Mohamed Yousry “Shika”
- Fellow 2017
- Dancer, based in Cairo
- Cooperating Partner: Nora Chipaumire, Zimbabwe/ USA
Mohamed Yousry “Shika”, is an Egyptian dancer of Nubian origin. He graduated from Cairo University and worked in commercial dance before joining the Cairo Contemporary Dance Center (CCDC) (2012-2015). In 2015 he became the first Egyptian to join Ecole Des Sables (EDS) in Senegal (2015-2017), and he became a CEC ArtsLink Residency recipient. In 2016 he had been chosen to participate in P.A.R.T.S/EDS exchange program. Shika’s studies in dance and choreography are shaped by internationally renowned masters, such as Vincent Mantsoe, Germaine Acogny, Francesco Scavetta, Sophiatou Kossoko, Frey Faust and Reggie Wilson. Receiving the Pina Bausch Fellowship 2017, Shika’s artistic guide in research for a contemporary new perspective of African dances and its body-concepts will be Brooklyn based performer and choreographer Nora Chipaumire.
Shika's Report
„Mohamed Y. Shika is an artist with great potential to cross borders within the cultural understanding as well as artistic transmuting of contemporary dance for the 21st Century. His approach is, as a dancer, to examine the gap between Egypt and the rest of Africa, and to seek to conquer it through out his own body. This body-political attempt is predominantly based on his education in Egyptian, African and Asian folk dances as well as worldwide established dance techniques at major dance institutions, i.e. in Egypt (Contemporary Dance Center), West-Africa (Ecole des Sables) and Europe (P.A.R.T.S). Consequently for his scholarship the planned student/teacher collaboration with Brooklyn based African artist Nora Chipaumire will give Shika the needed insight into a specific, high-reflected artistic inner perspective: to deconstruct ancient aesthetics and imagine a new African body that contributes to an international contemporary language of culture and movement. Despite this he will gain by not only shadowing Nora Chipaumire’s transcontinental work on African-American Dance and traditional African Dance in New York and Zimbabwe, but, as a most significant aspect, taking part of her method to embody aesthetic as well as political concerns while transforming them into new poetics of dance.“
- Jury-Statement