Laila Soliman

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Laila Soliman (born in 1981 in Cairo ) is an Egyptian playwright , dramaturge and director . With her pieces "Lessons in Revolting" and "No Time for Art", she brought the revolution in Egypt to the international theater stages in 2011 .

Life

Laila Soliman attended the German School in Cairo. She studied theater studies and Arabic literature at the American University of Cairo until 2004 and then completed a postgraduate course at the DasArts theater school in Amsterdam . She lives and works in Cairo and Amsterdam.

plant

Laila Soliman belongs to the young theater avant-garde in Egypt. Her plays and productions have been shown in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and on the stages of various European cities. Her most important productions include “The Retreating World” (2004) by Naomi Wallace, “Ghorba, images of lienation” (2006), a piece developed by the group “Cairo Camps”, which she co-founded; “… At your service!” (2009), based on plays by Harold Pinter and Dario Fo / Franca Rame and the theater performance “Spring Awakening Egypt” based on Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening , which she staged in 2010 at the Damascus Theater Festival . Her play "Egyptian Products" was performed at the Royal Court Theater in London in 2008 and in 2010 was included in the anthology Plays from the Arab World . Since 2011 she has been best known in Europe for her work “Lessons in Revolting” and “No Time for Art”. On the 100th anniversary of the First World War , Laila Soliman performed her new play “Whims of Freedom” about the revolution in Egypt in 1919 at the International Theater Festival in London in June 2014 .

"Lessons in Revolting"

Laila Soliman was one of the demonstrators of the 2011 revolution in Egypt in Tahrir Square in Cairo and witnessed the brutality, arrests and torture by the military police and sexual violence against demonstrating women for daring to share the same public space with men to express their dissidence. Her pieces “Lessons in Revolting” and “Blue Bra Day” document this dark side of Tahrir in a multimedia performance that combines documentary film , dance , pantomime and acting . She developed “Lessons in Revolting” together with her partner, the Belgian theater director Ruud Gielens. The piece was first performed in Cairo in August 2011. In his review of the performance at the Zürcher Theater Spektakel 2011, Charles Linsmayer wrote that the performance was not just a documentation of the protest movement on Tahrir Square, it saw itself as a work in progress and wanted to continue after the performance in Cairo and during the guest performances in Zurich , Rotterdam, Düsseldorf and Amsterdam record the paths of the Egyptian revolution under the rule of the military council. According to Claudio Steiger in the NZZ , the achievement of “Lessons in Revolting” is to clearly demonstrate the untenability of the current situation in Egypt. " It is an oppressive, painful lesson for the viewer that after Mubarak's retreat people were intimidated, persecuted and killed ."

"No Time for Art"

For her piece “No Time for Art”, Lailia Soliman condensed letters and notes from diaries into a documentary performance that covered the last few years of the Mubarak regime through the 2011 uprising on Tahrir Square and the protests against President Mohammed Mursi hits. The play was performed in 2012 at the Theater Festival Basel, in Tanzquartier Wien and in Ballhaus Naunynstraße in Berlin. In the production, four actors tell of traumatizing events in the lives of persecuted opposition members in front of a video film wall and read from their letters that report on human rights violations and are addressed to the Court of Human Rights in Brussels. Laila Soliman invites the audience to take part in the readings. You will receive a written instruction in which a. means: "We want to give as many martyrs as possible a face and a voice." Hans-Thies Lehmann cites the play as an example of post-dramatic theater between political activism and ethical practice and describes his experience as a viewer: " There is no performance, no acting out of a dramatic story. But there is the audience - our voices in a public space, our silence, our listening, our common moment of 'Einedenken' (remembrance). “With“ No Time for Art ”one could speak of a new form of tragedy .

Others

Laila Soliman is one of the three protagonists of the documentary "Laila, Hala and Karima" - a year in revolutionary Cairo by Ahmed Abdel Mohsen and Eduard Erne , a production of Swiss television in 2012.

In 2013 she appeared as a speaker at a panel event for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on the subject of “Arab Spring” - an illusion? on. In January 2013, as part of the Mosse Lectures series of events at the Humboldt University Berlin , she and ARD correspondent Jörg Armbruster gave a reading on the subject of The Arab Spring - Dream or Nightmare? .

Awards

In October 2011 Laila Soliman received the International Willy Brandt Special Prize for special political courage .

literature

  • Plays from the Arab World , edited by Nick Hern Books and the Royal Court Theater , London 2010, ISBN 978-1-84842-097-7
  • Brinda J. Mehta: Spring violence in North African women's theater: Jalila Baccar (Tunesia) and Laila Soliman (Egypt) , in: Dissident Writings of Arab Women. Voices Against Violence , Routledge 2014 (= Advances in Middle East and Islamic Studies, Book 23), ISBN 978-0-415-73044-0 , pp. 191-253
  • Hans-Thies Lehmann: A Future for Tragedy? Remarks on the Political and the Postdramatic , in: Karen Jürs-Munby, Jerome Carroll, Steve Giles (Eds.): Postdramatic Theater and the Political. International Perspectives on Contemporary Performance , Bloomsbury Publishing, London 2013, ISBN 978-1-4081-8486-8 , pp. 87-111

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Laila Soliman  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , DasArts Master of Theater@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.ahk.nl  
  2. ↑ Spring Awakening Egypt
  3. ↑ Playwright Laila Soliman on Tahrir and Her 'Alternative Version of History' , in: Arabic Literature November 20, 2011
  4. ↑ Egyptian playwright to present at London International Festival Theater , Daily News Egypt, June 21, 2014
  5. ↑ Brinda J. Mehta: Dissident Writings of Arab Women. Voices Against Violence , Routledge 2014 (= Advances in Middle East and Islamic Studies, Book 23), ISBN 978-0-415-73044-0 , pp. 220f.
  6. ↑ "Lessons in Revolting" ( Memento of the original dated August 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Kulturplatz, August 24, 2011, Swiss Radio and Television (SRF) player (video) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.srf.ch
  7. ^ Charles Linsmayer: "The revolution has only just begun" , Lessons in Revolting - Laila Soliman and Ruud Gielens translate the Egyptian revolution into dance and storytelling at the Zürcher Theater Spektakel , nachtkritik.de, Zurich August 29, 2011
  8. ↑ Egyptian Revolution, up close , Soliman & Gielens with “Lessons in Revolting”, NZZ August 31, 2011
  9. ^ Voices: Laila Soliman , Narratives, European Cultural Foundation
  10. ↑ Eduard Erne: Laila Soliman, theater director , SRF January 23, 2013
  11. ↑ Basel Theater Festival
  12. ↑ Helmut Ploebst: meditation and revolt , Der Standard November 26, 2012
  13. ↑ Hans-Thies Lehmann. A future for tragedy? Remarks on the Political and the Postdramatic. In: Karen Jürs-Munby, Jerome Carroll, Steve Giles (Eds.): Postdramatic Theater and the Political. International Perspectives on Contemporary Performance , Bloomsbury, London 2013, ISBN 978-1-4081-8486-8 , pp. 87f.
  14. ↑ Film portrait of Pilu Lydlow: Laila Soliman - The Historian ( Memento of the original from August 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , from: Kulturplatz from January 16, 2012, SRF Video @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.srf.ch
  15. ↑ NZZ panel on May 16, 2013
  16. ^ Mosse Lectures "Gelobte Lands - Promised Lands" , series of events at the Humboldt University in Berlin
  17. ↑ Karim El-Gawhary : “Dear West”…. a moving speech by an Egyptian democracy activist ( memento of the original from August 13, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 0, Taz Blog December 20, 2011 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / blogs.taz.de
personal data
SURNAME Soliman, Laila
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Egyptian theater writer and director
DATE OF BIRTH 1981
PLACE OF BIRTH Cairo