Nora Amin

Nora Amin ( Arabic نورا أمين; born July 4, 1970 in Cairo ) is an Egyptian dancer, choreographer and writer. She dealt with violence against women and combines literature, theater, dance and feminism in order to use art to resist and bring about change. In her biographical and political essay Femininity on the Move (2018), she took stock of the 2011 revolution in Egypt from the perspective of women. In 2015 she was a Fellow of the Akademie der Künste der Welt and has lived in Berlin ever since.

Life

Nora Amin grew up in a western-oriented family. Her mother was a university professor, her father an entrepreneur. She attended the French school in Cairo and received dance lessons. After studying French and comparative literature , which she completed with a master’s degree in 1993, she worked for nine years as an assistant at the Academy of Arts in Cairo. She translated English and French literature on theater and dance as well as two plays by Marguerite Duras (L'Amante anglaise, La musica deuxième) into Arabic . In 1993 she began her professional stage career as a dancer and founding member of the Modern Dance Company of the Cairo Opera House .

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In 2000 she founded the independent theater group “LaMusica”, with which she developed her choreographic style, which combines theater, dance and pantomime. An international theater festival initiated by her took place under her direction with the title Jadayel (entanglements) for the first time in Cairo in 2002. For Nora Amin, literature and theater are just two different languages. The language of the body in the theater creates “its own alphabet”. For example, she processed four poems, which she wrote during a stay in the USA from 2003 to 2004, into the multi-media solo performance Arab , which thematized stereotypes about 'the' Arab woman. In 2005 she made guest appearances on several German stages, including the Berlin Schaubühne and the National Theater Weimar . Before moving to Berlin in 2015, she directed and produced 37 theater, dance and music productions. Her feminist-oriented productions deal with the understanding of the role of Egyptian women and their everyday life, which is characterized by restrictions on personal freedom.

Since 1995 she has written three novels, collections of short stories and poems in Arabic, which have only been translated into English, Italian and German in small excerpts. Her emotional approach differs from "the simply and clearly structured, mostly politically or religiously instructive works of earlier generations of writers" in Egypt, says the text on the Samuel Fischer guest professorship for literature that Nora Amin attended in the 2004/2005 winter semester FU Berlin held.

In her essay Femininity on the move , published in German in 2018 , she examined the role of the female body in public space based on her own experiences using the example of the violent events on Tahrir Square in 2011. According to Eva Bucher ( Die Zeit ), she describes the history of the Arab Spring as body history . Tahrir Square was the stage on which the women, who had been banished from the public, demanded their freedom and exercised it at the same time: “They cast off the veil and dance and demand the overthrow of Husni Mubarak [...] The rules of patriarchy seem for briefly suspended ”[…]“ The dance of women is answered with mass rape. Sexual violence is a political tool, it is about the devaluation of the self-determined female body. "Amin, who founded the Egyptian project for a theater of the oppressed in 2011 and traveled with him through the country, drew viewers into the performances to improvise to look for new ways of resolving conflicts. In her essay, according to Bucher, she describes "how difficult it was for women, even on her theater stage, to shed submissive femininity: most of them were reluctant to face the oppressor even in the game."

In 2015, 2016 and 2017 Nora Amin was a Fellow of the International Research Center for “Interweaving Performance Cultures” at the FU on the subject of theater and political transformation. In the 2018 summer semester, she took on the Valeska Gert guest professorship at the Free University of Berlin and taught dance as a medium of political resistance and transformation. The resulting choreographies were performed by the 18 dance studies students , including a man, under the title “Performing Trauma” in a final presentation at the Academy of Arts . Representations of experiences of violence and the physical reactions could easily "drift into cliché", wrote Frank Schmid ( Kulturradio ) in his review of the performance. “Nora Amin, however, avoids overly clear expressive representations and she, who often works with laypeople, meets the lack of movement qualities of her performers by restricting them to sparse facial expressions and a few, simple forms of movement [...] A glimmer of hope emerges in the shared experience and expression of violence and trauma on overcoming what has been experienced and on healing. "

Publications (in German translation)

Femininity on the move . Translated from the English by Max Henninger. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-95757-571-5

documentary

An Enemy Of The People: The Journey To Survival (In the midst of bloody clashes a new Egypt played Nora Amin with her theater group LaMusica 2013 their version of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People .) Film documentary by Ibrahim Ghareib (2014, 55 min.)