Making revolution everyday: quotidian performance and utopian imagination in Egypt's streets and squares

After Egypt's 2011 uprising was quashed, independent dramatists worked to revive utopian revolutionary communities through public performance. This essay analyzes the arts festival Art is an Open Square (2012), and a clown show for refugees by Cairo's Red Tomato troupe (2014), as attempts at everyday utopia. When public activism was banned, these performances in streets and squares adapted quotidian repertoires of festivity and hospitality to stage heterogeneous publics. Analyzing the performances as attempts at activating the utopian within the quotidian, I evaluate the efficacy of such minor scenarios of revolutionary citizenship, devised to sustain hope in oppressive times.