Surrounded by a crowd of protesters, her arms glide through the air in wide sweeping motions, her hair swinging freely through the air. “I didn't think about it, (…) I got so emotional, and then I went in the center and just started dancing.”

Yasmin, a 21 year old dancer and artist from Tehran currently studying in Spain, gracefully performs a traditional Iranian dance. Her face is calm, her movements relaxed. If she were to do this in her native Iran, she would have gotten arrested for not wearing a hijab and dancing in public. This happened to Astijazh Haghighi, 21, and her fiancé Amir Mohammad Ahmadi, 22, back in November of last year after posting a video of themselves dancing in front of the Freedom Tower in Tehran, in which Haghighi was not wearing her hijab. They were sentenced to 10 1/2 years in prison.

In Valencia, Yasmin can dance without being arrested. There, she experienced a peaceful protest, something she and her fellow protesters weren’t used to; “Nobody was there to tell us to not do that or start arguing with us or, hit us, shoot us” she recalls. However, after a video of Yasmin dancing that was posted by activist accounts on Instagram went viral, she has accepted the fact that she can likely not return to her country safely. Activists performing such public acts generally cover their faces to avoid recognition and imprisonment from the Theocratic regime, but Yasmin knew the risk.

She was exposed to protests from a young age; “when I was eight years old (...) all of my family used to go to protests, and I was standing behind a window and watching the people getting killed, getting shot (…) in front of my house.” In 2009 protests about the result of the presidential election that year spread out across the country, during which at least 70 people were killed. Soon enough, she started attending multiple protests with her friends and relatives, which always posed a substantial risk. Protests in Iran frequently get violent at the hands of the police. At one protest, she noticed a green laser aimed at her forehead. Moments later a girl was shot a few meters away; “it could have been me, you know”.

Similarly, she has been expressing herself through dance since the age of three. However, as she grew up under the rule of the Theocrat Khamenei, all her training had to be done in secret; “I started dancing because my art is dance, I really want to express myself and say something…so I was always struggling with not being able to dance in the streets or wherever I want in my country.”

Iran has a very rich culture of dance and music, which are both generally seen as Haram by the Iranian government since the 1979 Iranian revolution. Before that point, Iran had many dance schools and dancing at parties was commonplace. “each city has their own rules (…) in the north they start clapping their hands (…) and jumping. The Kurdish people just grabbed their hands one boy, one girl, one boy, one girl to show that we are all one person”, Yasmin recalled. These days however, dancing is done exclusively behind closed doors and the parties that some of the youth still hold need strict guest lists, sound insulation and courage, because being caught by the Basiji police can mean imprisonment and 99 lashes.

Yasmin has been attending protests every week since the events in Iran unfurled in September and doing other initiatives with friends, such as a “Free hugs for Iran” action to spread awareness on the humanitarian struggle, as well as traveling to bigger protests in the Spanish capital of Madrid.

In the latest phase of protest, dance has been a major form of resistance. Yasmin explains how protesters in Tehran often gather at the Freedom Tower and; “take their hijab off, and dance with a guy or girl, to show that we're all one thing. And they grab their hands, they kiss each other. They hug each other- every single thing that you could not do in the streets. (…) to show no, we're not listening to you anymore”.

Throughout the protests, many women in Iran took off and burned their hijabs and even now that the protests have decreased considerably, many women don’t wear their headscarves. These and similar actions of defiance continue. At this point it is difficult to say how the history of the country will continue, although by keeping the music and dance alive, the country preserves its own culture and fights against its opression.