Even before they migrated to Europe, the 1001 tales that Scheherazade unspooled to keep her execution at bay spread to cities across the Mediterranean world. For Sorour Darabi, who relocated from Iran to France more than a millennium later, One Thousand and One Nights is still on the move and still a cosmopolitan affair. The 34-year-old gender-fluid choreographer sets his “body opera” to a quasi–Middle Eastern dirge in what resembles a sex ’n’ drugs dungeon. His Mille et une nuits exudes the careless sexiness of those with beauty to spare. Disheveled, half-clothed habitués stumble into shafts of light and slip in puddles: ice sculptures suspended from the ceiling by heavy chains have been steadily dripping onto the cement. These characters are living through the kind of dissolute night that it would take a thousand days to recover from. The work premieres at the Hannover and Montpellier Festivals this month before touring to Lausanne, Paris, and Vienna in autumn. —Apollinaire Scherr