This is how Saba defied the Iranian regime, on tiptoe and without a single strand of hair

The window is present, but it will not open; it is sealed shut. Saba Poori is twenty-three years old when she finds herself staring at it in a grey room furnished with two chairs and a desk, “all deliberately old and dilapidated, to make you feel even more anxious”. She is a dancer, lives in Milan and, at the end of the summer of 2022, returns to Iran to see her family. As soon as she lands in Tehran, her passport is confiscated; and, for the second time in a few days, she finds herself being interrogated. “I follow you on Instagram. You’re a very, very pretty girl,” a man in the room tells her. The first interrogation lasted six hours, in an office where, to enter, she had to cover her clothes with a long, loose-fitting dress brought by her mother. The two men who had been waiting for her were wearing jeans. They were young, without the usual long beards. “Modern,” they had told her mother to reassure her. Saba now recounts how she came to be in that room, alongside Federico Taddia, in Saba che danza la speranza, published by Mondadori Ragazzi.

Her story begins in Karaj, some forty kilometres west of Tehran, in a house with a huge mirror. Standing in front of it, when Saba was little, her mother would open the wardrobe, choose a skirt, turn on the stereo and start dancing. Then she turns the music down. “That’s better,” she tells her daughter; it’s too early to explain that in Iran women cannot dance freely: anyone who offends public morality risks between ten days and two months in prison or seventy-four lashes. In the Poori household, dancing survives in this way, simply by changing its name. At the age of seven, Saba begins to wear the maqna’e, the Iranian headscarf that covers her hair; as she grows up, the rules multiply (“cover yourself better”, “tuck it in properly”, “you can’t come in like that”). Dancing went underground: every week her father took her to Tehran – a four-hour drive for a two-hour lesson – in a tower full of mirrors where they danced in secret. And thanks to dancing, at the age of seventeen, Saba managed to go to Armenia: her first memory is of her breath, the feeling that, at last, no one was watching her.

The opportunity to leave Iran comes shortly afterwards, thanks to an audition organised by an Italian teacher. Saba turns up wearing her boyfriend’s tracksuit bottoms. She is chosen but asked to wait a year: she is too young, they tell her. However, when another girl withdraws, the place becomes hers. Saba had dreamt of Paris, but her visa says Milan. She discovers the Duomo, the Navigli, Covid, and her first panic attack. To support herself, she works as a delivery rider. She graduates from the academy with a performance in which she portrays the wind. When, on 13 September 2022, she returns to Tehran, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini is stopped by the morality police because a few strands of hair are peeking out from under her headscarf. She dies three days later and Iran takes to the streets. Saba’s parents beg her to stay away from the protests. Shortly afterwards, she, too, cuts off a lock of her hair. It is during the second interrogation, in the room with the sealed window, that the man asks her what she thinks of the protests. Saba knows that the man sitting opposite her can decide her fate – her passport and her future – so she replies that she doesn’t know much about it: she has returned, she says, simply to see her family. Under her headscarf, she hides the cut lock of hair. The interrogator presses her: why dancing, of all things? He suggests she become an informant for the regime. Saba refuses. In the end, they let her go. She decides she will carry on dancing, and so she does.