She teaches ballet to dancers in Iran, where it is banned. Then someone took her platform away.
Tara Ghassemieh is a ballerina. She trained at American Ballet Theatre's Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, became the first Iranian-American principal dancer at Golden State Ballet, and now performs internationally as a principal guest artist. She founded and directs INTUITV ARTSHIP, a company that tells contemporary stories through classical ballet and goes by a second name: the disobedient ballet company. She is also a mother of three.
The cause she has given more than a decade to would sound uncontroversial almost anywhere: she wants people to be free to dance.
Then she woke up one morning in April to a blackmail email. Someone had taken over Persian Swan, the Instagram account named for a nickname her school friends gave her and built around ballet, Iran and the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. She says it happened despite two-factor authentication and verification, and that the person wanted money to return it. About a week later, a photo from her Woman, Life, Freedom series, showing her bare back with those three words written on it, was reported as sexually explicit.
Tara believes the pattern points to someone aligned with the Iranian government. DanceOn has not independently verified who was responsible. At the time of our conversation, she was still working with Meta to recover the account.
People tell her she is too small a fish to be a target. She disagrees.
"What people really underestimate is the power of an artist," she says. "Artists have an insane influence on humanity."
Tara teaches dancers inside Iran through encrypted online classes. She logs on at 7 a.m., which is late at night for them. Her students join from living rooms and basements, or anywhere that isn't public.
"We have the right to pick up our dance bag and go to class any day we choose," she tells DanceOn. "And they don't. And if they do, they're risking their life. They're risking their safety, their family's safety, not just theirs."
She told us a story about a bomb going off next to an apartment building where one of her students lived. The student had to evacuate without knowing if it would stand. She grabbed her pointe shoes and her phone. As Tara tells it, she said, "Okay, Mom, that's all I need. I can go."
"Anything you've been through just really gets small when you hear things like that," Tara says.
Since the hack, unsure how closely she is being watched, Tara has paused her classes.
"I have to protect them," she says.
It wasn’t always like this for Iranian dancers. For two decades before the 1979 revolution, the Iranian National Ballet performed in Tehran, blending classical ballet with Iranian folk dance. It grew, Tara says, into the largest company in the Middle East. When the Islamic Republic took power, the company was dissolved and ballet was banned.
Tara's father left Iran for college in California a year before the revolution. He was the youngest of nine children and the only one who left. She has met her Iranian family only once, in Dubai, and has never been to Iran. She believes her advocacy has now put it out of reach, though she says there is "nothing I want more" than to stand on Iranian soil and one day help re-establish the national ballet company.
Tara's request to the dance world is practical. Tell these dancers' stories, rethink portrayals like the Arabian dance in The Nutcracker with the care companies have brought to other cultures, and put dancers of Middle Eastern descent at the front of the stage, so the next generation knows it's possible.
"They've never seen it," she says, "so they don't think that's an option."
She is careful about how she frames it:
"I'm not saying that we are more important. I think everybody's equally important." But, she adds, "it needs to be our turn."
Tara and her husband have talked about what her advocacy work could mean for their family's safety. Her answer hasn't changed.
"I can't not do what needs to be done out of fear, because that's exactly what they want. They want you to be fearful. They want you to be silent. They want you to shut up, just go be a pretty ballerina and do nothing."
Tara's story is political, because the circumstances surrounding these dancers are political. But at its heart, this conversation is about something even more fundamental.
The right to make art.
The right to move your body.
The right to dance.
It is difficult to imagine a principle more central to DanceOn.
Watch the full conversation here. Follow Tara @persianswanofficial while she works to recover her account, and share her Woman, Life, Freedom photo with credit to photographer Lee Gumbs @leegumbs.photography
