Courtesy of BuSSy Facebook page
Many projects to empower women have been created recently. The initiatives have sprung up to oppose the cultural mishaps of Egyptian society as well as the organised harassment of women.
However, there are several initiatives that have been addressing the same issues for some time. One of these projects, which has been around since 2006 and aims to use creativity to empower women, is called BuSSy, which means “look” in Arabic.
The group’s Facebook page clearly states their purpose: “BuSSy is a project intended to empower women and raise awareness about women’s issues through creative means.” The project began with two students at the American University in Cairo who wanted to document women’s experiences in an artistic way.
They wanted to turn women into their own storytellers, countering their exclusion from traditional social narratives: “The monologues exposed real women’s stories and provided a space for free expression on issues that society was failing to address,” explains their website.
The project creates theatrical performances of those tales, and the people who work on those performances are volunteers. BuSSy does not use professionals, only people who want to either tell their own stories or help others to tell theirs.
In 2010, the project extended beyond the confines of the university and became an “independent theatre project”. They also started taking on other stories; instead of only focusing on women, they started to incorporate men’s stories, exploring the relationship between genders and the power struggles that these relationships can create.
With global focus shifting towards social media, it is surprising that BuSSy chose theatre for their main medium. However, their website explains this: “Why theatre? Because we felt that this would be the best way to reach a large body of people while providing the storytellers – women and men – with a direct opportunity to publicly reclaim the truth as they experienced it.”
In 2010, they were censored during a performance at the Cairo Opera House, and resorted to miming the censored parts. After the performance they were endorsed by actor and activist Khaled Aboul Naga.
Provocatively, the BuSSy group started to take their performances to more public places, including the ladies’ Metro carriages. On their website they share the positive reactions of women in the Metro, some of them asking if they were creating other projects to criticise harassment and assault.
In July 2012 they performed live in the street, and onlookers were not aware they were watching performances. During these street performances they staged three fake harassment situations to see how people passing by would react.
After struggling to find a venue for their performances in 2010, the project has since performed in several famous locations both inside and outside Egypt. In September 2012 they performed in Amman, Jordan, during the Hekaya Festival. After visiting Amman, the project performed in Beirut’s Menassa for Contemporary Arab Theater in October 2012. Most recently, in February 2013, they performed at the Audrey Emerton lecture theatre in Brighton, UK.
