Note from the creator of the performance:

The performance was designed and conceived as a ritual for several reasons:

– It was inspired from the circular shape connected to rituals that are based in my Arab and Egyptian cultures, whether Halaka or Zar or street performances or Hadra. The community gathering in a circle, or in circles, was somehow a definition of the spatial aspect of a ritual.

– It relied on a strong concept of energy communication, circulation, channeling and projection. The circle facilitated and supported the energy circulation, and created a bonding between the participants/ spectators, a bonding that defines the nature of a collective ritual and therefore lays the foundation for a human equal and connected community that creates the ritual and develops it.

– It was designed with very specific, systematic and calculated actions that have to be repeated in a regular, sustained and rhythmic style. Because every ritual includes repetition, repeated actions, and a kind of collectively adopted physical behaviour, the spectators’ actions took the shape of almost similar repetitive individual actions that all two hundred spectators repeat. At the same time those individual actions are passed on from one person to the other, and communicated and connected from one person to the other, so that there happens a kind of individual internal partnership between each two spectators. From one to the other to the last person this constructive and repetitive cooperation builds a collective active physicality, and a community that ends by adding visual aspects to the performance due to the material fabric that they pass on from one to the other and that ends by becoming a part of the scenography of the performance via the hands and arms of the spectators holding it, eventually connecting through it from the first till the last person. On the performative level the actions of passing on the fabric till it makes a circular shape held by everybody becomes an active performative action made by the spectators to translate the human and emotional bonding into a material representation (via the white fabric) which also could be interpreted as a symbolised visualisation of wrapping the pain, of materialising each person’s story, and of changing the way that the space looks.

On one hand, the practises of dance and performance are here opened to the spectators who literally become active partners and collaborators in creating the ritual and its togetherness, and on the other side the practices

are here primarily giving space to the spectators’ actions that interweave through the medium of the fabric, and through what the fabric carries of their emotions and personal projections, and of the way they hand it to one another, until they hold it up together to make it into a circular screen for the video projections. Therefore the spectators employ and develop their collective actions to create a new scenographic aspect to the performance, one that clearly holds witness and shows visual references of a testimonial act.

All the actions of the spectators are facilitated by co-performers or assistant performers, five of them, who function as ceremony helpers within this ritual, who wear the same fabric and colour, and who hold a strong bonding between each other, and with me,  the solo performer. Their energy channeling and bonding holds and carries the space and regulates the collective energy of the spectators, and the bonding that the five co-performers share with me guarantees a network and radiant flow that covers the whole circle and tightens the communication and communal transcendence.

Nevertheless all this was not what the audience expected when buying tickets for a performance created by an Egyptian woman. Maybe some of them did already know my work, and considered the performance as artistic work without any labels, but definitely another part of the audience had expectations related to the label, the label of the migrant body, the gendered body, the Arab body, and therefore – maybe – the exotic body. My first intention was not to create a performance that decolonizes my body, or decolonizes the spectators’ perceptions, my initial intention was to create a dance ritual of reviving pain and going towards healing. It was part of my life long project on Performing Trauma, which later brought me to a Valeska-Gert guest professorship. It was also an intention of reviving the feeling of community among the spectators as a microcosm  of the larger society. But how would I do that if I already had a stigmatised body and a labeled identity…? How would I be able to create a dance practise of interweaving, of transcendence and of human bonding if my very presence was already connected – or triggering – a history and consciousness of divide, discrimination, hierarchy and voyeurism, how can I stimulate the spectators to leave their Western and white position of spectatorship and re-position themselves as one with me? As equal humans…?

The explorations that followed were gigantic in the final formulation of my understanding of my role as a performer, and in the performance’s understanding of the spectators’ gaze towards me, the solo female performer. This final formulation included the revelation that I should reverse my position from being looked at, to be looking back to the spectators, to look back is to create equality in the gaze, is to see the spectators, and allow them to realise that they are also being looked at, it creates mutuality, removes separation and hierarchy, and transforms the act of looking/gazing into an act of exchanging and sharing. I should re-position myself and become also a spectator of the ritual, a spectator of the spectators, then the whole concept of spectatorship and the gaze would shift into a dimension of equality and human exchange, which welcomes the instant messages being sent and received, those messages that shape the momentary energy flow and growth of the performance.

Then another crucial revelation came with a final part of the performance where I have a one on one encounter with each spectator, I pass through all the circles of spectators and look through the eyes of each spectator along with a hand to hand caress that brings an immediate physical and sensorial dimension to the relation with the spectator, recognises the emotional bonding, removes the hierarchy and the alienation, and radiates humanness which replaces a history of othering and of objectification, and eventually opens a path towards healing via the communal spirit and the collective human bonding.

At the end, I disappear and the spectators gather the fabric and put it in my place, and leave the space in groups. They hopefully end by owning the ritual, and by re-identifying with the power of performance as ritual, and the power of the community, it is this power that is able to decolonise the migrant performer body only by first decolonising the body – bodies – of the spectators through reviving their human bonding to each other and therefore to the migrant performer- who would no longer be migrant – and to the performance that would no longer be labeled as an import.

Rite of Revival
A Multimedia Interactive Solo Dance Performance
Scripted, performed & directed by Nora Amin
With co-performers: Eva Balzer, Pasquale Rotter, Alina Amer, Julia Lemmle & André Vollrath
Live drums & kajoon: Tamer Essam
Recorded violin: Ayman Asfour (and composition)
Sound track design and composition: Nader Sami
Sound, light and video technician: Maged Monir
Video design: Ibrahim Ghareib
Presented at Studio R, Maxim Gorki Theater
22 February 2018