Writer Profile: Nora Amin

 

Nora Amin is one of those rare and omnipresent cultural figures that change the thought landscapes of societies. Independent artist and at the same time involved with almost every single genre and its notable representatives, Amin has become a driving force in her own right. Starting from the body and its expressive possibilities, Amin explores movement, improvisation, diverse relationships, memory. The feminist perspective is one she often employs but in no way is her art confined to women’s point of view only. Arriving at subjects of physicality and the subjective experiences of women, Amin is as interested in exploring an issue often suppressed by censorship and clichés in Egyptian culture. At the same time, Nora Amin manages to make her art socially and internationally relevant by recognizing that movement unlike language often needs no translation.

Nora Amin was educated at Cairo University where she received a MA degree in French and Comparative literature. Still, ever since she graduated in the Lycee la Liberte, she has been involved in theater as a director and performer. Around the same time she started making a name for herself as a dancer, choreographer and actress. Her talents have been honed under the guidance and influence by names such as August Boal in Rio De Janeiro, Eugenio Barba in Denmark, Walid Aouni in Cairo, Bruno Meyssat in France, Alexander Stillmark in Berlin.

Not to be omitted is the influence Augusto Boal, driving force behind “Theater of the Oppressed” had on her. Amin is the Arabic translator of his Rainbow of Desire. During her stay in Rio de Janeiro and the Center of the Theater of the Oppressed, Amin says she was reunited with “the old notion of art as a tool for political and social change.” This experience resulted not only in a series of workshops Amin led, but also to her widening her parameters even more and working with those often discarded by society’s artistic endeavors—patients in mental and psychological hospitals, prisoners, troubled teenagers and marginal communities.

In addition to those projects and her position at the Academy of Arts in Cairo, Amin has taught around the world and lead numerous workshops in Cairo, Khartoum, Rome, Malta, Damascus, USA and Berlin. Those tend to be as unforgiving of ignorance as everything else she does—her latest involved work with the personal stories of women victims of the civil war in the Sudan and the ways to convert those memories into theater statements.

Impressive as her artistic achievements are, Nora Amin does not limit her work to the creative side only. She is an active producer and an important figure when it comes to Arts Administration in Egypt with work ranging from producing the Egyptian tours of dance companies from abroad to designing the first of a kind courses in higher education focusing on arts and culture management.

The written word and literature have not remained in Amin’s past; on the contrary—before she turned 30 she had already made a name for herself as “one of the best-selling authors of her generation and a darling of the critics.” Today she boasts poetry readings around the world, works of fiction including collections of short stories and novels as well as theater and film scripts. Furthermore, Amin is the author of the first book dealing with theater and human rights in Egypt, The Egyptian Theater and Human Rights: The Art of Claiming our Right.

Even a glance at the cultural territory which Amin has been cultivating leaves one with the impression not so much of a Renaissance woman but rather someone who is able to build bridges between genres and fill gaps left open in an entire society’s cultural life. It seems that form has never posed restrictions for Amin who transcends the borders between the genres driven by the message she wants to get across.

In much of her workshops abroad and her touring productions, she was the first Egyptian and Arab theatre person to have presented her work in foreign cities. In Malta, she was the first Egyptian to have performed theatre and directed a workshop on “Theatre of the Oppressed” with the support of Inizjamed.
In Rome, she was the first Egyptian to teach an acting workshop to Italian actors, culminating in a performance at Meta-teatro.
In the USA, she was the first Egyptian and Arab and African to receive a fellowship at the John F. Kennedy performing arts center. The same applies to her Samuel Fischer prize for literature in Germany, given to writers from non-European cultures, and to her scholarship at CTO-Rio De Janeiro, as well as to her several performances of her solo show “ARAB”, in Hostelbro/Denmark, Kiev/Ukraine, Gdansk/Poland, Mount Holyoke/USA, Grenada/Spain, Kiel-Weimar-Bonn-Berlin/Germany.

She is also the first artist to conduct a theatre workshop with Sudanese women who have been affected by the civil war, and represent their personal experiences in a performance, supported by SIHA, NGO for women in the horn of Africa. A book resulted of this pioneering experience, documenting the workshop, describing the methodology and presenting the true stories.

Amin is working now as a consultant and teacher at the first Egyptian academy for cultural management, at Sawy Culture Wheel, as well as preparing for her new ensemble piece funded by Hanager arts center, to be out next Spring. Very soon her new novel, “Before Death”, will be out.

 
 
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