Mad Song Challenges Perception of Reality

 This review was published in the Daily News Egypt, 11 February 2008

By Ismail Fayed

Much like the poem that inspired the dance, “Mad Song is an anti-performance, challenging audiences’ perceptions of dance and stage performing.

“Mad Girl’s Love Song is a landmark of confessional poetry by late great American writer Sylvia Plath. The poem questions our perceptions of the world, whether we are truly aware of what we can and cannot see. On a more basic level, it’s also a record of the experience of a mad girl who falls in love. In this light, Adham Hafez’s performance is structured around his consciousness of his surrounding as well as the objects and people inhabiting it.

Performed at the Townhouse Gallery’s factory space, Hafez avoided using a set, lights or music. Instead, the space was left as is. The audience walked in, some chose to sit, while others stood around the undesignated stage.

Hafez moved among the spectators, emphasizing the idea behind the performance: They may all be just a figment of his imagination, or he may be an extension of a bigger illusion. He critically studies the process of perception via a myriad of forms and media – through stillness, movement and sound – before examining the validity within each medium

The performance starts with Hafez lying on the floor, eyes closed. As soon the audience starts to break their assembly, Hafez starts to explore his surroundings through voice. He becomes increasingly aware of his body, but this awareness is not without its problems.

The body is a means to consciousness, a way of realizing that our surroundings are not free of contentions, deceptions and misapprehension. Hafez believes that nothing we experience in life can be deemed entirely real or valid, and his inspection of the delusions humans go through on a mental, physical and psychological level is both brutal and liberating.

The performer gradually comes to consciousness in an extremely incisive manner as he starts imitating the audience, drawing our attention to how amenable we are to those around us; that no matter how immune and distant we are as individuals, we are not isolated from those around us.

Hafez points to the fact that mimesis, in the literal and the pathological sense, remains one of the chief methods by which we understand who we are as well as how and where we stand from those around us. In a coup de grâce, after imitating and projecting the energy and behaviour of the audience, a shaking Hafez exits the stage after succeeding in unsettling the audiences’ views of the aesthetics of dance, perception and space.

After watching this performance in Istanbul last year, world renowned dance theoretician and critic Ramsay Burt described it as a challenging dance that defies both the concept of movement and the space in which the movement takes place.