Laura Boutros

The Middle East & North Africa (MENA) has taken center stage of late, motivated by the “attacks carried out on 7 October 2023 on several civilian targets in Israel.” As a result, the UN Human Rights Council “investigated Israeli attacks on the Gaza strip up to 31 December 2023, with a focus on the siege, attacks on evacuating civilians and attacks on residential buildings and refugee camps.” The events following October 7th reinvigorates the need for examination of MENA representation in Western public consciousness. As a significant conflict in the MENA region, the United Nations conducted an investigation of human rights violations with a resulting report published in 2024. To do so, it required a mission to “the Arab Republic of Egypt from 28 February to 8 March 2024 to meet with Palestinians evacuated from the Gaza Strip.” It is here that the focus of this thesis finds its catalyst. As with the UN visit to Egypt, this thesis utilizes Egypt as a conduit to interrogate the dominant narratives constructed and circulated in the West. In the study of cultural communications, Edward Said’s Orientalism provides a key theoretical foundation, establishing the theatrical vocabulary for which Egypt has been rendered legible to Western audiences as part of a grander Oriental mythology. This thesis asks, therefore, how the immersive theatre practices can combat Orientalism through the construction of communally authored narrative constellations. To do so, this question is tackled through three sections.

The first section establishes the theater of Orientalism as according to Said, the contemporary obstacles such staging creates, and how such obstacles manifest when individuals of Egyptian descent intentionally stage their own representation. The second section covers the fabrication of self, the process of identification, and the adaptation of Theodor Adorno’s constellation theory in Negative Dialectics as a means of countering Orientalism. The third section puts the constellational identification into practice, utilizing collaborative storytelling to build an anti-Oriental understanding of Egyptian performance.

This research looks towards the rituals of collaborative storytelling from Egyptian history. From Ancient Egypt, there is a Demotic word, sḏy (“to speak, to tell”), expanded to Setjedi (“storyteller”) as a title for the performer/researcher. The Setjedi acts as a fulcrum for which the storytelling experience balances, from which the constellation forms around. In the search for the ideal performance scenario for the Setjedi, Naguib Mahfouz’s short story, The Mummy Awakens, wherein the French salon serves as a bolster for the Oriental myth, creates ample room for an anti-Oriental communal storytelling experience. The exact parameters of the Setjedi salon are still in flux as experiments continue to progress.