Greyscale photo of Armen Ohanian, an Armenian woman. She wears lace and sheer fabric dress and headscarf. Her headband is covered in intricate beadwork. She smiles slightly.
Content warning for genocide
“And it was then that I understood that a dancer is more than a woman; she is a dream, and to preserve that, she must show the world only her unreal self.” – Armen Ohanian
An innovative belly dancer, writer, poet, political revolutionary, translator, and all-around renaissance woman, Armen Ohanian dared to defy the stereotypes associated with Middle Eastern women during her lifetime. She overcame many obstacles to pursue a career that would showcase her numerous talents, distinctive artistry, and people’s culture to the Western world. Born in Armenia, Ohanian was one of the first women to bring traditional Middle-Eastern dance to the West. While doing so, she revolutionized the industry by merging traditional Armenian and Iranian dance with Western contemporary and modern free-dance forms. In addition, Ohanian utilized dance and her other artistic pursuits to become a worldly traveler, which led to her constant presence as a figure in many artistic circles and her frequent engagement in relationships with both women and men. As a woman of Armenian and Iranian descent, Ohanian managed to lead the life of a sexually liberated bisexual woman. To this day, she serves as one of the earliest documented examples of a Middle Eastern woman striving to balance her queerness and heritage.
Armen Ohanian was born Sophia Pirboudaghian in 1887 to an upper-class Armenian family in Shamakha, a region under Russian Empire rule that is now part of modern-day Azerbaijan. Thanks to her family’s status, Sophia was privileged to a solid academic and artistic education from an early age. In 1902, however, a devastating earthquake hit her home, causing Ohanian and her family to flee and move to the larger, vibrant city of Baku—the current capital of Azerbaijan. Once there, Ohanian completed her studies at a Russian school, graduating three years later in 1905. However, that year, Ohanian and her family were hit with yet another setback, as 1905 marked the beginning of a slew of anti-Armenian pogroms in the region. Though she survived, Ohanian’s father, Emanuel, was killed, devastating Ohanian and the rest of her family. As a result, Ohanian was hurriedly married to an Armenian-Iranian doctor named Haik Ter-Ohanian. The marriage, alas, was a failure, and in a progressive move, Ohanian ended the marriage within the year. Once separated, Ohanian took up residence with a group of Muslim women, where she learned to dance and began to develop her passion for performance.
By 1906, Ohanian began acting, going by the name Sophia Ter-Ohanian as part of a theater group for the Armenian Cultural Union of Baku. Two years later, Ohanian moved to Moscow, where she studied plastic arts at the Nelidova School. Subsequently, she revisited her love for dance, performing her first piece at the Maly Theatre. In 1909, Ohanian performed a short stint at the Tbilisi Opera, which marked the first time that she went by her newly minted stage name - Armen Ohanian - a name she kept for the duration of her career.
Ohanian subsequently traveled to Iran, where she began to flourish. She performed as a dancer and actress during the last period of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, a time of fundamental change in Persia that heralded the country’s shift into the modern era. It is there that Ohanian co-founded the Persian National Theater in Tehran, which greatly contributed to the expansion of women’s participation in the public arts in Iran. Within a year, Ohanian also organized a musical and literary festival together with the Persian Women Benevolent Association, an event that marked the first time Iranian women could perform on stage and watch a film in the country. The gala was a potpourri of artistic endeavors, featuring music, literature readings, theatrical and dance performances, and cinema showings, all able to be consumed by women. Seemingly not busy enough, that same year, Ohanian produced, directed, and performed in the famed Russian writer Nikolai Gogol’s play, The Government Inspector, conducted exclusively in Farsi.
In addition to these aforementioned creative and organizational pursuits, Ohanian continued to hone her dance skills in Iran, hoping to perfect her craft. She continued to perform and practice in the country and began touring throughout Egypt and the Ottoman Empire before being hired to perform in London in 1911 in what would serve as a watershed moment for her life and career. With this European performance, Ohanian became an overnight sensation, bursting onto the scene of Western culture and delighting audiences who deemed her “exotic” and lusted after her “Orientalist” forms of dance. Ohanian quickly became a sought-after performer and continued to perform throughout Europe into the late 1920s.
From the late 20s and into the mid-1930s, Ohanian rose to be a key figure in the "exotic" dance craze that swept the Western world at the time, touring through most of Europe, Mexico, and the United States. Blending a plethora of dance experiences with her unique perspective, intelligence and creativity, Ohanian capitalized on the trend and merged American and Western elements of dance with Armenian and Iranian influences. In particular, she applied "free dance" methods developed by the famous American dancer Isadora Duncan to her choreographies to Armenian and Iranian music. Some of Ohanian's dances that integrated these two realms include "Salome," "At the Temple of Anahit," "Treason," "The Matchmaker," "Haschich," "The Great Khan of Shamakha," and "Towards Nirvana," each of which captivated and were widely praised by the public audience.
Though she was undoubtedly a talented dancer and choreographer, Ohanian's career and success as a performer were not exclusively met with fanfare and appraisal. Given the groundbreaking nature of the work, Ohanian's career was also prone to various criticisms. For one, some believed that Western audiences perceived Ohanian's art as simply hypersexual belly dancing, reducing her to a sexual object and fetishizing her style of dance rather than considering her pure talent and cultural innovations. Still, others viewed Ohanian as "selling out"—choosing to embrace Western fetishism merely to further her career. However, a true artist is not to be responsible for or affected by audience reception or critique, and Ohanian was an innovator in her field who performed with pride for her heritage and culture.
Nevertheless, Armen Ohanian should not be remembered for her dancing alone. In addition to performing, she also was an avid writer. She began writing poetry and autobiographical pieces while living in Paris in 1912. She soon had pieces appear in various widely translated media. Her first book, The Dancer of Shamakha, was published in 1918 in French and was later translated into English, Spanish, German, Swedish, and Finnish. Ohanian continued to write and publish autobiographical pieces regularly, releasing a memoir entitled, In the Claws of Civilization in 1921, an account of her time in the Soviet Union called The Laughs of A Snake Charmer in 1931, amongst others.
Alongside her compelling yet complicated professional career, Ohanian led an exciting and label-defying romantic life as well. Though it was not a term in existence at the time, Ohanian was likely a bisexual and is known to have had multiple affairs with both men and women during her life. As she traveled the world, she found herself constantly surrounded by creative circles and pursued relationships with several artists, including the painter Emile Bernard and the writers Maurice Barres and Andre Germain. Though many of her documented partnerships were with men, there are several recorded accounts of her affairs with women as well, including a notable one with the American writer Natalie Barney, a famously open lesbian at the time who served as inspiration behind The Well Of Loneliness and other notably sapphic works.
Despite entertaining many suitors and practicing polyamory, Ohanian opted to settle down again for the second time and married the Mexican economist and diplomat, Makedonio Garza, in 1922. The couple moved around, living in Hamburg, New York, Paris, Moscow, London, and Madrid, before finally landing back in Mexico in 1934. As she aged, Ohanian began to dance less frequently but pursued various other cultural and political interests. Having been interested in the native dances of Mexico from previous visits to the country in the 1920s, Ohanian founded a school of dance in Mexico City in 1936. Together with Garza, she translated numerous books from Russian to Spanish, many of which were about Communism—a cause Ohanian had been committed to since the mid-1920s. In fact, while in Mexico, Ohanian quickly became an active and productive member of the Mexican Communist Party. Ohanian also continued to write and publish her own books on Russian, Soviet, and Mexican literature and in 1946 published Happy Armenia, a book on Soviet Armenia in Spanish, in which she explored a renewed interest in her Armenian ancestry. Perhaps one of her greatest pieces of writing came in 1952, a poem entitled "My Dream as an Exile," written in her native Armenian tongue and published in 1952 in a journal of Paris.
Well into her fifties and sixties, Ohanian continued to dance sparingly and made a comeback in the Mexican dance scene, performing there from 1940 to 1941 and again in 1946. She also returned to the stage in Paris in both 1949 and 1953. During a second visit to the Soviet Union in 1958 with her husband, Ohanian traveled to Yerevan, Armenia, returning to her homeland where it all began in order to donate a collection of her private files to the Museum of Literature and Arts. She then returned to Mexico, where she continued to write, translate, and publish through 1969, when she released what was to be her last volume of memoirs in Spanish, before passing away in 1976 at the age of 89.
Via her boundless creative output, Armen Ohanian refused to limit herself to a singular art form, and throughout her career, made considerable contributions to the fields of dance, poetry, translation, and more. As a woman of Armenian heritage, she broke past the traditional barriers and limitations of her gender and culture and chose to live her life as a sexually liberated individual and fiery political activist. She overcame natural disasters, ethnic cleansings, and Western prejudice to pursue her many passions and chose to outwardly love whom she loved regardless of gender. Ohanian should be remembered as both an early and rare figurehead of a Middle Eastern woman who displayed the ability to live an independent, subversive, liberated and queer life while still proudly spreading her culture and heritage. To this day, Ohanian is sadly not well known or widely talked about, but she nevertheless left an important impact on the world and should serve as a courageous exemplar to Middle Eastern women everywhere—and in particular queer ones—who are trying to make a name for themselves in a world that aims to hold them back.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material
Armen Ohanian: A Queer Armenian Artist You Should Know About. Equality Armenia. (2020, February 5). https://equalityarmenia.org/f/armen-ohanian-a-queer-armenian-artist-you-should-know-about.
Chakmakchi, Mohamed. “Dear Armen.” REORIENT. (2016, January 27).
http://www.reorientmag.com/2016/01/armen_ohanian/
Meeker, Camilla Selian.
“Meet Armen Ohanian, the belly dancer who defied every stereotype of a Middle Eastern woman”. The Tempest. (2020, July 29.)
https://thetempest.co/2020/07/29/history/armen-ohanian-belly-dancer-defying-stereotypes/
Ohanian, Armen. The Dance Of Shamahka. London, Butler & Tanner, 1922.
Townsend, Julie. “Autobiography and the Coulisses: Narrator, Dancer, Spectator.” Emerging Bodies: The Performance of Worldmaking in Dance and Choreography, edited by Gabriele Klein and Sandra Noeth, Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2011, pp. 137–148. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1wxt9q.13. Accessed 17 Apr. 2021.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1wxt9q.13?seq=8#metadata_info_tab_contents
About the Author
Marc is a writer and artist born and raised in Manhattan. He is particularly passionate about giving voices and recognition to those on the margins that history has forgotten or ignored. His passions include queer literature, female hip hop, and brutalist architecture. He currently resides in Brooklyn with his partner where they run a book club and frequently seek out disco parties.