Nora Amin's latest theatrical venture strikes Nehad Selaiha as the fulfilment of a prophecy Since she first burst upon the world at the beginning of December 1879, Ibsen's Nora has been an inspiration to numberless women all over the world. In an article commissioned by the Norwegian Embassy in Cairo for the "Nora's Sisters" seminar in 2006 to mark the centenary of Ibsen's death, Egyptian actress and Weekly columnist Lubna Abdel-Aziz, who was first introduced to Nora at the age of 9 through her father, wrote: "During the 1950s, Egyptian women were struggling to secure a respectable place in society. ... Egyptian society then was not different from Ibsen's Norway or Victorian Europe. Breaking well- honoured traditions and conventions was just as hard. But Ibsen's voice was loud and Nora's courage was unprecedented and inspiring. They reached the shores of Egypt and spawned their many followers. Nora whispered gently in my ear, encouraged me to think for myself, to believe in my abilities, to study, to travel, to do what I was convinced was right. I did -- breaking away from tradition, shocking my society by becoming a movie actress, then walking away from it all to become a wife and mother -- all my own choices. Nora's sisters are many in Egypt and around the world." I bet Farida Fahmi, the first Egyptian middle-class female with a university degree to take up oriental dancing professionally in the 1960s, transforming it into a highly refined and internationally acclaimed art, could tell a similar tale. But in the case of Mona Abousenna, of the same generation as Lubna and Farida, the influence of Ibsen's heroine was such that, though she took up a less shocking profession than acting or dancing, becoming a professor of comparative drama at one of the top Egyptian universities, she not only led the life of a thoroughly independent and truly liberated woman, braving all the hardships and the loneliness such a path entails, but also called her only child 'Nora', promising herself that she would not be a Nora only in name. In bringing up her little 'Nora', Abousenna relentlessly went against the book, breaking with the traditional, Egyptian way of rearing children, a mixture of debilitating protectiveness and suffocating authoritarianism, steeling her heart and teaching the child the often very painful and socially reprehensible lessons of freedom at a very early age. Happily, Abousenna's Nora has grown into an independent, responsible person, with a daughter of her own, and a spirited, multi-faceted, highly disciplined and self-fulfilled artist. Her latest work, Nora's Doors, a dance theatre production based on Ibsen's A Doll's House, with an original musical soundtrack and a recorded verbal script, made up of the last scene of Ibsen's play and originally written dialogues by Amin that accompany some of the scenes, came as no surprise to those who know her; indeed, it seemed inevitable. In one of her earlier works, Message to My Father, an intimately personal, reflectively autobiographical and cathartically confessional piece, like most of her work, which she herself wrote, directed, choreographed and performed as she normally does, Nora dwelt on her name, voicing it out loud several times, then inserting a pause between its two syllables, and ending up by dropping the second to focus the first:' No', repeating it over and over. It was as if she had to discover and internalise this emblematic 'No' before becoming reconciled with her father. In the printed programme of Nora's Doors, she adds to her director's note a personal one addressed to the spectator and confidentially entitled 'From Nora'. In it she says: "Having directed 25 theatre and dance productions in Egypt and abroad, why is this production a special one for me? It is special because it has been my dream since I was a child, searching for the meaning behind my name and listening to the story of Ibsen while growing up. I have been training and working on stage since the age of eight, as a dancer, then actress, then directress, then choreographer and scenographer. I have been trying to open new doors in theatre leading to the expression of what is personal and biographical, provoking discussion of the unspoken issues and topics in our lives, recreating a physicality and a sense of sensuality and vigour in a theatre that is trying to survive. ...I was doing as Ibsen's Nora has taught me to do: believe in my choice, go ahead with my journey and carry the consequences." The journey, she goes on to confess, involved many failures, instances of oppression, repeated threats to her integrity as a human being and having to daily confront a society that generally regards acting as a shameful profession, or at least one that cannot be taken seriously. The price of freedom has been high, she admits: a growing sense of alienation, finding oneself alone, feeling an odd woman out, at odds with society, with even the girls one grew up with. But though Nora feels her 'sense of belonging shrinking' day after day, her 'personal space' diminishing, and her personal and cultural identity 'in continuous transformation and re- positioning', she, like Nina in Chekhov's The Seagull (a character who amply qualifies as one of 'Nora's Sisters' and whose final speech in the last act of that play Nora Amin seems to echo in the final part of her note) has found her salvation in theatre, 'making it' her 'own way to live with all of that and to turn it into a life more lively than the one we live.' One wonders if Ibsen's Nora took up theatre too after leaving Helmer's house, or may be she became a feminist, joining 'every grass-roots group campaigning against patriarchy, phallocracy and male chauvinism', as a Danish critic reviewing Suzanne Brogger's first novel, Deliver Us from Love, suggested in 1973 (See "Wonderful Nora" by Danish writer, poet and essayist Suzanne Brogger, in Nora's Sisters, published by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2006, p. 25). In the essay I have just mentioned, Brogger perceptively defines the 'core question' in A Doll's House as 'not so much whether the Helmer family can stay together, whether Nora leaves or not, but whether they as individuals will be able to become whole people and heal the various splits in their personalities by gaining insight into their own hidden motives." Another important question the play raises concerns the imbalance of power in a relationship and the threat posed by the weaker party developing and gaining in strength. What would be the consequences then? "The most explosive imbalance in a relationship," however, as Brogger stresses, "is when one of the partners has to hide their talents to avoid envy, breakdown, or just an unpleasant mood"(p. 29). Then there is "the eternal problem of two people in a relationship developing in different directions, the balance between them being upset, and all the inevitable conflicts that ensue." Elucidating this, Brogger further says: "As long as the trophy of modernity -- individualism -- remains a value, there will be personal development and deviation. So the question is, even today: How can two people develop together without a risk of developing in different directions?" Ibsen provides no answers, for "the questions raised in the play," as Brogger concludes, "are unsolvable, and can only be resolved by living them out" (pp. 27-28). I do not know if Nora Amin is familiar with Brogger's essay, but the questions she poses by way of guidelines to the show in her director's note in the printed programme are almost identical to the ones Brogger reads in the play: "What is personal freedom in a couple's relationship? How can love be oppressive? And what about psychological and mental abuse? Who's right to choose and decide? How far can separation be harmful or constructive? And is it possible to reconstruct one's own identity into a better individuality and independence and still confront the consequences of social prejudice?" These questions are graphically explored by five performers/dancers, 4 females (Nora Amin, Aliaa Elgready, Fatma Mosleh and Kholood Issa), dressed in black tights and red, white, blue and orange thigh-long flaring tops, representing different facets of Nora's character, and one black clad male (Adel Antar) who features in all the projected relationships. Performed on an empty stage, except for five white rectangular frames (the doors in the title) hung at different heights on a black back wall, which eventually descend to floor level and are finally wrenched out and manipulated by the performers at the end, and a huge, looped sheet of shiny plastic precariously hanging at the top, like a sky about to fall down any minute, and with the help of a brilliant lighting plan, a lively and varied original musical score, combining western and oriental tunes, by Ramz Sabry, Nora's Doors unfolded as series of open narratives and metaphoric representations, combining movement, language, dance and mime. While the choreography drew on feline fights and animal movements, children's games and striptease acts, body jostling and rope walking, among other things, the spoken dialogue that accompanied some of the scenes was recorded and played as a voice over rather than performed live. In this way, the stage became an internal space where all the raw, suppressed feelings underlying the spoken words -- the pain, fear, rage, desire, repulsion, cruelty, or humiliation -- could be expressed in poignant visual metaphors and eloquent physical imagery. True the scenes varied in imaginative power and emotional impact, and some, like the one in which a woman keeps running round a man in circles then jumps into his arms only to be dropped to the floor time after time, or the one in which another flings herself repeatedly at the feet of a lover who spurns her and walks away, were banal and downright embarrassing. These, however, were few and most of the other scenes more than made up for them. Particularly memorable and moving was the scene where the final dialogue between Ibsen's Nora and Helmer was accompanied by a visual sequence in which the actress playing Nora, dolled up in a long, red evening dress, blonde wig, high heels and beads, stands woodenly, gazing at Helmer across the stage for a while, occasionally swaying on her feet as if about to fall down, while he anxiously mimes trying to catch her if she falls, then, when a sheet drops from the flies, erecting a barrier between them, proceeds very slowly to strip, holding every item of clothing up high for a second before dropping it to the floor. When she has finally stripped down to her underwear, the sheet goes up and she advances barefoot towards her husband to hand him his wring and walks away towards the doorframes at the back. Equally powerful, but in a verbal rather than visual vein, was the dialogue, written by Amin, in which a husband and wife debate personal freedom versus family duties and responsibilities. The party that wants to walk out here in search of a more authentic and fulfilling life is not a Nora-like wife, but rather the husband who feels that marriage and family life have falsified him and eroded his freedom. If it is morally right for Nora to walk out on her husband and children in search of her true self, Nora Amin seems to argue back at Ibsen, why can't it be right for a husband to do the same? But here, unlike Helmer, the wife refuses to maintain the establishment and care for the children alone. She too realizes that marriage is a stifling arrangement and decides to leave, declaring that perhaps it is ultimately better for the children to grow up on their own since the family structure is invariably oppressive anyway and parents are notorious for stunting their children's natural growth and capabilities. Here, Nora Amin spells out what Ibsen perhaps wanted to say openly but stopped short of: she denounces the very idea of marriage conceived by patriarchal societies as a safeguard for property and power. Marriages of this kind do not only oppress women and distort their identities; they also cripple men and corrupt their souls. The idea of both parties wanting to walk away and remaining tied against their will by some external force surfaces again as a visual metaphor accompanying the dialogue in the scene where two lovers are connected by a long, red strip of cloth, tied round their waists at both ends, with both alternately miming walking away without moving an inch, or being drawn closer by the other party while resisting, as in a tug-of-war. Less radical and problematic, and more in line with the traditional feminist view of husbands as oppressors, but visually stunning nonetheless, is the scene where Adel Antar and another actress, dressed in the traditional Islamic uniform, crouch on the floor, one on the defensive, the other poised to attack, and mime a ferocious fight between two feline animals, ironically accompanied by a sweet oriental tune played on the lute, while a violent, realistic dialogue plays in the background, in which we hear a husband fiercely berating a weakly protesting wife for disobedience, threatening and warning her and finally sealing his orders with a resounding slap on her face. Other arrestingly imaginative scenes include: the one where all the 4 Noras are trapped inside a huge, transparent, plastic sheet and desperately struggle to break out, with the light picking out their terrified faces and frenziedly waving arms; Nora and two other women alternately and intermittently crawling, animal like across the stage, in a beam of light (from a side, floor-projector) and struggling to reach its source; the trio of women, or 3 Noras, one crawling, one feeling her way gingerly towards the doors at the back, and the third suffused in light, whirling round in ecstasy with outstretched arms; or, indeed, the breathtaking, overwhelmingly paradoxical, and provocatively ambiguous final scene, in which all the five performers rip the empty door frames off the wall and play around with them like children exploring an unknown object, skipping across them, in and out, twisting them out of shape, then straightening them to wave them high over their heads before the hanging sky above descends to engulf them all. No facile optimism here. Stepping out of the door, leaving the protective walls of traditions and conventions, of bourgeois homes, does not automatically spell freedom, as Nora Amin herself has found out from experience. Rather, it is the beginning of an arduous, dangerous and, possibly, endless quest for it -- for one's own true path and one's own true self. And the quest may very well end in disaster, if repressive society proves too strong for one, as Nora's Doors suggests. Still, it is worth the risk. As in the case of Sisyphus, the burden of freedom has to be endlessly borne, and even if at the end of the day we fail, it is enough that we have tried. In the attempt lie our dignity, integrity and definition as humans.
