Abstract :
The post-independence years have been turbulent and fruitful for North African women in the performing arts: theater, cinema, dance, music, and art performance. In Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, the forces shaping the status of women are dynamic, unstable, productive, and in some cases, violent. They take place within larger, and equally volatile, discourses about the socio-political future of the three nation-states. This atmosphere has a profound effect on the women artists who must operate within it, or from its diaspora, as they agitate to have a voice in the future of the region. When we consider their work from a remove, it is easy to forget that, in addition to facing themselves the social and political issues about which they write, film, and perform, they, like artists everywhere, grapple with the petty politics of publishing, publicity, funding, public taste, and bureaucratic policy. This article is a continuation of an earlier study, conducted in the years 1997-2000, that identified some of these artists and their works for the first time in English. It returns to the region, specifically Morocco, to pick up the threads of the discourse in recent work by the artists of the study, and by artists who have emerged since its completion. For example, it considers the cases of two young Moroccan artists who have had tremendous impact in the last year: Laïla Marrakchi, who made the controversial film, MaRock, and Samia Akariou who, with the almost entirely female troupe, Takoon, created Bnat Lalla Mennana, a brilliant feminist adaptation of Lorca’s La Casa de Bernarda Alba.
