International Women's Day is marked by body language at the British Council. Nehad Selaiha joins the celebration The new extension to the British Council building, which accommodates the new Knowledge and Learning Centre, looked impressive -- elegant, well- proportioned and in harmony with the old architecture. The garden, however, was a sorry sight. I had arrived early, in plenty of time to look around. From the new, spacious entrance hall I strayed into the open, tiled courtyard which houses the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and a cigarette, then wandered round the white fence of thin wooden boards to look at what was once a charming garden. The makeshift work sheds with their ugly corrugated roofs crammed into it for months during the renovation project -- a veritable eyesore -- had mercifully disappeared, but the ground was still covered thick with rubble. Under the night sky, it looked ravaged and forlorn and the few old trees, which bordered it on two sides, seemed somehow to increase the air of desolation. It was pitch dark except for a blinding spotlight on ground level and I made out the silhouettes of some people busy doing something and what looked like a glistening patch of water. The people, I soon discovered, were Nora Amin and her artistic crew -- Nader Sami with his guitar, Tamer El-Demerdash, the soundtrack designer, at the sound-system board, fiddling with the keys, and Bakr, her technician. As for the glistening thing, it wasn't a patch of water after all, though it looked very much like one. It was a low platform covered with a shiny black plastic sheet and I wondered what it was doing there on top of all that rubble. It was not until I glimpsed those still, recumbent figures, their heads meeting at the centre of the platform while their bodies spread out fanlike to form a circle that I realised that this was our stage for the night and that this derelict, draughty spot, covered in the middle with some carpets and several rows of chairs, was our theatre. You can't beat that for an untraditional performance space. A flyer handed out at the door had thoughtfully warned the audience to "please be careful when you enter the garden area as it is dark and the ground is uneven." Many people stumbled and nearly fell over all the same. But incredible as the choice of site seemed, it was curiously apt. Rugged, bleak and desolate, it struck me as perfectly suited to a show intended to "illustrate the experiences, thoughts and dreams of nine young Egyptian women", as the flyer announced. The Nine to whom the show refers in its title are Reem, Yasmeen, Maha, Rania, Rasha, Mounira, Iman, Nefertari and Niveen. Significantly, no family names, no reference to paternity in the programme. It is as if these young women, none of whom was ever involved in theatre before, wanted to define themselves away from and against the labels, roles and identities imposed upon them by a conservative patriarchal culture and, moreover, to define it in a new kind of language which is neglected, suppressed, or frowned upon by that culture -- namely, body language. Over six months these young women -- all in their twenties -- were involved in a workshop sponsored by the British Council as part of its "Connecting Futures" activities which seeks to encourage greater cooperation and communication between young people in Egypt and the UK. With the help of director Nora Amin -- the only Egyptian female director committed to and conversant with physical theatre as a mode of artistic and existential expression -- and with some assistance in the later stages from Deborah Barnard (of the Ludus Dance Company in Lancaster), the brave nine learnt to literally "body forth" their anger, frustration and defiance as well as their longing for freedom and fulfillment. Slowly, they developed their own intimate vocabulary, a concrete language of resistance, transforming their bodies into live chronicles of a long history of suppression and rebellion and building clusters of vivid, graphic images of great power and pathos. But the really remarkable thing about this show was it ruthless honesty; however much it hoped to empower women and raise their hopes it made no concessions to facile optimism. It starts with the recorded voices of the nine women softly whispering their real names over and over then gathering force in a rising crescendo until the recumbent bodies begin to respond and rise. When they do their bodies form a tangled, amorphous mass of twisted limbs, heads and torsos which struggle to extricate themselves from each other and establish their individual integrity. When this is done they face us in three rows, looking deeply and earnestly (questioningly? Reproachfully?) into our eyes. That long, fixed gaze seemed to pour into our souls and had a staggering effect. The suffering of centuries seemed concentrated there. Next they mechanically recite a string of familiar clichés used to censure, admonish, caution, edify or chastise women, drilling them in their traditional roles. Then, in a rising physical crescendo this time, they begin to dust their clothes and rub off invisible dirt and stains from their hands, faces, hair and clothes. The activity reaches a frantic pitch and in desperation, having failed to remove the eternal stigmas that have attached to them throughout history, they begin to mime ripping off their bodies in parts and hurling them at us -- legs, arms, eyes, hips and all. The following sequence is a mock striptease in which they violently divest themselves of one garment to reveal another underneath which they proceed to peel off until we reach the last. Nora of course would have loved to get rid of that as well, but this is as far as she could safely go in our society. I remembered how she used the same trick to suggest and simulate nudity in an earlier production. In The Box of Our Live she had taken off her black dress and stood in a skin-tight, flesh-colour leotard scribbled all over with words in black letters. It was her theatrical image for all the taboos historically inscribed on women's bodies. Here, she left her performers in training suits or trousers and T- shirts and instead of writing the history of oppression on their bodies she let them spell it out in movement all over the stage in big, bold letters. Nine unfolded as a series of concise, highly charged and cunningly choreographed images, alternately involving the whole group or part of it, in which case the rest of the performers sat at the far end of the stage with their backs to us. In one sequence they all stand quite still while some invisible weight seems to be bearing down on them from above, trying to force them to their knees. You could feel the enormity of that weight and their desperate resistance in the tension of the muscles, the strained features, the look of desperate determination, the slight, almost imperceptible quivering of the legs or shoulders as if a taut string were about to snap. This silent, heroic resistance, which lasts for a few minutes, becomes poignantly moving as one by one the bodies slowly give way and begin to collapse. In another, equally unforgettable sequence three performers -- one lying flat on the floor, shaking convulsively, another on her side in an embryo position and the third crouching -- struggle to stand up and keep their balance on the stage which their subsequent different movement patterns transform figuratively and synchronically into a stormy sea in one area, a quagmire in another, and a land in the grip of a violent earthquake in a third. The conception, execution and rhythmic orchestration of this scene -- with one body rolling, swirling and tossed around and upside down at the back, another staggering, stumbling and slithering all over, and the third stuck in the middle, being pulled down while striving to resist and extricate itself, was ingenious and shattering in its effect. But Nine was not all about the language of pain. There were moments of joy when the nine young women romped about, danced and shouted out their dreams and hopes before joining in a choral hymn to freedom. In this scene the choral part gives way to a solo during which the singer, lying horizontally, is lifted up high by the others and then slowly lowered and folded round with their bodies, as if by rose petals, so that only her head shows in the centre of the formation which vividly suggests a rose. But the joyful moments are few and, like the rose, short-lived. Freedom is still far away and the road to it is strewn with martyrs. In the final scene, when the women collapse under the invisible weight, they manage to rise to their feet briefly, one final time, to hum the tune of Sayed Darwish's famous song Biladi, Biladi, Laki Hobbi wa Fu'adi (My country, Oh, my country, you have my love and my heart). The song was composed during the 1919 nationwide popular uprising against the British occupation. Women, though still veiled, were actively involved in that event and some were shot and killed. That tune, hummed just before the women lie down like corpses lined up in a cemetery, was a sardonic reminder of the cruel fact that in political and ideological struggles down history women have been encouraged to sacrifice their lives for the cause in order to justify their claims to freedom and equality only to find that when the battle is won the booty is shared out solely among the men, all promises forgotten.
