Gestures of resistance between the street and the theatre: documentary theatre in Egypt and Laila Soliman’s No Time For Art
Conference paper
Hussein, N. 2015. Gestures of resistance between the street and the theatre: documentary theatre in Egypt and Laila Soliman’s No Time For Art. New Anarchist Research Group Monthly Meeting. Torriano Meeting House, London 25 Apr 2015
Type | Conference paper |
---|---|
Title | Gestures of resistance between the street and the theatre: documentary theatre in Egypt and Laila Soliman’s No Time For Art |
Authors | Hussein, N. |
Abstract | This paper explore a direction in contemporary theatre in Egypt that emerged since the 25 January revolution in 2011 and that employed the immediacy of documentary form as a response to political change, unrest and repression, seeing in documentary theatre a mode of resistance that intervenes in hegemonic discourse. Through extending Peter Weiss’s ideas on documentary theatre and its relationship to political protest, I show how the work explored attempts to extend the struggle on the street, occupying a liminal position between the performance space and the public space, instituting a dialogic relationship between performance and audience as active co-participants in a community ‘in the making.’ As such, documentary form models a constantly shifting and open-ended revolutionary process. In light of Weiss’s theatrical model, I focus on Egyptian director and playwright Laila Soliman’s performance series No Time for Art, which demonstrates a particular inflection of the documentary mode contemporaneous to the 2011 Egyptian uprising. The series is shaped by a performance form that seeks a place directly connected to and implicated in the broader events taking place, while disrupting conventional modes of representation and rupturing the tendency to fix and reify events from the revolution. The particular mimetic mode shown in this series includes the audience in collective and intimate acts of bearing witness, in ways that extend Weiss’s proposed ideal of ‘theatre of actuality’ and puts forward the practice of theatre as a ‘gesture’ of political resistance. |
Research Group | Theatre Arts group |
Conference | New Anarchist Research Group Monthly Meeting |
Publication dates | |
2015 | |
Publication process dates | |
Deposited | 05 May 2015 |
Output status | Published |
Language | English |
https://repository.mdx.ac.uk/item/853vy
51
total views0
total downloads0
views this month0
downloads this month