The miracle of Walid Aouni. He is a comprehensive expressive artist. He is a dancer, choreographer, and theater director, a painter and a musician. Aouni entered the heart of the Egyptian theatrical and artistic movement, breaking the closed circles, breaking the organized hierarchy, revolting against stereotyped awareness, and making expression in the language of the body on the theatrical level a gateway to purifying the self and understanding the soul. However, the hidden side of Walid Aouni is that he is a painter with a unique style. He draws spaces in the same rejecting context that we knew him on stage. It is difficult to classify him within the framework of a trend or current in art, but even though he is a professional artist, he gives unparalleled respect and loyalty to the spontaneous contemplative ability, and he intends to dive into the artistic self until he touches it, not because that root is the summary of what he was born with but rather because it is the raw material for the action of instinct. We can see Walid Aouni as a symbolic, metaphysical, and surrealist artist, but that will still not be enough, that is, for him to mortgage himself for those moments. “Automatism,” which brings the stream of the unconscious into the space of the soul, He paints as if he were under a controlling will, and even as if he were a per formative mediator for the ferment of the unconscious. When he leaves the space of drawing, this is an indication that he has just returned to the “daily” and to the state of wakefulness.

-Ahmed Fouad Selim

About the Artist

Walid Aouni, a renowned modern dance choreographer and director, began his career in Belgium in the 1980s. He studied Graphic Arts and Fine Arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Aouni founded his first dance theatre group, Tanit Dance Theatre, in 1980 and gained recognition for his innovative choreography in Belgium.

During his career, Aouni collaborated with acclaimed choreographer Maurice Bejart for nine years and worked as a scenographer. In 1990, he visited Egypt with Bejart and later, in 1993, was invited by the former Egyptian Minister of Culture, Farouk Hosny, to establish the first modern dance group at the Cairo Opera House, the first of its kind in the Arab world.

From 1993 to 2011, Aouni directed over 25 shows for the Egyptian Modern Dance company at the Cairo Opera House. He also created numerous celebratory ceremonies for the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Armed Forces, and national events, including the opening ceremony of the restored Sphinx in 2012 and the opening of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.