«Little is known about the Copts and their relationship with the sea. Their Egyptian ancestors were also more occupied with the Nile and the delta than with the sea and navigation. (...) Some of the greatest hermits and the humblest monks of the Mediterranean – Saint Anthony, Saint Pacomius, Saint Macarius – are fruits of the Coptic tree.»
Predrag Matvejevic, Breviario Mediterraneo
What the twenty interpreters of the Egyptian Modern Dance Theatre, evenly divided between women and men, perform in The Women of Kassem Amin, under the guidance of choreographer Walid Aouni, is a true parable on the role of women in Arab society and their complex negotiation with the difficult contradictions of modernity. The title references the historical figure of the author of two fundamental books on women's liberation, and the cultural revolution that began in his name as early as the end of the 19th century. It must be said right away that the most effective and powerful moment of the entire choreography is found in the second part, and it is worth starting from here, when some white door frames for six absent doors are brought on stage, behind which the men dress after handing the women white veils along with a book. While the men then lift them to dance with them, they remain with their gaze always on the open book, perhaps as a sign of a new, non-violent distance, of a reasoned rejection that coincides with a more genuine liberation. The black trailing of the veiled woman, gathered and folded in the next scene by the men, an archaic symbol of an enslavement now disarmed, contrasts with the center of the group of reading women, now emancipated. Indeed, in the following scene, which sees a woman in white literally overwhelmed by two rolling beams inscribed with authority and patriarchal power, with a sudden and silent gesture, the roles reverse and the executioner is also pursued and crushed by his own victim. From the beginning, it is the veils, first black that cover and oppress, then white that liberate dances in a strongly modern dance style, in a set design closed on three sides, rational and metaphysical, within which the imprisoned female figures seem forced to celebrate a prayer that appears immutable only in appearance. The male sections are suddenly more severe, accompanied in the background by projected writings that evoke an authority that cannot be trampled upon. Even the finale, with the men’s faces covered by black veils lowered from above, reverses the initial scene in which the women were instead in the same situation of constraint and imprisonment; indeed, even this situation reveals a trust in art and its capacity for reversibility or progression of cultures.
Lebanese dancer Walid Aouni began his career in Belgium in the 1980s: his group, Taneet group for theatrical dancing, participated in the inaugural performance of the Arab World Institute in Paris in 1988; later, he worked as a set designer for nine years with Maurice Béjart, with whom he visited Egypt in 1990. In 1993, the Egyptian Minister of Culture asked him to found the first modern theatrical dance group for the Opera Theatre. Between 1993 and 2010, he directed more than twenty-five performances, collaborating with musicians and film directors, winning international awards and recognition.
