In progress: Tapping energies
By
Sherif Iskander Nakhal
Nora Amin graduated from the Faculty of Art at Cairo University having studied French and Comparative Literature. She has directed 10 plays, written seven, acted in 20 as well as in eight short films.
Nine is a physical theatrical performance, presented by nine young actresses, and grew out of a workshop funded by the British Council. It aimed to promote freedom of thought and expression through theatre.
The audience's response to the play was much stronger than I expected. It only showed for one night and the publicity was minimal but the crowd it attracted made for the largest audience I've yet had, maybe more than all my previous performances put together. I remember looking at the audience before the performance began and recognising people who had studied with me 10 years ago. The project gave me the feeling that I had ended one phase in my career on a positive note.
I'm currently working on taking the actors to Minya, where I have assembled a group to put on another version of Nine, integrating performers from Minya with those from Cairo. It will be the first theatrical performance at the Jesuit Theatre in Minya and I am looking forward to seeing the Cairo girls interacting with the Upper-Egyptian ones.
The performance is not based on a script and the rehearsal process involves a great deal of improvisation dealing with the actor's personal experiences and thoughts, later transforming them into movement. It is as much a psychological as a physical process. The play tends towards the construction of solid statements that are biographical.
We plan to go to England a week after our showing at Minya to embark on the second phase of the project. The idea is to select five performers from Nine and combine them with four British performers from the Lupus Dance Company. We are going to explore ideas and conduct some kind of dialogue through the language of movement. Hopefully a draft for a new performance will emerge which will reflect the differences and similarities of young women of almost the same age but from different cultural backgrounds. It's a big challenge.
One of my favourite playwrights is Marguerite Duras. I have performed two of her scripts, La Musica Deuxième and The English Lover. I translated both texts three years ago into colloquial Arabic and the two have been published in a single volume. I later staged them at the Cairo Experimental Theatre Festival. I'm also very interested in the experiences of non-performers. The interest began during the making of Nine and I am keen to develop this way of working with other people. It will always be interesting to work with actors on a text-based performance but it is equally interesting to develop the process of workshops with people who are not professional actors and then produce something out of it.
Two years ago, when I was staging Box of Our Lives, I was simultaneously running an acting workshop in Rome with six traditionally trained actors. I told them to forget all about the style they were used to and asked them to instead improvise and focus on their bodies, and to reflect on personal, lived experiences.
It is up to the teacher to choose which direction the workshop should take from these sense memory exercises. I didn't want to take them into an imagined outside world but wanted them to re-explore their personal experiences, not in a particularly cerebral way but in a psychological and physical manner. The body often tells you more than you want to know about oneself.
I had a girl in the group who had gone through a tragic accident five years ago and was told that she wouldn't move normally any more. She has been working with the group for six months now, doing intense three-hour physical exercises daily. For her it has become a psychological, maybe even spiritual exercise: she does the things she has been told she is incapable of doing, that scientifically she should not be able to do. This is what inner energy can achieve.
Themes such as death, oppression, repression, solitude, love and opposition have been the basis of my work. I would very much like to get rid of them and focus on other themes but don't know how.
At the beginning of September I'll be travelling to Washington DC for 10 months. The Vilar Institute at the Kennedy Center offers fellowships every year to six people from around the world to study art management. I expect to learn a great deal from this experience. I'll be working with theatre companies within the Kennedy Centre and learn the details about funding, marketing, structuring and networking from A to Z.
From my experience in the independent theatre community I think what we need most is not artistic talent, we have that, but to manage, distribute and promote much better. I'm the first woman from the Middle East to have this opportunity and my plan is to pass on what I learn to independent theatre groups in Egypt.
I'm emptying my apartment and turning it into an office with a fax machine and a computer for the use of any independent theatre group. It's something that I've been wanting to do for three years now.
My summer programme is going to be quite busy. In two weeks time I'll be travelling to Istanbul to participate in a workshop held by DBM, then to England for the second production of Nine followed by Brazil for an internship at the Augusto Boal Centre. Afterwards I'll be going to Lebanon to look at shows for the Vienna festival of which I am now a committee member.
