Choreographer and performer
Adham Hafez, Artistic Director of Cairo’s HaRaKa, presents his work on the Arabic-speaking region and Europe, including his latest production
2065 BC—a displaced and revisited re-enactment of the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884, which formalized the Scramble for Africa.
2065 BC developed from an ongoing examination of politics and aesthetics in Cairo, Berlin, and New York, centering on the ethics of occupation, cultural hegemony, and aesthetic violence.
In conversation with
Deborah Kapchan, Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, Hafez discusses what a choreography that critiques western hegemony could look like and to what extent it should be informed by the western artistic and philosophical canon.
Presented in partnership with New York Live Arts as part of the festival Live Ideas: MENA/Future—Cultural Transformations in the Middle East North Africa Region.
Choreographer, composer and performer,
Adham Hafez studied contemporary dance at the Cairo Opera House before he moved to Amsterdam for his Masters in Choreography, at the Amsterdam Theater School. With a Master degree in political sciences from SciencePo (Paris), Hafez’s work tilts towards studying what political art is at times of catastrophic change, and, having studied with Bruno Latour, the impact of the human on nature
―physically, artistically and politically. Awarded for his work as a choreographer, composer and cultural entrepreneur, Hafez is currently a PhD candidate at New York University, re-activating a 15 years research on Arab performance history. His latest productions were presented at Cairo Opera House (Cairo), MoMA PS1 (New York), Damascus Opera House (Damascus), Hebel Am Ufer (Berlin), and ImpulsTanz (Vienna). Adham Hafez publishes in Arabic and English on Arab art history and performance theory. Hafez is the founder and program director of the research platform HaRaKa, the first movement and performance research project in Egypt. He is also the artistic director of the TransDance festival series and the founder of
Cairography, the first publication in Egypt dedicated to critical writing on choreography and performance. Currently, Hafez is enmeshed in research on geopolitical constructs, borders and violence, with his company staging its next production on the history of communism in 2016, and is holding a series of distant choreographic engagements.
Deborah Kapchan, Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, researches poetics and performance in North Africa and the North African diaspora. She is the author of
Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Music and Trance in the Global Marketplace (Wesleyan University Press, 2007), as well as numerous articles on sound, narrative, affect and embodiment. She is the editor (with Pauline Strong) of "Theorizing the Hybrid", a special issue of
The Journal of American Folklore, and has recently edited two books:
Intangible Rights: Heritage and Human Rights in Transit (2014 University of Pennsylvania Press), and
Theorizing Sound Writing (Wesleyan University Press, in press). She is also the translator of a volume of Moroccan poetry entitled
Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Moroccan Contemporary Poetry (under review). She has been a Fulbright-Hays Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a recipient of grants from the American Institute of Maghrib Studies, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
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