A passionate telling

Jasper Thornton speaks to Sherine Al-Ansari, a woman with stories to tell
Riches I hold in light esteem
And love I laugh to scorn
And lust of fame was but a dream
That vanished in the morn --
And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is -- "Leave the heart that now I bear
And give me liberty"
"I don't believe Shahrazad sat in bed, as we are told. I am sure she got up and acted and danced"
I cannot help thinking of Emily Bronte's words when I meet Sherine Al-Ansari. Sitting in a restaurant downtown, slight, shy, with elfin face, Sherine Al-Ansari looks far from the passionate artist, defiant of worldly things. She seems too sweet, too soft. Too young.
"I am small, I look young, I have a gentle voice. People think I must just be a performer for children," she says. But look again. Around her eyes are the marks of exhaustion. But those large dark eyes watch the world steady as rocks. She rarely smiles. When she does, it is like a glance of sunlight through rain-clouds. Then she talks. And as she does, it becomes plain: Sherine is a gentle person; but in that gentle earth run seams of ore. Sherine is an artist, an artist who has had to struggle for her art.
That art is storytelling. She could have chosen few harder. Women do not tell stories in public. Storytelling is the preserve of old men, with roots in the far past, sitting in coffee-houses lecturing other men. Women who perform in public are actresses or belly dancers: nothing in-between. Tradition weighs heavily. The accepted format is never departed from; the style never varies. Always the audience knows what to expect. Innovation is forbidden. The same tales are told over and over. No-one would dream of dancing. No-one would dream of changing things. No-one would ever dream of a woman telling.
Sherine did. She dreamt all sorts of things, weaving her own experiences and experiments into bits and pieces of the storytelling tradition: picking a thread here, a thread there, and making something fresh and wholly her own. The Thousand and One Nights, from which Sherine takes most of her stories, is a large influence: but even that Sherine re-imagines. She recalls Shahrazad telling tales to Shahriar. "I don't believe Shahrazad sat in bed, as we are told. I am sure she got up and acted and danced. Now when I tell a story, I get up, I act, I wear costumes to set the mood and dance and sing. I perform."
There are other influences. Storytelling is a male art. But "women have always told stories too, in the informal setting of the house, mothers telling stories to their children who tell them to theirs. I just took the uninhibited abandon of the private sphere into the public."
This casting of old cloth into new clothes is difficult. Often people misunderstand Sherine. "When I say I am a storyteller, people ask 'what, are you on TV, in the theatre?'" Every performance becomes an explanation. But there is another side. The storytelling Sherine does is storytelling her way. And she can introduce her own ideas, her own instincts. Sherine's art is never static; it is ever evolving, ever becoming something new.
"I used to use puppets, and other props. Now I don't. I have found that without them the whole performance is much clearer. Now I just use movement, my body, my voice and my costumes. It is empowering. I go deep inside and drag things out."
But sometimes change has been forced upon Sherine. She used to enjoy the accompaniment of two or three musicians. But the festivals where she performs often cannot afford two people. Then Sherine had to go alone, finding what she needed to touch her audience within her four limbs and voice.
For as long as she can remember she has told people stories, and from childhood knew she wanted her life to be a performance. At university, during a course in acting, her restless experimentation resulted in an outlandish fusion of characters telling tales taken from Calvino and La Celestina, performed in the garden, under a tree, on the grass. Opera music played. She reversed her dressing room so the audience could watch her as she morphed from one character into another. The audience adored it, as did two members of the French cultural institute who offered Sherine a scholarship to France. Her tutors did not. "This is not theatre," her end of term report raged. She tore the report up.
France was not quite the joy it should have been. At 21, she was far younger than most of her fellow students at the Jacques le Coq school of acting in Paris. But with two film parts, numerous stage roles and other credits, she had far more experience than most. Her tutors found her precocity hard to deal with.
"At times, they used me to show others how to do things. At other times they savaged me. You're not neutral enough. You do things too much from the gut," one teacher said. Another: "go and be a language professor. You're too shy, too fragile, too passionate. You'll never succeed."
"I felt abused. I felt horrible," she says. That same teacher insisted that Sherine would never be anything.
"I have taught acting for twenty years, and have never been wrong," she told her. It was then that the toughness surfaced, like hard rocks breaking a quiet lake.
"I confronted her. 'I am not here to be told whether or not I can do this. I am here because I know I can. I am here to learn,' I said."
They took away the scholarship and Sherine was asked to leave the school. But she stayed in Paris, fanatically practicing dance. "No-one understood. Everyone said 'what are you doing? You'll never be a dancer.' They didn't see how it could fit into my own vision of the relationship between body, movement and word."
That was the most dangerous time, Sherine recalls. "I became aggressive, mistrustful. I didn't want friends, I didn't want to believe in anything. I felt like I was walking around with a big house around me. No-one could reach me."
Perhaps it is no surprise that it was at this point that Sherine became addicted to Rimbaud. She returned to Egypt, coasted through some plays and was asked to do some advertisements on TV.
"I became disgusted. I hated theatre. People kept demanding to know why I didn't want to be big. I wanted to laugh. I don't do this for fame, I don't do this to be big. I do it because I am passionate about it."
After a while, though, the furies stilled and she devoted herself again to finding new ways to express old stories. "Those feelings faded. I had to go through that process, I think, to become secure in who I was. I am more tolerant than I ever was. I am more distant, but in a good way. I am not in need. I have started to feel a distance from people. It gives people around me freedom, without too many expectations."
Now 30, Sherine's art still demands she struggle. "I would be happy if I spent the rest of my days performing in an oasis," she says. "But sometimes I do feel like more renown. Not for its own sake, but because it would make what I want to do easier. I have so much to do beside my art, so many material concerns. I want to take three months to work on a new performance which I have been planning for two years. But I haven't been able to due to the lack of money. Maybe I'm tired of fighting." For a moment she looks worn out but when she looks up again the passion has returned: "I will never be commercial," she says fiercely. "I want to reach everybody."
So why does she do as she does, adjusting to every circumstance in the hope that a moment will arise in which to express her vision?
"I want to be free," she says. "I wanted freedom. This can give you freedom. When you perform, you don't feel, you are. You are every word you speak, every image you see, every character you speak, every story you tell. The more you work, the stronger and freer you are on stage. And it's all about freedom."
"You trouble your audience, you speak to the child within them, you remove them from their everyday."
When she performs "some are very embarrassed, especially men of a certain age. But sometimes you can really touch them," she says, and smiles.
In the Journalism Centre of the American University in Cairo an audience waits expectantly as the lights dim. After an overlong pause a figure, dressed in white like a medieval janissary, enters. She laughs nervously and apologises for the bad light. Coughing, and shuffling, she looks down at her feet. The audience shift in their seats and look at each other. Then she looks up, slowly raises her hands and begins to speak. Every word is fully pronounced, surrounded by a moment of humming silence like the silence that follows the peal of a large bell. She is telling one of the stories from The Thousand and One Nights. As she holds each word, embarrassment flutters around the room. The performer's speech seems artificial, intrusive. A few students giggle and leave the room, looking a little flushed. Sherine ignores them. Then her rhythm quickens. Her movement suddenly meshes with her words and the story takes on its own momentum. The words flow now; they are no longer simply planted. The story unfolds, taking the audience to different worlds, different places. Technique is no longer noticeable. Only the story remains, now drifting, now racing, now caressing the listeners. Costumes change. Mood alters. Tension follows ease. After an hour that seems like minutes, she finishes. There is a long moment of utter stillness. No one laughs.
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