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Text by Claudia Galhós
Nine women in a circle shout harsh words from a real story of rape that happened with CBS´s journalist Lara Logan in February 2011, during the manifestations in Tahrir Square (Cairo) while covering Egyptian revolution. Philippe Vincent has a recent experience in dealing with this subject of sexual aggression and violent behaviour inflicted on women by man in the context of his theatrical experiments, namely addressing the shocking subject in the same city where it happened, Cairo, and then taking it to a stage in New York.
Now, in Convento da Saudação (Montemor-o-Novo), within TryAngle, and after diverse experimentations with filming, dancing and acting – “Hunters”, “Boy meets Girl” and “3D” – he asked nine women to join him in a choir where the outrageous rape of Lara Logan is shouted in a hard rhythm and accompanied with the sound of severe and arid feet beating on the floor.
Here is the text:
LARA LOGAN
text by Philippe Vincent
February 11, 2011. Tahrir Square is burning tonight. The atmosphere is electric. Hands and fists are raised, banners and flags fly. Celebration of victory, against he, who for over twenty years was the absolute master of this country and is now downgraded to the rank of deposed dictator. Amid the jubilation, my body is suddenly raised by the wind of revolt. I am weightless. I float now above the ground. My clothes, torn away by the tempest, come off me scattering into the distance. I scream. But even I do not hear my scream in the middle of this tornado. Speechless, weightless, almost naked, I am a flag that floats amid others. Its color is that of my skin, white, in a sign of surrender. The breath of the revolution has many hands that touch my breasts, my thighs. For twenty-five minutes the turbulence turns into a hurricane. Aeolus, as a democrat, insurgent against the god Mubarak. His hands slam harder and harder into my face, tug at my limbs, twist my body. His fingers, soiled with struggle, greased with koshari and sougoq, creep into my vagina. My body, a wayward cloth in the tempest, navigates from hand to hand, finger to finger, without touching ground. A kind of lull suddenly casts the torn flag against a grill, behind it: the eyes of a woman. Recognizing one of their own, a rampart of long tresses, veils, niqabs, erects itself around me. The female herd, clutches me within its tribe, protecting its gender. End of the Meteorological event. It’s what one can live thru in Tahrir Square today. This is Lara Logan, live for CBS.