Making revolution everyday: quotidian performance and utopian imagination in Egypt's streets and squares

ABSTRACT

After Egypt's 2011 uprising was quashed, independent dramatists worked to revive utopian revolutionary communities through public performance. This essay analyzes the arts festival Art is an Open Square (2012), and a clown show for refugees by Cairo's Red Tomato troupe (2014), as attempts at everyday utopia. When public activism was banned, these performances in streets and squares adapted quotidian repertoires of festivity and hospitality to stage heterogeneous publics. Analyzing the performances as attempts at activating the utopian within the quotidian, I evaluate the efficacy of such minor scenarios of revolutionary citizenship, devised to sustain hope in oppressive times.

KEYWORDS:

• Street performance
• clowning
• utopia
• Egypt
• revolution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I use the term scenario as defined by Diana Taylor: “culturally specific imaginaries – sets of possibilities, ways of conceiving conflict, crisis, or resolution” (Taylor 13)

2 Egyptian dramatic performances in highly policed public spaces after the revolution were doubly out of place, as the dramatists belonged properly to the domain of culture rather than politics, and in theatres rather than the street. They can be read as disruptions of what Jacques Rancière has called the “distribution of the sensible” among social actors, “based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed” (“Politics of Aesthetics” 12–13).

3 http://www.clownswithoutborders.org/about-us/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota.