Surrealist artist’s Salvador Dali’s artwork inspires, incites, and provokes strong reactions of wonder, awe, and sometimes shock. His personal life arouses as much interest as his surreal paintings and statues.
Dali’s life is the focus of a new Egyptian performance by director Reda Hasaneen and choreographer Mohamed Fawzy. They entitled their piece “Dali…Lonely” as they chose to focus on one aspect of the artist's personal life: his sense of loneliness.
Researching Dali’s life and reading some of his diaries, Hasaneen found that the artist had a brother who died at a young age. When Dali was born he was given his late brother’s name—Salvador.
This was the starting point for creating this performance, currently playing at the Floating Theatre by University Bridge in Cairo.
The director assumed that the brother was an important part of the psyche of Salvador Dali, and carrying his name must have haunted the artist all his life.
Hasaneen decided to have the dead brother be present on stage, sharing in everything the artist does, including sharing the same bed with his wife.
This interesting premise of bringing Dali's brother to meet the artist was not clearly translated to the stage, however. The audience had no clear idea who the other character was. Performed by the talented Alaa El Naqeeb, the dead brother dressed in white and lurked behind the curtains, imitating the artist’s movement and engaging in a sudden boxing match with him.
Choreographer Mohamed Fawzy and the dancer presenting Dali’s character on stage finds Dali relevant to the “surreal” time we are living in, yet the performance does not attempt to make any such connection to current reality.
The visuals of “Dali…Lonely” relied heavily on the artist’s surreal paintings, yet unfortunately the poor projection quality, and the backdrop moving in the breeze of the open air floating theatre made it hard to decipher the details of the paintings.
Hasaneen tried to replicate some of the artist’s legendary moments, which made him infamous in the art world, such as having his wife Gala come out of an egg. Yet the lack of precision and the vague visuals did not help him get the idea across.
The few monologues written by the director himself did not add much to the truncated scenes, and the voices of the performers were often muffled and unclear.
However, the quasi dance performance was not without some merit and the play did include some interesting theatrical moments. One was when the dancer used a huge paintbrush and, as he moved it on the back drop, the projected images started to appear.
Fawzy, representing Salvador Dali, also had some interesting dance moves. However, his most poignant moment on stage was handling the life-sized puppet sitting at a desk and moving it to a microphone on the other side of the space. The precision and delicacy he used brought the puppet to life, and showed his skill as a master puppeteer.
One poetic scene presented the three performers side by side engulfed in soft red light with lyrical music playing in the background. Though the relationship between them was not obvious, their sensitive movement to the music was rather touching.
On the other hand, the boxing match scene between the artist and his shadow set to motivational music was unoriginal, and did not seem to belong to this performance.
Asking the director about the logic of the sequence of the different sketches Hasaneen said: “we found that there was no clear connection between the different scenes, so we added the singer Maher Mahmoud as a sort of narrator.”
Unfortunately, the warm voice of Mahmoud did not salvage this performance from the lack of dramaturgical structure, under the claim that it belongs to the genre of the Dance Theatre. This claim fails to work as an excuse to avoid doing the real work of creating a solid structure for this performance.
“Tanztheater” (Dance Theatre) is a term coined to describe the work of the great German dancer, choreographer, and director Pina Bausch. She created powerful performances rebelling against the rules of both traditional dance and theatre, thus creating a new genre.
Programme:
Performances are held everyday starting 9 August, running till 15 October at 8:30 pm
Floating Theatre, Kobry El-Gam’aa, El-Manial, Cairo
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