Singing a New Future: Egypt’s Choir Project

Abstract

This paper explores the creative production of Egypt’s Choir project, a collaborative musical and theatrical group that has provided a context for youth creative, social and political expression since 2010. Drawing upon Richard Bauman’s (1984) multifaceted framework for thinking about emerging art forms, I detail the history and socio-political context of the Choir project’s activities during the period from 2011 until 2018, and engage in close literary analysis of some of its lyrical productions. Since the Choir has emerged and developed in a charged political environment, I take into account the important ways in which it has provided a context for political expression. However, I argue that detailed literary and social analysis of its creative process and production suggests that while the Project can be considered a mode of social and political expression or even resistance, it is also a profoundly creative phenomenon that produces lyrical and dramatic creations, which must be considered in their own right and which also must be understood as powerful modes of personal and even existential expression. I suggest that paying close attention to aesthetic experimentation and style adds an important dimension to our understanding of emerging art forms and the complex set of ideas that they express. Close analysis of the nature of innovative creativity also may help to explain why these forms have been so popular among audiences and the general public, even in the midst of political chaos and uncertainty about the future.

Key Words:

• Choir project
• Creativity
• Egypt
• Music
• Revolutionary art

Acknowledgments

Support for this research came from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Graduate School, Center for International Education, and Center for 21^st Century Studies. I would like to thank Kennan Ferguson of the Center for 21^st Century Studies and the participants of the 2015 Center cohort including Bernard Perley, Kimberly Blaeser, Katherine Paugh, Kristin Pitt, and Deborah Wilk for helpful comments on an early version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Author interview with Salam Yousry, Cairo, 18 January 2012.

2 Author Interview with Choir participant and audience member, Skype interview, 22 January 2018.

3 Defining the time frame of ‘the revolution’ is complicated in the sense that Egyptians and outside commentators define the period between January 2011 and May 2014 in different terms. For example, some Egyptians describe May 27, 2011 as the second ‘Friday of Rage’ (January 28, 2011 being the first) and the beginning of the second revolution. Some Egyptians describe November 18, 2011, the Battle of Muhammed Mahmoud street as Egypt’s second revolution. Some Egyptians considered the May 2014 election of Former General el-Sisi as legitimate, some considered it a coup, still others, the result of a third revolutionary process. In what follows, I have tried to clarify how Choir Project songs have responded to any one particular period, political tension or regime.

4 See, e.g. Angela Boskovitch (2014) Photo Essay: Coloring a Street of Protest. Sada: Carnegie Endowment forInternational Peace. Available at: https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/54186, accessed March 9, 2019; Shehab Ismail (2013) Revolutionizing Art. Mada Masr. Available at: https://madamasr.com/en/2013/10/15/opinion/culture/revolutionizing-art/, accessed March 9, 2019; John Lennon (2014) Assembling a Revolution: Graffiti, Cairo and the Arab Spring, Cultural Studies Review, 20(1), pp. 237–275; Kelly Main (2014) Bombing the Tomb: Memorial Portraiture and Street Art in Revolutionary Cairo, B.A. Thesis, Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major, University of California, Berkeley; and Soraya Morayef (2012) The Seven Wonders of the Revolution. Jadaliyya. Available at: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/4776/the-seven-wonders-of-the-revolution, accessed January 7, 2019.

5 Daniel J. Gilman (2014) Cairo Pop: Youth Music in Contemporary Egypt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press); Nesreen Hussein (2015) Gestures of Resistance between the Street and the Theatre: Documentary Theatre in Egypt and Laila Soliman’s No Time for Art, Contemporary Theatre Review, 25(3), pp. 357–370; Margaret Litvin (2013) From Tahrir to ‘Tahrir’: Some Theatrical Impulses toward the Egyptian Uprising, International Federation for Theatre Research, 38(2), pp. 116–123; and Ted Swedenburg (2012) Egypt’s Music of Protest: From Sayyid Darwish to DJ Haha, Middle East Report, (265), pp. 39–43.

6 See further Saddeka Arebi, Women and Words in Saudi Arabia (1994) (New York, NY: Columbia University Press); Samah Selim (2000) Crossing Borders: The Construction of the Feminine in the Novels of Bahija Husayn, Critique, Fall (17), pp. 31–48; and Caroline Seymour-Jorn (2011) Cultural Criticism in Egyptian Women’s Writing (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univeristy Press).

7 See Richard Bauman (1984) Verbal Art as Performance (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press).

8 Many scholars and journalists have documented the large, receptive audiences for art forms of various kinds during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period (e.g., Mona Abaza (2013) Walls, Segregating Downtown Cairo and the Mohammed Mahmud Street Graffiti, Theory, Culture and Society, 30(1), pp. 122–139; Hussein, Gestures of Resistance between the Street and the Theatre, pp. 357–370; and Litvin, From Tahrir to ‘Tahrir,’ pp. 118–119). Salam Yousry himself reported that the choir became so popular that in 2013 they were invited to perform on the well-known Egyptian variety show Al Bernameg hosted by Bassem Youssef, which in turn resulted in more public focus on the project. As he wanted the project to remain small-scale community-based work, he stopped the workshops for a year, until interest died down (personal Communication, March 4, 2019).

9 Yousry is a graduate of Helwan University School of Fine Arts in Cairo, and has a professional background in fine arts, dramaturgy and film.

10 Except where noted, translations from the Arabic are my own. For the most part I represent the Egyptian dialect. For purposes of simplicity I do not indicate the emphatic or pharyngeal fricative letters.

11 Author interview with Salam Yousry, Cairo, 18 January 2012.

12 Mariz Kelada (2015) Social Change between Potentiality and Actuality: Imagination in Cairo’s Alternative Cultural Spaces, International Journal of Sociology, 45(3), pp. 223–233.

13 See http://www.choirproject.net, accessed January 10, 2016.

14 Website translation.

15 Ibid.

16 According to Yousry, this was a result of the fact that Town House Gallery management received threats from State Security officers that they might ban their programs if they did not tone down political content of productions (Personal Communication, March 4, 2019).

17 Heba Elkayal (2011) Cairo’s ‘Complaints Choir’ Sings of Revolution, Daily News Egypt, February 24, http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2011/02/24/cairos-complaints-choir-sings-of-revolution/, accessed June 14, 2018.

18 See, for example, Ahmad Abdalla (2010) Microphone (Film) (Cairo: Film Clinic), Richard Jacquemond (2008) Conscience of the Nation: Writers, State and Society in Modern Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press); Samia Mehrez (2011) The Literary Life of Cairo: One Hundred Years in the Heart of the City (Cairo: AUC Press); Ibid (2012) Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press); Viola Shafik (2007) Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class and Nation (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press); and Ted Swedenburg, Egypt’s Music of Protest.

19 See, for example, Bronislaw Malinowski (1935) Coral Gardens and their Magic, 2 vols. (London: Allen and Unwin); Gregory Bateson (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books); Lila Abu Lughod (1986) Veiled Sentiments (Berkeley: University of California Press); Richard Bauman & Joel Sherzer (1989) Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Steve Caton (1990) Peaks of Yemen I Summon (Berkeley: University of California Press); and Deborah Kapchan (1996) Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press).

20 Erving Goffman (1974) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper Colophon); Gregory Bateson (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books).

21 Bauman, Verbal Art, p. 11.

22 Ibid, pp. 43–45.

23 Ibid, p. 42.

24 Author conversation with Egyptian friend, Cairo, January 18, 2012.

25 El-Said Badawi & Martin Hinds (1986) A Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic (Beirut: Librairie du Liban) pp. viii–x.

26 Walter Armbrust (1996) Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); see also Ziad Fahmy (2011) Ordinary Egyptians, pp. 1–19, for a recent discussion of the relationship between the levels of Arabic language, popular culture and identity in Egypt.

27 Author Interview with Choir participant, Skype, April 3, 2018.

28 Margaret Litvin (2013), From Tahrir to ‘Tahrir,’ p. 119.

29 Nesreen Hussein (2015), Gestures of Resistance between the Street and the Theatre, pp. 364–365.

30 After Maspero, the Choir Project wrote a song expressing their shock over this particular incident. According to Salam Yousry, they wrote the song Ayy il-`ibāra [What’s Going on] in five hours. Author interview, Salam Yousry, Cairo, 18 January 2012.

31 Thanassis Cambanis (2015) Once Upon a Revolution: An Egyptian Story (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster), pp. 131–160.

32 Kelada, Social Change between Potentiality and Actuality, p. 230.

33 Sahar Keraitim & Samia Mehrez (2012) Mulid al-Tahrir: Semiotics of a Revolution, in: S. Mehrez (ed) Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir (Cairo: AUC Press), p. 46.

34 Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb & Kathryn Spellman-Poots (2014) Introduction, in: Werbner, P., Webb, M. & Spellman-Poots, K. (eds) The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p. 16.

35 Marwan Kraidy (2016) The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 65.

36 Ashraf Khalil (2011) Liberation Square: Inside the Egyptian Revolution and the Rebirth of a Nation (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press), p. 71.

37 See Salwa Ismail (2006) Political Life in Cairo’s New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota); and Farha Ghannam (2013) Live and Die Like a Man: Gender Dynamics in Urban Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

38 Author Interview with Yousry, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, March 2019.

39 Author Interview with Choir participant, Cairo, June 27, 2018.

40 Ibid.

41 Author Interview with Choir participant and audience member, Skype interview, January 22, 2018.

42 Ibid.

43 Author Interview with Choir participant, Cairo, June 27, 2018.

44 Ibid.

45 Author Interview with Choir participant, Cairo, June 23, 2018.

46 Ibid.

47 Author Interview, Skype, January 22, 2018.

48 Author Interview with Choir participant, Cairo, June 27, 2018.

49 Kelada, Social Change between Potentiality and Actuality, pp. 232–233.