ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the least obvious and most obscure place for an intervention into these visual media-perpetuated narratives, a contemporary Iraqi dance theater performance inspired by Hijikata Tatsumi. It focuses on the butoh-inspired choreographic work The Bald-headed and shows that choreographer Anmar Taha, director of the theatrical company Iraqi Bodies, effectively countered negative stereotypes of Iraqis as aggressive and hyper masculine. Taha's The Bald-headed poignantly and powerfully conveys Iraqi experiences of war as universal iterations of human suffering. The edited video clip of Taha's The Bald-headed reveals six hairless male dancers embodying motifs of conformity contrasted with distortion. The butoh-esque dancers performing The Bald-headed are extremely homogenous, and hardly distinguishable from one another, never mind identifiable as a concise ethnic group. Iraqi Bodies, these Iraqi bodies in The Bald-headed, literally young Iraqi theater students from war-torn Iraq, are inextricably linked to larger and negatively stereotyped Middle Eastern, Arab, refugee, or Iraqi figures.
