Nehad Selaiha cheers the young mummers at Al-Saqia Last week, right in the middle of the 2nd Egyptian National Theatre Festival, I was virtually hijacked and transported to Al-Saqia cultural centre in Zamalek where I was kept for two days. Don't get me wrong; it was the most delightful instance of a voluntary kidnapping. For four days I had been diligently fishing out the fringe shows I had missed the year before -- student, amateur, workers and provincial theatre productions. What I mostly netted was disappointment: the Cairo University version of Saadalla Wannus's Tuquus Al-Isharat wa Al-Tahawulat (Rites and Signs of Passage) was so poor and dowdy it could make you cry, and the Theatre Institute productions of Albert Camus's Caligula and Eugene O'Neil's Anna Christie were even more miserable -- awkward, embarrassingly pretentious and crudely garish; such bad acting I have not seen in years, and it makes you wonder what people teach at this academic establishment and whether the students go there to train for anything other than the art of building a false media image and knowing the shortest ways to get into television soap operas and commercials. By comparison, the workers of the Max Company for Salt in Alexandria seemed more professional and did a wonderful job with Kafr Al-Tanahudat (The Hamlet of Sighs) -- a musical adaptation of Ra'fat El-Dweri's old play, Al-Waghish (The Pest), in which he transposed Aeschylus' Orestia to Upper Egypt, merged it with the old Arab epic of Al-Zeir Salem and gave it a sharp political edge. But more of this next week. To cut a long story short, I was grateful for any excuse that could honoruably release me from my self-imposed obligation even for a short spell. Though I detest sitting on a jury, the offer was irresistible: a chance to feast on a rarely seen, much neglected performance genre which I happen to simply adore: Mime. The event was the third Al-Saqia Annual Mime Festival (6-7 July) and I was promised 15 original ventures by budding mime- artists. I suddenly remembered how I had regretted missing Al-Saqia's 2-day statue-mime/ live-mannequin contest last month which was held for the first time this year and seems to have been intended to give the public a taste of the earlier antecedents of the art of pantomime and whet their appetite for this festival. Isn't it wonderful the way Mohamed Al-Sawy, the founder of Al-Saqia cultural centre, keeps coming up with new ideas? I would not be surprised if in the years to come we find Al-Saqia hosting, besides the many theatrical events it already has on its calendar, a children's theatre festival, another for puppets, and one for clowns and acrobats. To highlight neglected art forms and popular theatrical traditions, revive interest in them and encourage young creators to explore them seems to be one of the guiding principles of Al-Saqia's cultural policy. What is it about the art of mime that makes it so enchanting, so refreshing, so intriguing? Is it that it takes us back to our infancy, to our pre- linguistic stage, in Julia Kristeva's words, when we were "whole", and the world seemed an extension of our being, a big field of energy of which we were an unconscious part and where such concepts as "inner" and "outer", "self" and "other" had no place? Does it remind us of the trauma of coming into selfhood, of the moment we split away from the "body of the world" and entered the "prison of language", what Lacan has called the "symbolic order", with its sharp divisions and categorisations, ruthless abstractions, rigid grammar, and deeply embedded prejudices and taboos? Is it true, as some have claimed, that the silent technique of Pantomime, once described as "the music of the soul", can recover for us, even fleetingly, that sense of wholeness, of oneness with the world, and briefly dispel the feeling of alienation, of a terrible "lack" (again Lacan's word) somewhere, which sets in as we grow up into language? But Mime has also a political significance. With the advance of capitalism and patriarchy, the "word" was claimed as the property of the powerful and language became a site of conflict for supremacy and a tool of oppression, deceit and rigid class/gender/ethnic/religious distinctions. For the voiceless masses -- women, children, slaves and minorities -- there was only one language left: the language of silence. Mime became the heritage of the poor and oppressed, their only means of artistic expression and a form of silent resistance. No wonder the most famous characters created by the greatest masters of this art -- Gaspard Batiste Deburau's "Pierrot" and Marcel Marceau's "Bip" on stage, and Charlie Chaplin's tramps and Buster Keaton's little men in silent movies -- were all downtrodden people who could sometimes win, but always ended up at the bottom of the ladder. Silence is of the essence of the art of mime, or, rather, as someone once said, "the true being of mime". Far from being a negative state, an absence of language, it is considered by this art's philosophers as a creative field of energy where body language can flourish and modes of intuitive knowledge, expression and communication can be achieved. As the champions of this art often claim, we can better communicate in silence and movement than in words. Etienne Decroux, the great theoretician, psychologist and master of mime was called "the apostle of silence", and Samuel Avital, who is the present direct link to the great mime teachers of the 20th century christened his mime school in Boulder, Colorado, Le Centre du Silence. He is quoted to have said in a lecture that though '"In the beginning was the word", before the word there was vibration, movement and silence -- "the source of all life". He also said: "In the age of noise we live in, it is sometimes wise to listen to what silence has to tell us." For Aristotle, however, the father of dramatic theory who, one has to remember, relegated "spectacle" to the end of his list of the elements of drama, arguing that performance was not an essential requirement for its enjoyment or fulfilment, "silence" was a negative state, denoting submissiveness and lowly status -- a virtue only when observed by women. In his all-hallowed Poetics we read: "Silence is a woman's glory, but not the glory of a man." It follows that, as a theatre woman, I have to love mime, and I do, but not for Aristotle's reasons; it was the only language my earliest ancestresses were allowed to speak. In Feminism and Theatre, Sue-Ellen Case shows how the "first women playwrights created in the medium their cultures allowed them -- the language of the body", and adds: "These were the women mimes who performed in the market places, the streets and before the theatres in classical Greek and Rome. Their theatre tradition was a silent one, consisting of physical dramatic invention. Their bodies were the sites of their texts." At Al-Saqia's mime festival, I was happy to discover some of the descendants of those ancient female mimes. Rania Rif'at, a trained lawyer, who came second in Al-Saqia's statue-mime/live mannequin contest last month and won the best female performer award in this festival, is one of them, and she seemed to emphasise the link by choosing female oppression as her theme. Her Al-Saginah (The Prisoner), which she devised and acted, showed a veiled woman, all in black, guarded by a man, who first ties her hands, then thrusts a huge hood over her head, labelled in front "prisoner" and at the back "female". Two movement sequences follow: the prisoner struggling hard to break free and finally succeeding, and the woman, in a white dress, having cast off the veil and hood, her long hair streaming down her back, washing herself and whirling in a soft pool of light. The performance ends with the jailer reappearing, and the woman facing him bravely in a posture of defiance. The battle is not yet finally won and struggle will go on. Obviously, such a performance, which incorporates props, costumes, music and lighting effects, belongs more to physical or movement theatre than to mime. And, indeed, only two performances in this festival, Mohamed El-Sa'idi's Action, which scooped the best performance award, and Amr El-Amrousi's Al-Lu'ba (The Game), which won second best performance, could strictly qualify as mime. Mime, however, is a diversified discipline and both artists used a blend of many styles, fusing elements from the three main schools of mime which, according to Annette Lust (in her very informative book From the Greek Mimes to Marcel Marceau and Beyond: Mimes, Actors, Pierrots and Clowns: A Chronicle of the Many Visages of Mime in the Theatre ) were developed in Europe, in the 20th century by Decroux, Marceau and Lecoq: the common whiteface illusion mime (which portrays concrete emotions and situations by means of conventional, stylized, gestures), corporeal mime (which expresses abstract and universal ideas and emotions through codified movements of the entire body), and Lecoq's movement theatre which combines acting, dance, and clowning with movement). Of the two, El-Sa'idi, in black and white, with suspenders, white gloves and white face paint, looked more like the traditional illusion pantomimist, only he didn't use conventional or symbolic gestures to create illusions of objects or persons, as El-Amrousi did, to a certain extent, in The Game, albeit without the familiar iconic signs of the conventional mime. Lugging a large, checked, black and white drum and carrying a smaller one, of the darabukka type, under his arm and a canvas bag slung over his shoulder, El-Sa'idi kept taking one hat out of the bag after another, trying it on and prancing about, or beating his drum, in tune to the music, then falling backwards with flailing arms and splayed legs. Each headgear symbolised a phase in modern Egyptian history, with the officer's cap finally sweeping all aside. But even this military cap proves too burdensome to support for long, and finally, this naïve, confused, overburdened and helpless figure, a symbol of the typical Egyptian citizen down history, decides to replace his head with the darabukka. Obviously inspired by the late Mansour Mohamed's groundbreaking mime-and-dance show back in the early 1990s, also called The Game, El-Amrousi's contribution featured a reclining young man flipping through television channels and faced with an assortment of figures all impersonated by El-Amrousi, in a variety of costumes, in total silence, save for the sound effects he himself vocally produced . The persistent contrast between the inertia of the supine figure who seems in control, and the ceaseless activity of El-Amrousi which is involuntarily set in motion and abruptly terminated at the flick of a button, eventually generates the idea of relentless oppression. Oppression kept surfacing again and again, in a variety of forms, in this festival. Samaa Ibrahim's Ahlam Sa'ida (Happy Dreams) was far from happy and a visual metaphor for the nearest thing to a nightmare. It showed a girl in black, chased by the light, which seems determined to trap and frame her. It began in total darkness, with Samaa hiding in the auditorium before being surprised by the light. A curious contrast to Rania Rif'at's Prisoner ; whereas one sought out the light, the other craved the darkness of anonymity. This leads one to reflect on the paradoxical nature of light, both as a God-given gift and symbol of life, birth and freedom, and as a man-made, artificial intruder into one's privacy and symbol of society's reluctance to leave the individual alone. Once framed in a box of light, against her will, and despite all her efforts to elude it, Samaa loses her natural movements and acts like a robot. The idea is here incorporated in the mime work, as Decroux, the theoretician of "the art of silence" has prescribed. I wish I could say the same for Hebatallah Ali's Nino Yabhath 'an Badilou (Nino Searches for his Substitute). Dressed and made up to look like the typical circus clown, complete with auburn wig and artificial red nose, and relying heavily on a musical collage, she seemed quite at a loss what to do next. Having won the top masquerading prizes in the buffoons and statue-mime contests at Al-Saqia this year, she did not seem to have advanced an inch further along the road to true mummery. Of the rest of the shows in the festival, only the following are worth mentioning: Ahmed Fouad's Al-Mashnaqah (The Gallows), which consisted mostly of the choreographed movements of bare hands and feet, seen on top, underneath, and on the sides of a small screen stretched across the stage, and dotted with hangman's nooses waiting for their hooded victims, symbolised by a crouching figure at the foot of the stage, at audience level; Midhat 'Irian's Al-Qalib (The Mould), featuring a man in white desperately resisting being incarcerated inside a box; Ahmad Abdallah's rather sentimental Muftaraq Turuq (Cross Roads) which argues in a feeble, naturalistic way, movement-wise, that all romances break down on the rock of marriage; Walid Atef Sayed's Al-Yom Al-Khamis, which features a man trying hard to shake off his reflection in the mirror which obstinately dogs him, destroying his sense of identity, but which has left us wondering about the meaning of the title; and Mohamed Abdallah's Matloub Anisah (Young Female Required), a traditional comic sketch, minus words, very much in the vaudeville tradition, which satirises the job market and uses drag as a major comic device. How many shows have I mentioned so far? Most I suppose. The ones left out are not worth remembering. Still, though this festival fell far short of fulfilling the full potential of mime, both philosophically and politically, and though it seemed at times to think that mime consisted in nothing but the ousting of words and replacing them with sign language, throwing all aesthetic values to the winds, it was, nevertheless a movement in the right direction and a graphic declaration that mime was the art of the oppressed and marginalised.
