Choreographing Bittersweetness: Touching Pain and Refusing Representation in Aisan Hoss’s The Pleasant Pain

The Pleasant Pain (2017), choreographed by Aisan Hoss, unsettles (neo)colonial regimes of representation that reduce Iranians to legible narratives of oppression, resistance, and liberation. The performance draws on interviews Hoss conducted with Iranian immigrants from her generation—whose childhoods unfolded during the first decade of the Islamic Republic—and mobilizes touch, skirts, and sound to cultivate bittersweet forms of memory and attachment. Through hapticality, stasis, and silence, the performance dislodges the primacy of the optic and discursive in favor of haptic relation. Close readings of the performance reveal bittersweetness as a relational mode through which contradictory attachments persist and dominant binaries begin to loosen. Rather than centering agency as the primary analytic, I ask what becomes possible when agency no longer organizes the analysis of The Pleasant Pain. Reading the performance as a choreographic praxis of refusal, I argue that bittersweetness reorients relationships to power through ambivalence, contradiction, and suspension.