Body Politics in Adham Hafez Company’s 2065 BC By Chloë Edmonson Arab Stages, Volume 2, Number 2 (Spring 2016) ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publication
New York Live Arts hosts the Live Ideas Festival each Spring under a different theme. The festival website is http://newyorklivearts.org/liveideas/. The 2016 theme for the Festival was MENA/Future – Cultural Transformations in the Middle East North Africa Region. In the program notes, MENA/Future’s co-curator Adham Hafez observed that “contemporary Arab performance is obliged to reside within the limited and limiting spectrum of ‘political art.’” His dance theatre piece 2065 BC was one of MENA/Future’s many performances that explored the potentials and limitations of ‘political art’ in the Middle East and North Africa.
Aside from co-curating the festival, Hafez is the Artistic Director of Adham Hafez Company and the Program Director of the Egyptian dance development and research platform, HaRaKa. His work persistently explores the various iterations of political art within tumultuous times and places, such as contemporary Cairo. Conceived, composed, and choreographed by Hafez himself, 2065 BC reimagines the Berlin Conference of 1884, restaging it in a war-torn, dystopian future in which resources are scarce and a new world order needs to be established.
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