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

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics in Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt by Sonali Pahwa Edward Ziter THEATERS OF CITIZENSHIP: AESTHETICS AND POLITICS IN AVANT-GARDE PERFORMANCE IN EGYPT. By Sonali Pahwa. Performance Works series. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; pp. 186. This smart and readable monograph reveals the significance of Egyptian avant-garde performance to the formation of new "repertoires of citizenship" (5)—the myriad ways of performing nation and national resistance that emerged in state-financed and independent theatre venues before and after the January 25th revolution of 2011. Through the lens of theatre practice, Theaters of Citizenship explores Egyptian responses to a range of modern phenomena, from the rise of neoliberal politics with its doctrine of self-help to trends in Arab feminism and the rethinking of Arab masculinities. Theaters of Citizenship is an important contribution to an emerging literature on Egyptian identity formation and political action in the cultural spheres—a literature also represented in Jessica Winegar's Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (2006) and Marwan Kraidy's The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (2016), to cite two examples. These works and others present citizenship as a daily practice, and Pahwa's book expands this conversation by illustrating how performance acts as a particularly charged practice of national reimagining. The "avant-garde" in the book's subtitle signals both formal experimentation and a repositioning of theatre's social uses. The book covers full productions in esteemed national artistic venues as well as performances and workshops that could be called community-based or therapeutic. After a short historical overview in chapter 1, the book's second chapter examines the culture of theatre festivals in Egypt using three representative examples: the large Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre, the more limited festival sponsored by the Centre Français de Culture et de Coopération (CFCC), and a festival sponsored by the network of state-owned cultural centers throughout the country. While these festivals act as carefully controlled instruments of liberal reform and celebrations of globalization, Pahwa is also attentive to how they have made inequities visible and become sites of resistance. Chapters 3 and 4 provide a detailed discussion of highlights from the 2004 theatre season through ethnographic and performance analyses of four productions. Chapter 3 focuses on two productions examining satellite television as an obstacle to meaningful civic participation. Messing with the Mind, mounted by the independent Haraka troupe and staged at the state-owned Hanager Theater, is a political cabaret in the guise of a television talk show. The manipulative television host (representing the Mubarak regime, according to Pahwa) questions handpicked youths who parrot the host's neoliberal economic beliefs, and he interviews a US general who babbles on about US–Egyptian amity. Such comic scenes are juxtaposed with political songs protesting the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 or calling on the audience to resist the status quo. According to Pahwa, the production optimistically presents theatre as an antidote to wide-spread political and economic disenfranchisement. The Ma'bad troupe's Mother I Want to Be a Millionaire similarly examines the media's influence, through the psychology of a "self-hating middle-class man" (68). That play culminates with an expressionistic and despairing sequence. The protagonist is on an American Idol–type contest; he sings the prescribed song in a tuneless dejected manner; lights dim, a side of beef lowers onto the stage, and the protagonist furiously pummels it while proclaiming his hatred of Arab countries and Egypt. Both plays, according to Pahwa, stage a youth culture generated by the media, while also demonstrating "the absence of opportunities for self-representation under the Mubarak regime's policies" (49). Chapter 4 examines two productions focused on female identity: Mirette Mikhail's dance theatre piece Details for the CFCC festival, and Abeer Ali's Misahharati troupe's Harem Tales at the Independent Theatre Festival. The former used a strategy that Pahwa describes as common in Egypt: using translated texts to stage identity politics that are controversial in Egypt. Details combines contemporary dance with selections from Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel The Lover and...