A Feminist Theatrical Archiving of the Egyptian Revolution in Laila Soliman's Whims of Freedom and Blue Bra Day

During the eighteen days preceding the end of the Mubarak regime on February 11, 2011, Tahrir square was congested with performances, orations, and documentations in multifarious artistic forms. An ongoing trend of memorializing, celebrating and recording pervaded unleashing a whirlwind of mixed emotions and state violence on the one hand, and revolutionary artistic expression on the other. Documenting both, artists seek to create an inner reservoir to preserve and protect historical moments in the lives of many generations to come. Deploying memory and memorialization, summoning personal reflection and archival material, exploiting oral history, ethnography and random collections of biographies, Laila Soliman attempts to produce a collective memory wherein gaps of truth are filled and unanswered questions are underlined voicing a female cry against violence. Blue Bra Day commemorates a woman with a blue bra dragged by soldiers in the middle of Tahrir Square with her "^cibaya" torn open and soldier’s feet stamping on her body. In one image Soliman raises political consciousness and an awareness of violence against women, sexual disempowerment and spatial segregation. Soliman disrupts gender – determined spatial framings by resorting to eye-witness accounts and moment narrations whereby she recreates an alternative version of history. Whims of Freedom historicizes the present. Egypt’s 1919 revolution is juxtaposed with the 2011 January uprising. A journey of jumping between past and present is maintained through strands of personal material, oral history and episodic narrative. Laila Soliman resorts to the techniques of postdramatic theatre, Jacques Derrida's critical theory of Archive Fever and feminist consciousness raising to portray a dissident theatrical archive of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.