Lecture/Performance by Nora Amin
Guests:
Nora Amin & Jacob Stage
This event is part of the Arabic film series “Beyond Spring”, organized by Mayadin Al-Tahrir e.V., EUME and the Werkstatt der Kulturen.
The Other Body
Lecture/Performance by Nora Amin, followed by a discussion with Nora Amin & Jacob Stage
Werkstatt der Kulturen, Wissmannstraße 32, 12049 Berlin
Synopsis:
“The Other Body” is a new cross-cultural project by the choreographer Jacob Stage and the Egyptian performer Nora Amin. Based on Nora's biography it has the character of a performance lecture that combines text, dance, video and music about an Arab Muslim woman who heads to the West to find her own personal space, but instead meets an equally limiting and reductionist view of her person because of her Arabic background. She is the "second body“. It is also a project on a white Western man, Jacob Stage, who will try to translate Nora's problem for the performing arts, while he must confront himself with the unequal distribution of privileges that favor him and the culture where he is born which bluntly dismisses people in need on the edge of Europe with predicates as convenience refugees and criminals. "The Other Body" studies mechanisms behind the lack of space and the apparent need to polarize the world into "them" and „us“. It is a meeting between two cultures, two sexes, two worldviews, two different approaches to theater and a common passion for the performing arts.
Nora Amin is an Egyptian theatre director, performer, writer and choreographer. Founder and artistic director of Lamusica Independent Theatre company since the year 2000 where she directed 36 theatre, dance and music productions. Founder of "The Egyptian National Project for Theatre of the Oppressed" since 2011 and its Arab network. Author of "Migrating the Feminine" on the transgressions of female physicality in public sphere.
Jacob Stage is a Danish director/choreographer/performer/photographer. Currently he is the artistic director of The Peoples Entertainment Group and co-founder of Mute Comp. Physical Theatre. He works with a hybrid of theatre expression: dance, theatre, videoinstallation, music and photography. Winner of Reumert Best Dance/Performance of 2016.