to it. In Return to Sender - Letters from Tentland, the six Iranian women living in exile succeed in making a passionate plea for freedom by expressing their rage, desires and dreams, as well as appealing for tolerance and cultural diversity through dance.

Three percent of the world's population are migrants. But the world of the rich has a problem with this minority. Their escape from a settled existence at home towards an uncertain future does not exactly elicit increased hospitality. In between the law and police practice, they flutter like tents in the wind.

Helena Waldmann, director and choreographer, lives in Berlin and studied under, among others, Heiner Müller, George Tabori and Gerhard Bohner.

In her Forschungen auf dem Feld der Blicke she used such devices as shifting the audience right up against the stage, distorting the stage perspective, and bricking up the fourth wall with such success that her subsequent  plays (1993-99) Die Krankheit Tod, Vodka konkav and CheshireCat won accolades worldwide.

The political power of her choreography after 2000 is a mimicry of exile and inner immigration.

This is demonstrated in her recent works Letters from Tentland, with six Iranian women, her short film emotional rescue, made in 2005 in Palestine, her ballet on extreme sports: Crash, made in Saarbrucken and her Return to Sender..., which is the response of Iranian women forced into exile to the European asylum politics - all of which attract attention as theatre of the political avant-garde.

Tickets are available at Ranga Shankara (26592777) and Max Mueller Bhavan (25205305/6/7/8)