After watching Walid Aouni’s “Sheherazade Monalisa, the opening performance of the 9th Festival for Modern Dance Theater that kicked off Monday night at the Cairo Opera House, I found myself gravely needing to consult my program for clues as to what I had just watched.
In the text under Aouni’s name, I was confronted with sentences such as these:
“The Genie sleeps in his lamp, the pirates were tired of carrying sails and Johnny Deep (I assume he means Depp?) was making fun of us and our silly dreams. Marilyn Monroe’s shoe is small for Sheherazade, the Indian and Chinese lovers returned back to their countries.
Further down in the stream of consciousness text, Aouni seemed to be attempting to create a link between Sheherazade, who saved a kingdom with her gifted storytelling in “One Thousand and One Nights, and “all women.
“Any woman can turn to be an emblem with her magic, smile or shoe, her love … [ellipsis his] in her tyranny or her eyelashes. All women, Mona Lisa or Marilyn Monroe, Hend Roustom or Princess Diana, are Sheherazade.
Yet the foundation of Aouni’s “illustrative text is quite weak. Why, for instance, would he presume that Monroe, Roustom or Princess Diana, represent “all women ?
Aouni’s work rarely comes off as an artistic unification of female icons over time, but rather as the work of a director and company with far too many ideas in their minds, and far too few capabilities, both technically and creatively, to carry them through.
Indeed, the major theme of this epic piece is the continual introduction of half-baked ideas that are hardly contextualized or clarified.
The show – presented by the Modern Dance Theater Company – began with the introduction of a massive set of the Opera’s Main Hall. The stage was covered in a large semicircle of huge boards bearing black and white images of famous female divas, flashing their white teeth and wearing evening gowns.
Among those boards were tables and chairs, creating a cafeteria of sorts.
Center stage was the Mona Lisa, looking modest amidst Monroe and her consorts. Squarely above the Mona Lisa was a balcony, and the show began with the vivacious soloist beating a rug over the railing, while the rest of the large ensemble trickled out from the wings of the stage into the café.
Hence the first of many unexplained images.
Below her we see a group of youth in plain clothes, dancing unenthusiastically. In the midst of this scene we see a man dressed in black, wearing a bright blue helmet. I suppose we are to imagine that he is a police officer.
Soon he unsheathes a gun, and begins a series of dances with the cast and his counterpart, a smaller man, also dressed in black, whose t-shirt boasts a sequined skull.
Bizarre, unexplored image number two comes in the form of his dance with a baby doll, whom he points his gun at, then angrily exchanges for another identical baby doll. The large cast moves aimlessly, sometimes sitting in chairs and watching, sometimes performing a jazzy ensemble for which they lacked both the sufficient training and the physical agility .
Aouni gives the impression of being an esoteric or highly experimental artist.
Problem is, his movement vocabulary is totally marked in a 1980s Broadway musical repertoire, and he presents this movement in every instance quite sincerely, without irony.
Then a young male soloist appears on the balcony with a tiny pair of paper wings on his back. The wings are so small that they might be mistaken for small white horns, yet luckily the costume designer has “ANGEL written in black letters on his t-shirt.
He performs a set of movements with substantial emotion – though what exactly he is expressing is unclear – before getting himself killed by the black clad dancers.
This murder scene, however, occurs in one of the performance’s many moments of poor lighting, and in fact happens in light so dim that it is completely upstaged by one of the pieces rare moments of innovation. At the same time, in center stage, we see a group of dancers headed by two, holding up what appear to be large paper wings. Moving their wings, they appear to “fly, a moment of true beauty usurped yet again by the company’s flailing ability to dance in unison.
In this case, the wings move side by side in the same direction, looking like petals in a fan, rather than the mirrored in-and-out movement required to initiate flight.
Another potentially noteworthy moment occurs when the large Mona Lisa board is wheeled out in front of the anti-hero. I was quite mesmerized at this moment of ingenuity – but true to form, the director’s following choice ruined the moment.
At this instance, the tall black-clad man (one of the show’s better performers) stood hesitantly in front of the image and delivered a half-hearted, yet long kiss to Mona Lisa’s mouth. The board left then as quickly as it came, and the company went on in flamboyant clichéd movement for another 20 minutes or so.
The finale involved the whole company changing into Persian clothing, an action which, of course, seemed to occur without reason.
The dark angel was killed, only to jump up a minute later to perform further empty gestures with newfound props, such as swords. The lead soloist, whom I assume to be Sheherazade, performed the last of her predictable and virtually identical duets with the same partner, a duet in the spirit of what one might remember from the American movie “Dirty Dancing, yet with a random shot of belly dancing thrown in.
Sheherazade Monalisa concludes with large Persian paintings, supposedly from the time of “One Thousand and One Nights, dropping from the ceiling, while the cafe magically vanishes. This seamless gesture was one of the highlights of the performance, mainly because it seemed one of the most honest – it did away with vacuous art gestures, and finally embraced the possibilities that come with such a big-budget production.
Returning to Aouni’s text I found the following: “We are in a big undefined coffee shop; it does not matter if there are old or modern clothes and music, with or without sets.
My question is, why not?
Aouni’s belief that the audience can or must follow his whimsical shifts from plain clothes to ancient Persian garb, from Christian iconography to Hollywood divas to lampshades on women’s heads with small flashlights as costuming, seems assumptive at best.
At worst, his reluctance to question his own basic readability seems born of the same dangerous comfort that his position as one who – I would assume also, without much questioning – seems to be always in charge of the opening performance at all major dance theater events.s
