Freedom dance
Serene Assir attended an international women's conference in which art helped convey a message individuality
It was a calm evening on one of the Nile's most luxurious boats as we sat and waited for members of the international women's conference to finish their dinner. Not until 8pm did novelist and women's rights activist Nawal El-Saadawi's glamorous hosts arrive; this might as well have been a fashion show in Milan, what with the colours and fabrics on display. Certainly there was something unreal about the gathering, which lacked the vaguest hint of the suffering that we were there to discuss. People looked too good, sounded too superficial and reeked of too much fragrance to be credible fighters. How the Swedish dancer and choreographer Ami Skandberg Dahlstedt's performance was going to change anything was unclear.
Until, that is, the dancer in question walked onto the improvised stage. Skanberg looked like a timid child: small, with long red braids, red lipstick, red trousers and a patterned green shirt. "I choose colour to counter the tradition of Western modern dance: life is not monographic, dance is not dull. There is energy in dance, and the colours I wear reflect this," she was to tell Al-Ahram Weekly. So she was a rebel. The evening looked promising after all. And indeed her piece -- based on the true story of Mervat, a Kharga Oasis woman whom she visited a few years ago -- demonstrated just that rage against the dying of the light. She managed to bring forth the reality of a young woman who refuses to stop dancing, whose every activity over the course of the day becomes a manifestation of music and dance. You mother asks you to do the washing up, for example, and you start thinking of the dishes as flowers floating in a stream, a waterfall, a tune to which your body is responding.
And while Mervat grows older, opposition to her inborn vocation grows in tandem. Both family and community are critical: in one memorable re-enactment of this predicament, Skandberg is forced to dance in smaller and smaller spaces, until she is finally unable to move. Her being alone on stage heightens the force of the moment; other characters, like the girl's mother and father, her girlfriends and, later on, professionals in the dance community, are reduced to voices pronouncing the briefest of lines (in Swedish -- with written English translation); they are but part of the soundtrack. The dancer is mocked and bullied because no man will agree to marry her if she does not adjust her ways -- she is reproached because she is not "normal". But, her imagination dominating her sense of reality, she is free. It is attending her sister's wedding that consolidates her disdain of the institution. She finds out, while Arabic rhythms sound out the consummation, that her sister is unhappy; rather the whole point of matrimonial union is family honour.
Saddened, she eventually seeks a way to spend the rest of her life travelling all around the world doing what she loves. It is at this point that the performance's most thought-provoking moment occurs. While the young dancer is being auditioned, the male voices of producers criticise her: one says that, though clearly an artist, she is not "what (they) are looking for". She is not attractive enough, her body is too imperfect for the commercial purposes at hand. What Skanberg thus conveys is in effect contrary to mainstream feminist discourse: liberation constitutes something much more complex and complete than the integration of women into the labour force; the empowerment of women is part and parcel of the empowerment of humanity -- a notion that comes across lucidly when she cries out, "I am me!".
Yet the performance is open-ended, to somewhat unsettling effect, since the audience is given no answer as to what happens to people who go against the grain to preserve their integrity. It was during an hour-long open-floor debate following the performance that such an answer came. Mervat, Skanberg told the audience, is now 45 years old; she is still unmarried, and she is still happy.
As for Skanberg herself, she is married with two children. Her childlike presence seems to flout the experience her eyes reflect. "It's funny, I know. A young girl in Sweden once approached me after attending this performance and, with a frightened look on her face, she asked me whether I was married," Skanberg told the Weekly. "When I told her I was she breathed a sigh of relief. You see," she went on, "for me the search and the fight for women's rights are not at all about the institution of marriage. It's part and parcel of living ethically." Refreshingly, women's rights and human rights are seen as one and the same thing. "I show this performance to teenagers in Sweden, to try and urge them to do what they want, not to succumb to social pressure. Because social pressure and tension exist anywhere you go in the world -- and I feel it in today's world more than ever before -- that's why I choose to incorporate a semi- political message into my dance. To counter that pressure..."
Skanberg chose an appropriate medium, too. "I have to dance every day," she told the Weekly, physical freedom being vital to its spiritual counterpart. During the debate, Skanberg explained to the audience how she "makes the dance" herself, how it is free from any restrictions of form or style. "Ballet," she said, "is all about reaching up to heaven, to the human ideal. Modern dance is more about the space that immediately surrounds us. I dance somewhere in between. There is realism and struggle, and at the same time the space to dream." She struggles and dreams in her own life, too. "I do what I love, and whatever performance I create really comes from the heart. And because of this," she told the Weekly, "I find myself continually unemployed. Many freelance artists I know view unemployment benefits as the debt society pays to artists. We cannot be free and integrated at the same time. But when I manage to perform in places and for audiences such as these, the cyclical process of struggle and acceptance becomes worth my while after all."
The sheer humanity of both performer and performance was warmly received. During the debate, many of those who asked questions or made comments did so in deeply engaged tones -- the forced intellectualism of much feminist discourse thus having no room on the Nile tonight. Conference members and attendees were reduced to men and women in search of self and self- fulfilment -- freedom. Perhaps this was Skanberg's greatest feat, in the end -- she could pose simple questions to which people responded warmly: courage rather than ostentation. "When you are seeking to make an impact on the society around you," she told the audience, "don't give up. It's only a question of time and patience. Of course you will meet with resistance. When I train my body, my muscles start out being inflexible. But my mind emerges victorious, as I counter-resist with love. I fight it out, but happily..."
Hearty applause ended the evening. Though still on a luxury boat charging its guests extortionate prices, when I left I could see the water, the moon, the people. And I was thirsty for change; somehow, the world struggle for greater freedom on all its levels seemed possible, definitely worthwhile. "Even if the result is but a moment of joy," as Skanberg puts it, "we must go on."
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