NAPA International Theatre & Music Festival 2018
For the NAPA International Theatre & Musaic Festival 2018, Goethe-Institut Pakistan brings Egyptian Choreagrapher, theatre director and writer Nora Amin, who will present 'Resurrection.
‘’Resurrection" is a dance ritual on breathlessness, passion, oneness and survival. It is especially dedicated to all those who lost their lives due to oppressive systems. Made with original music, the piece includes a poetic monologue written by Nora Amin in English and Arabic.
The piece was created and developed over the course of ten years, it reached its current performative form in 2016/2017.
"Resurrection" was triggered by the collective death of fifty theatre artists in the south of Egypt, on 5 September 2005. The Egyptian state is still to be held responsible for this collective death by means of negligence and disrespect to the theatre community in specific, and disrespect to human dignity in general. The fire took place in a small state theatre venue, and among the deceased was Saleh Saad, from whom part of the performance is inspired. Saleh was Nora Amin's partner, and he had a vision of his own death which he told to her some days before the fire. This vision adds another dimension to the trauma. And it fuels the performance with the potential of personal and collective healing. In 2007, the story of Saleh and the fire grew to another perspective, and the artistic potential of expanding the biographical performance into a universal testimony occurred when Nora met with female survivors of the civil war in Sudan and conducted a workshop on storytelling and healing/transformation. From that workshop she carried the feeling of a witness to political oppression, war and torture, and how it influences the lives of women, and how women as natural storytellers and carriers of family archives are able to preserve the memory and revive the love and the spiritual connection. With that foundation, "Resurrection" aspires to be a political statement supporting human dignity and the value of human life, as well as a ritual that resurrects the human bonding related to the universal heritage of pain, survival, forgiveness and healing.
Choreographed, written, performed and directed by Nora Amin
Music by Nader Sami and Ramz Sabry
Language: English and Arabic
Previously performed in Milan, Ragusa, Tangiers, Copenhagen, Alexandria and Cairo.
Nora Amin
Writer, performer, choreographer, theatre director and educator, Amin is a founding member of the Modern Dance Theatre Company at The Cairo Opera House (since 1993) and the founder of “Lamusica Independent Theatre Group”, where she directed and produced thirty-seven theatre, music and dance productions since 2000. She has published four collections of short stories, four novels, a poetry audio book and two books on theatre methodology. She is the author of the first Arabic book on theatre and human rights, “The Egyptian Contemporary Theatre: The Art of Claiming our Right”, published by CHRSI in 2003, as well as of a book on theatre as a medium for healing and transformation for trauma survivors, “Theatre For Change: From the Internal to the External”(2007). In 2009, she launched the independent initiative “Our Stories” to encourage personal storytelling in popular neighborhoods. In 2011 Amin founded “The Egyptian National Project Of Theatre Of The Oppressed” and its Arab network. She was a fellow of the "International Research Center for Interweaving Performance Cultures" (20015-20016) for her topic "Theatre and Political Transformation in Egypt", guest lecturer at the cultural policy institute at Hildesheim University (2018) on "The Transformations of the Performing Arts: Cultural Policy and independent theatre in the Arab Region", And she will be a guest professor at the theatre and dance department of Freie University/Berlin (summer 2018) at the Valeska-Gert chair, under the topic "Performing Trauma". Her most recent publication is a feminist essay "Migrating the Feminine", on the transgressions of female physicality in the public sphere, at Matthes&Seitz, Germany.
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