Nehad Selaiha is caught in an orgy of violence at the French Cultural Centre Frustration, aggression and pent-up rage seem to have become the order of the day in works by young Egyptian directors. In Karim El-Tonsi's Numb, however, the rage and violence are directed not only at the world outside, or some external authority or "other", but also -- and primarily -- at the self. Since the launching of his independent modern dance troupe with Transmission in 1995 El-Tonsi has used dance and movement as vehicles for cathartic self- expression, producing subjective choreographic constructions with a sharp, personal edge. Inevitably the works express many private nightmares and obsessive anxieties. But, up until 2000, however oppressive the atmosphere or scarred the mental landscape presented, the mood was never nihilistic or one of wanton violence and black despair. When all else failed, El-Tonsi seemed to tell his audience, one could always draw comfort from the body and revel in its physicality. But since 2000, in Versus, then two years later (albeit to a lesser extent) in To Whom It May Concern, it seems that El-Tonsi's faith in the body as sanctuary and final refuge has begun to waver. In both pieces images celebrating the energy, integrity and resilience of the body increasingly fade, giving way to images of constrained, maimed, tortured and mutilated bodies -- the ballet dancer with an artificial leg in To Whom and Karim lacerating himself with a knife in Versus are unforgettable. In Numb the body seems to have lost the ability to relate to the world in any other form but aggression and its defiant energy seems to have finally turned against itself in a persistent suicidal urge. In the opening quasi-realistic scene, at the psychiatric clinic, the body is caricatured as inert, lifeless lump, deformed entity, or mechanical, marionette-like, vapid travesty. Karim sits motionless, staring into space like a wooden dummy, Marwa Sharaf represents an imbecile child with an overgrown, misshapen body, Marwa Abdel- Moteleb shrinks in horror at her ugly reflection in a stolen mirror and Nabila El-Iskandarani's and Yara Idris's love of their bodies and inordinate pride in their looks are summarily dismissed as ridiculous vanity and inane narcissism. The scene ends on a surrealistic note when the psychiatrist pokes a white- clad arm from behind a screen to pat the silly child's head and we discover at the end of it the large paw of a furry beast. The second sequence takes up another medium and a different mode of representation. A videotape treats us to a factual, visual record of the performers during and between rehearsals while the soundtrack allows us to eavesdrop on their conversation and listen to them questioning each other and anatomising themselves. But though this is supposed to be factual reality, a kind of documentary, the deformation of the body started on the fictional level in the first scene through deliberate caricature is achieved here by playing the videotape in rewind. This has the effect of jerking the bodies and faces out of focus, distorting their contours and breaking them up into odd, ill-fitting squares, like pieces of a jigsaw-puzzle badly put together. The fast- flashing contorted images stand in sharp contrast with the candid voices and the quiet, confidential tone of the conversation, suggesting a deep rift between the self and external reality, between how these young people see and feel themselves and how they look to the world outside. The contrast also suggests the fragmentation of self and reality and a painful sense of alienation. By making his wonderful performers (Nabila El- Iskandarani, Yara Idris, Marwa Abdel-Moteleb, Marwa Sharaf, Mohamed Habib and Mohamed Youssef) use their real names in the show and giving two of them (Nabila and Habib) confessional monologues which sound as if drawn from real experience, El- Tonsi manages to keep up this intriguing dialectic of the factual and fictional, of reality versus the social or artistic mask, throughout the show, sometimes alternating thesis and antithesis in the scenes, but more often than not teasingly blurring the dividing line between them. After the skewed, mock-documentary images, we are pitched headlong into a world of madness and violence. In the mental asylum sequence, with the dazed, frightened inmates constrained in straitjackets and fighting and screaming to break free, the choreography and costumes get to work, replaying the themes of isolation, insecurity and disorientation in metaphoric terms. At the end, however, when Nabila sits on a chair facing us and speaks to us earnestly as if to a psychiatrist, we cannot tell who is speaking: the metaphoric person in the fictional asylum or the real performer called Nabila. The following scene continues the themes of madness and violence in a solo vein. A lonely bride, looking thoroughly dishevelled and distraught, frantically circles the stage, sobbing and wringing her hands; a male voice-over tries to console her, telling her he is listening to her pain, can hear her silent agony, and begging her not to feel suicidal. While he speaks she softly folds her veil in a baby-like bundle, cradles it into her arms, lays it gently on the floor, then suddenly falls on it with a knife, viciously stabbing it over and over before collapsing with a piercing scream. The combination of sound and movement here builds up the theme of violence towards others -- introduced by the doctor's treatment of his patients in the previous sequence -- into violence towards the self, subtly identifying the two and shading them with pain of betrayed love and the sorrow of shattered dreams. Unlike the bride, the girl in the next scene bribes her lover with gifts to stay with her and takes up with the first man who offers when he leaves. Though spun in a lighter mood as an ironic variation on the theme of betrayed love, its sardonic, crass cynicism had an acrid, bitter taste. For the rest of the piece love disappears from the scene and we only get variations on violence and madness. Among the most memorable are the duo, trio or group fight sequences -- superbly choreographed down to the finest detail and executed with overwhelming animal energy, rugged elegance, split-second timing and a real sense of threat; the lurid fantasy of self-punishment or guilt- expiation (reminiscent of Orestes and his old, Greek Furies) -- in which the girls, looking menacing in black leotards, with nylon stockings slipped over their heads and waving about huge scissors, alternately mimed stabbing themselves and baiting and poking Karim; the thunderous drugs-transvestitism scene -- which carried the piece to its highest pitch of frenzied madness; the quiet and poignant suicide scene -- in which Karim, surrounded by a sea of convulsed bodies, in the throes of death, calmly sets about putting an end to his life with a knife (a throwback to Versus) and plastering white tape round his neck and wrists. Unfortunately the last three scenes of Numb seemed pallid and redundant and did not match the rest of the piece in imaginative ingenuity or choreographic panache. The lampooning of television female broadcasters on stage has already become a cliché and here it seemed to serve no function except to stretch the duration of the show by 15 unwanted and tedious minutes. The lift scene, with its collection of character stereotypes and lacklustre dialogue was obviously foisted as a facile ruse to bring the piece to a close with a resounding crash. If these two scenes were intended to argue that what passes for reality nowadays is nothing but a collection of absurd social masks, then all I can say is that the caricature was too stale and bland to give this old message a special edge or fresh relevance. The lift crash leads to a feeble finale in which the motionless man of the first scene suddenly comes to life and blinks his eyes as if waking up from a long dream. Needless to say this facile end, another well-worn device, runs contrary to the rich factual-real/imagined- fictional-real dialectic mentioned above and proposes a clear, unproblematic division between the inner and outer worlds. Karim would have done better to wind up his piece with that fascinating, quasi-ritualistic and highly evocative mourning dance which follows the suicide scene. Combining a subtle flavour of Upper Egypt and the Far East, it features four women with identical white masks, completely covered in black except for their hands and masked faces; the choreography vividly draws on the rich store of ritual gestures and physical expressions associated with the traditions of mourning and lamentation in Egypt. It progresses slowly, rhythmically, hypnotically, like a vision unfolding or a memory floating up from a distant, forgotten past, and ends with a stunning, unexpected image. When the dancers finally withdraw and the lights begin to dim we glimpse, at the back of the stage in a soft halo of light, a curious, disturbing shape, half real, half artificial, half man, half woman, a human figure which seems to have its head fixed back to front. It was, of course, Karim, in black, squatting with his back to us, wearing on the back of his head the same white mask as the women dancers and gently swaying his arms above his head the way they did. Apart from its strong theatrical impact, this elaborate visual fabrication puts in sharp focus the central dialectic of the piece and the issues of identity and self-definition it negotiates. El- Tonsi should reconsider the final scenes of Numb; it is a crying shame that such a forceful piece of work should end on such a feeble note.
