Arash Fayez

I Can Only Dance to One Song

The short film I Can Only Dance to One Song by Arash Fayez features a series of people from the migrant community in Barcelona singing along or dancing to songs of their choosing. The  video begins with a man contently sings along to a song while getting his hair cut at the barber shop; a woman dances emotively to another song in an empty room full of desks, maybe a school or place of religious study; in a food market, a cashier nods his head to music while tallying customers’ orders and then later moves through the  aisles of his store passionately dancing and mouthing the lyrics as if he were in a music video. Expanding on the music video aesthetic, the film then cuts to a group of young men perched in front of a graffitied wall, cheerfully dancing and rapping along with the song playing from their stereo. The film ends with a lone woman swaying in an empty  gymnasium and then elsewhere, a man at a butcher shop snapping along to the same song.

I Can Only Dance to One Song explores the role of music in forming a sense of belonging to a location. Fayez’s video portrays accounts of displacement rooted in the experience of migrants through sound and movement. By incorporating dance as an expressive act of transformation, this video illustrates the emotional landscape of displacement using corporal and auditory acts. This work moves beyond the visible to tell the story of an invisible community; a kinship that exists between every displaced person.