Abstract
It is because Adham Hafez is a dancer and choreographer that he writes about the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 as a physical practice that is performative. Hafez writes about a process of politicization in which he learns through his body as it experiences situations of fear and violence, and he comes to recognize that his body is the focus of relations of power.
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Notes
- 1.
Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 55.
- 2.
Ibid., 116.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
On a visit to Cairo in February 2015, I asked whether the term Arab Spring had any currency in Egypt. It was cold and during the first two days of my visit there had been a sand storm. This was spring weather, I was told. Spring was not, therefore, a meaningful metaphor, in an Egyptian context, for uprising and revolution.
- 5.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Arabs Are Democracy’s New Pioneers,” Guardian (2011), 14.
- 6.
Helga Tawil-Souri, “Egypt’s Uprising and the Shifting Spatialities of Politics,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 52, no. 1 (2012), 166.
- 7.
Mohamed Samir El-Khatib, “Tahrir Square as Spectacle: Some Exploratory Remarks on Place, Body and Power,” Theatre Research International, Vol. 38, no. 2 (2013). See also Khalid Amine, “Re-Enacting Revolution and the New Public Sphere in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco,” Theatre Research International, Vol. 38, no. 2 (2013).
- 8.
El-Khatib discusses the political, historical and cultural centrality of Tahrir Square. El-Khatib, “Tahrir Square as Spectacle”.
- 9.
Franco Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2008, 49.
- 10.
Ibid., 143. For Berardi’s discussion of the general intellect, see 103–134.
- 11.
Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, 52–53.
- 12.
Ibid., 52.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Ibid., 53.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Conversation in Cairo, February 14, 2015.
- 17.
Hafez, “Amchoreo.”
- 18.
Manning, Politics of Touch, 53.
- 19.
Hafez, “Amchoreo.”
- 20.
Berardi, Uprising, 14.
- 21.
Nazra in Arabic means the gaze. It’s website is http://nazra.org/en. The website for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights is http://www.eipr.org/en.
- 22.
Emily Dyer, “The Arab Spring and Egypt’s Open Season against Women,” eds. Andy Mullins and Sasha Toperich, A New Paradigm: Perspectives on the Changing Mediterranean, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, 75–83.
- 23.
Hafez, “Amchoreo.”
- 24.
Mohamed Khairat, “Kissing in Egypt: A Criminalized Taboo,” Egyptian Streets (Apr. 26, 2015), http://egyptianstreets.com/2015/04/26/kissing-in-egypt-a-criminalized-taboo/.
- 25.
May Sélim, “Festival Transdance: La Résistance Par Les Corps Et Par Les Âmes,” Hebdo Al-Ahram en ligne (Oct. 30, 2013), author’s translation.
- 26.
The “Golden Age” of Egyptian Cinema is generally considered to be the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. The films that Al-Sennawi sampled were over fifty years old.
- 27.
Adham Hafez, “Td13: Oblivion and Resistance,” TransDance, http://www.transdance.org/td-2013--2013-1583160815851577.html.
- 28.
- 29.
Thoraia Abou Bakr, “Cairography: Breakdancing Down Barriers,” Daily News Egypt (Mar. 6, 2013), http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2013/03/05/cairography-dances-through-limits/.
- 30.
Blanchot, The Space of Literature, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, 236.
- 31.
See the amchoreo exchange platform at https://amchoreo.wordpress.com/.
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Burt, R., Hafez, A. (2018). Revolutionary Performances. In: Gržinić, M., Stojnić, A. (eds) Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78343-7_4
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