As the Artistic/Founding Director of New York/Palestine-based theater company Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre (YSDT), We Live in Cairo choreographer Samar Haddad King regularly creates work that crosses disciplines and physical borders—a necessary skill set for this production. We Live in Cairo writer Patrick Lazour sat down with Samar to find out more about her history in dance and her vision for this production.
Patrick Lazour: So, Samar, what made you pursue dancing and choreography?
Samar Haddad King: I feel like that question “why dance” is asked a lot, especially to Arabs. Some have the idea that our culture is more conservative and less dance-y, even though it’s quite rooted in movement, and traditional dance. I mean, technically my mom just put me into dance classes because I used to dance around a lot and sing—before I spoke, really. Dance has been the medium where I always felt like I expressed myself. For me, dance is everything. Dance is music. Dance is poetry. Dance is theater. Dance is all of these things. And you can say so much in the smallest gesture; with all of the thoughts zipping through your head all at once, with the most powerful feeling, it all comes out in this tiny gesture. This small movement can speak everything.
PL: A thousand words!
SHK: A thousand words in one little movement, yeah.
PL: How would you describe the choreography of We Live in Cairo?
SHK: I never think of dance as anything separate from theater, even though obviously there is a movement component to the show. In We Live in Cairo, there are two large dance sequences—one is a bit of a parody, the second one is at a club. The rest of the piece is much more stylized. I think it’s in showing this layer of unrelenting spirit—the unforgiving, ravenous spirit—that sometimes movement can help heighten and lift. We’re doing a piece about a revolution where a lot of people gave their lives for an idea. It was life or death for them. And as theater can be about life and death, dance is the same—it’s storytelling.
PL: It’s what inspired the physical language of the musical?
SHK: With Zoe Rabinowitz, my associate choreographer who I’ve been working with for 15 years, I decided to approach the whole language of the piece based on 24-count phrase. It’s 8 gestures, each with 4 separate movements. And those movements—I hate using the word “steps,” but let’s say “steps”—can be applied on different scenarios depending on where your urgency is. What are you fighting for? Are you fighting for your freedom at a protest? Are you fighting freedom from all of societal pressure or all of the weight of society by going to a club and dancing it out? The gestures—we’ve applied them on many different scenarios within the piece—they can be funny, they can be sad, they can be angry, they can be happy, they can be all these things. It’s a thought process by the performers and how they approach that specific movement.
PL: Interpret and approach. Love it!
SHK: Yeah. And the steps are just like words. They stay the same, but they’re adapted. The intensity and urgency is adapted differently depending on whatever scenario they’re in.
This new musical follows six revolutionary students armed with laptops and cameras, guitars and spray cans as they come of age in a contemporary Cairo.
