Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt by Sonali Pahwa

Abstract

Reviewed by: Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt by Sonali Pahwa Mohamadreza Babaee Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt. By Sonali Pahwa. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; pp. 192. Theatre and performance scholarship on Middle Eastern and North African drama remains an infrequently explored topic within the field. With Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt, Sonali Pahwa contributes a much-needed project on how MENA artists use theatre to address social, political, and cultural issues pertinent to their societies. The book explores avant-garde, experimental, and independent theatres of Egypt during the later years of Hosni Mubarak’s presidency, roughly starting in 2001 and leading to the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and its aftermath. Pahwa looks at plays, festivals, manifestos, and workshops to argue that new and independent generations of Egyptian theatre-makers, encumbered by the neoliberal policies of Mubarak’s authoritarian government, used avant-garde poetics to rehearse civic and cultural citizenship on varied theatre stages. Incorporating archival, ethnographic, and performance analysis research methods, Pahwa structures her study in six chapters to discuss how various aspects of national and identity politics undergirded the activist purposes of avant-garde Egyptian theatre in the early twenty-first century. Pahwa begins her book by laying the contextual and historical ground for understanding the purpose of theatre in contemporary Egypt. After the revolution of 1952, a national theatre was formed in Egypt that sought to decolonize the country’s theatre practices by focusing more on folk characters and native playwrights. Following the reestablishment of private theatres in the 1960s, Egyptian theatre experienced a golden age of works featuring the prominent themes of national unity, pan-Arabism, and socialism. When Mubarak became the fourth president of Egypt in 1981, he eventually reduced state support for playwrights and consequently slowed down the progress of the political drama in the country. Impacted by Mubarak’s repressive policies and his later neoliberal attitude toward the arts, the new generations of Egyptian theatre-makers at the dawn of the century found themselves excluded from participating in public modes of theatre, and citizenship writ large. These artists, who Pahwa discusses in chapter 1, used adaptation, hybridization, and improvisation strategies to form an avant-garde theatre that included the voices of the ignored and forgotten. The new independent art movement distanced itself from state institutions to create an undercommon, seeking fresh modes of theatre in which they could more freely address (national) identity politics. Chapter 2 deals with the emergence of avant-garde manifesto movements in connection to the evolution of the highly influential, state-sponsored Cairo International Festival for Theater (CIFET). The festival was inaugurated in the 1980s as a cultural venue for devising new forms of experimental theatre. Mubarak’s government, however, used CIFET to propagate a cosmopolitan image of Egypt as a country ready for global import and export. Feeling ignored and excluded in the CIFET programming, independent troupes and younger artists joined various opposing movements, including the “free theater” (1990) and “September 5” (2005), to ask for more visibility and cultural agency within and beyond a single state-sponsored festival. Dissident theatre artists used the CIFET and independent theatre festivals to devise new forms of experimental theatre outside the dichotomy of Arab and Western theatre, creating cultural and civic opportunities for rehearsing more counterhegemonic self-expression practices. Pahwa addresses gender identity politics and associated generational ideologies in chapters 3 and 4. By analyzing the 2004 multimedia performances of Messing with the Mind (Haraka troupe) and Mother I Want to Be a Millionaire (Al-ma’bad troupe), Pahwa argues that independent Egyptian theatre-makers of the time questioned the efficacy of state-sponsored mass media for representing young Egyptian identity, and challenged images of masculinity championed within more mainstream theatres as a defining feature of Egyptian culture and citizenship. Furthermore, women directors and feminist groups, such as Mirette Mikhail and Abeer Ali’s Misahharati troupe, used hybrid performance genres to create ethnographic, autobiographical, and translated stories centered on women, effectively imagining citizenship from minority perspectives to achieve recognition for subaltern identities. The last two chapters include discussions of...