“Ramy. The Voice of Revolution”. A show about Giulio Regeni and the Egyptian question

Giulio Regeni disappeared on 25 January 2016 in Cairo, where he was developing field research for his doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge. On February 3, his body was found lifeless along the highway that connects Cairo to Alexandria. With clear signs of torture. An Italian citizen, with an Italian passport, undergoes the same treatment that generally belongs to Egyptians disliked by the regime. The news immediately went around the world.

From that January 25th to today, truth and justice have not yet been achieved. The people responsible for the kidnapping, torture and death of Giulio Regeni are still unknown. Exactly 5 years earlier, on January 25, 2011, the Egyptian revolution began, which within a few days led to the dismissal of Moubarak.

One of the triggering factors was the killing by two policemen of Khalid Said, guilty of having asked the reason for a sudden search against him inside an internet cafe. Khalid Said will be savagely beaten and then taken to barracks, where he will be tortured and killed. His body will be found lifeless in the middle of a road.

Ramy Essam, known in Egypt as the voice of the revolution, was also in Tahrir Square on 25 January 2011. Ramy in the square sang for Khalid Said, for all Khalid Said, who before and after Khalid Said suffered the same fate. The artist sang to oust Mubarak and, to this day, he has never stopped singing against the regimes that have followed in Egypt.

Ramy has been living in exile since 2014, he can no longer set foot in the country, an arrest warrant for terrorism hangs over his head. In it no reference is made to his art or to the contents of his songs, but it is clear that the regime does not like in any way the request for freedom and justice for his people that he sings incessantly and that he accuses it of terrorism is completely unfounded.

Everyone knows Ramy’s songs, in Egypt and beyond, his videos get 10 million views, but he, for his people, can’t sing. Not even a note. A word. His mouth must remain closed. He can only get in touch with those who follow him through a screen.

“Giulio opened our eyes. Giulio took us to meet Ramy. Giulio asks us questions every day and asks for answers”, explain Valeria Raimondi and Enrico Castellani (Babilonia Teatri), authors of the show Ramy. The Voice of Revolution, staged on Saturday 4 February at 21 at La Città del Teatro in Cascina (PI). “Questions that we didn’t have the words to formulate on our own, but which today, working on stage side by side with Ramy, become deeply concrete, deeply human, deeply political, deeply authentic”.

“With this show we want to give voice to these questions. What the state means. What justice means. What power means. What the police mean. What trial means. What legality means. What prison means. What torture means. What public opinion means. What they mean. journalism and freedom of information. What does responsibility, humanity, strength mean”, the authors continue.

“With what yardstick do we measure the distance between the regime’s repeated declarations, in which the will to collaborate in the search for the truth is expressed, and the continuous misdirections. What name do we give to the declarations of our politicians who claim to demand truth and justice, but to whom they do not follow the actions necessary to obtain them. With this show we want to tell Egypt today. Italy today. The relations between the two countries. To tell it, with us, will be the voice of those who, like Ramy, live every day on their own skin what does dictatorship mean”.

The artist will sing it and shout it with the grace, poetry, anger and nostalgia of those who pay a very high price every day, exile, for their choices.

“With this show – conclude the authors – we want to unmask the hypocrisy of certain politics. We want to tell how and to what extent reason of state is ready to trample on inviolable human rights, sanctioned several times by international conventions which, in fact, remain a dead letter. We want to question ourselves about our weakness. About the weakness of a state that is unable to give transparent answers. We want to tell how our being free citizens in a free state encounters and clashes with the dynamics of victim and perpetrator. With dynamics that harm, offend and play with people’s dignity. We believe that this is never admissible and that it is always worth repeating it with strength and determination. In order not to stop being free citizens in a free state”.

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“Ramy. The Voice of Revolution”

by Valeria Raimondi and Enrico Castellani

with Ramy Essam, Enrico Castellani, Valeria Raimondi and Amani Sadat, Luca Scotton,

lights Babilonia Teatri/Luca Scotton, stage direction and video design Luca Scotton,

production of the Metastasio Theater in Prato