This workshop was a super active one! Our workshop participants started with a quick warm-up learning some basic movements in a circle. They then moved on to dancing with scarves, then reciting nursery rhymes and dancing in a circle again. We had such a great time and it was also lovely to see the families leaving together all at once!
Get to know more about Aida, who has worked with Sheba Arts for different projects since 2019:

• 2019: Choreographer for Women of Freedom Square, Sheba Arts, Manchester
• 2019-20: Outreach Officer, Workshop Coordinator and Event Assistant, Gardens of Babylon, Sheba Arts, Manchester
• 2024- Dance workshops for The Haideh & Nejad Project, Sheba Arts, Manchester
  
  

Aida’s Bio:

Aida Foroutan was trained as a painter and graduated with a BSc in Industrial Design from the Alzahra University of Tehran. She relocated to Sweden in 2000, where she worked in theatre and museum curation, and exhibited her paintings in Sweden and Germany. A book of her poetry, Forbidden Peace, was published in Stockholm in 2003. She moved to the UK in 2007 to do her Masters degree in Theatre Studies at the University of Manchester, then a PhD there (2008-2012) in Art History, titled ‘The Reception of Surrealism in Iranian Art and Literature’. She has published a number of scholarly articles for peer-reviewed academic journals, and one for a Festschrift. Before the pandemic, she convened a successful international conference ‘Modern Iranian Art and Architecture in the Shadow of the Classical Persian Past’ at the John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester. She currently teaches Persian at the University of Manchester.

We have loved working with Aida so far and can’t wait for future workshops with her!

See you at the next workshop with Sahba Music!