MAGNUNA means madwoman in Arabic

Many hebephrenics were accepted as ’majdhubs’, even abnormal motor behaviour was tolerated as long as there was no extreme catatonic excitement. For example, Safi-D-Din Ibn Zafir (d. AD 1283) in his biography, wrote of a holy woman in Giza, Egypt, who stood for a long period in a field without any protection from the sun or the wind. She was fed from time to time, eating whatever was given to her.

—Hanafy A. Youssef, Fatman A. Youssef, T.R. Dening, “Evidence for the existence of schizophrenia in medieval Islamic Society,” History of Psychiatry , vii, 1996, p. 59

MAGNUNA is a public performance for fifty performers, dedicated to the descriptions of female madness in medieval Arabo-Islamic literature. 

It focuses on literature from the beginning of Islam in 610 AD, to the end of the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt, in 1517 AD. Madness is observed and described in various sources, including Islam’s religious narratives (Quran, Hadiths and Sira), legal and medical literature, hospital monographs, encyclopedias, travel writing, poetry and Belles Lettres. 

Choreographies are based on descriptions of behaviors associated with madness: stupor, physical tics, repetitive speech, imitative acts and mannerisms. Appropriating them, potentially recuperating and rewriting these movements in first person narratives, imagining new meanings and associations, new forms of disruption; to give Islamic madwomen, then and now, a voice.