MAGNUNA is a choreographed performance for fifty female and male performers, dedicated to the ambiguous narratives of female madness in medieval Arabo-Islamic literature. It will attempt a feminist, Foucauldian historical analysis of Islamic madness and its contemporary reverberations.

My interest in movement and madness started out as a reaction to my experiences of constraint, as a woman in public. I understood movement and womanhood as intertwined in the effort to navigate and negotiate space, and understood madness in the European sense, as the internalization of social restriction, the necessary containment of one’s symptoms, in the face of power and authority. 

Magnuna is the colloquial Egyptian form of the Arabic word ‘Majnuna’; the root of the word is “Jinn”, demon. There is a long literary tradition in Islam that connects madness with poetry and mysticism: the notion that the mad have access to some hidden truth. 

MAGNUNA moves towards a new synthesis of madness and holiness. It recuperates and rewrites the symptoms of holy madness in first person narratives, imagining new meanings and associations for these poses and gestures. In these choreographies, involuntary movements are transformed into deliberate, assertive gestures. Using the affective atmosphere of madness—its tropes of inappropriate affect—the performance deconstructs and reappropriates the movements of the madwoman’s body for the crafting and potentiation of a semantics of resistance.