Workshop Performance & Conversation: Dancing is a Sin

Huntington Theatre Company in Boston presented Dancing is a Sin: Two One-Woman Plays from Egypt—a workshop performance and conversation—livestreamed on the global, commons-based peer produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Thursday 14 January at 7:30 p.m. EST (Boston) / 6:30 p.m. CST (Chicago) / 4:30 p.m. PST (Los Angeles) / 00:30 GMT (London—Friday 15 January) / 02:30 EET (Cairo—Friday 15 January).

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Full of humor, passion, and crushing candor, these two short Egyptian plays tell stories of women yearning for lives of dignity in the face of poverty, corruption, and discrimination. In the surreal one-woman show The Mirror by Yasmeen Emam (Shaghaf), a teenage girl is paralyzed by the question of whether to wear a revealing or conservative dress to the wedding of a man she dreamed of marrying. In the gritty monologue They Say Dancing is a Sin by Hany Abdel Nasser and Mohamed Abdel Mu’iz, an independently-minded belly dancer derides the duplicity and greed of her well-to-do patrons. 

Co-translated and directed by Rebekah Maggor.

This workshop performance will be followed by a discussion with Egyptian playwrights Yasmeen Emam (Shaghaf) and Hany Abdel Naser, in conversation with co-translator and director Rebekah Maggor and international theatre scholar and New York University professor Carol Martin, and moderated by writer and Culturebot contributor Hani Omar Khalil.

This workshop is hosted by the Huntington Theatre Company and supported by an individual artist grant from the Global Connections—IN the LAB program, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by Theatre Communications Group, the national organization for the professional not-for-profit American theatre. They Say Dancing is a Sin and The Mirror will be published by Seagull Books in the forthcoming anthology Tahrir Tales: Plays from the Egyptian Revolution (part of the "In Performance" series, distributed in the US by the University of Chicago Press). The translation of these plays was supported by a Literature in Translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a translation commission from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

About HowlRound TV

HowlRound TV is a global, commons-based peer produced, open access livestreaming and video archive project stewarded by the nonprofit HowlRound. HowlRound TV is a free and shared resource for live conversations and performances relevant to the world's performing arts and cultural fields. Its mission is to break geographic isolation, promote resource sharing, and to develop our knowledge commons collectively. Participate in a community of peer organizations revolutionizing the flow of information, knowledge, and access in our field by becoming a producer and co-producing with us. Learn more by going to our participate page. For any other queries, email [email protected], or call Vijay Mathew at +1 917.686.3185 Signal/WhatsApp. View the video archive of past events.