With all the optimism one can wish for, Hisham Gabr applied for the unoccupied vacancy of Director of the Arts Centre of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Though Cairo-based, he is after all an accomplished conductor and composer who studied in Egypt and France with various renowned figures and made a name for himself at the Cairo Opera House, playing with prestigious international orchestras. Gabr explains how he joined the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. “Like any other official post, I read a newspaper advertisement for the vacancy and I applied, the way many others did. I was informed that I was chosen for the job on the same day I was supposed to leave for the US to attend a programme called ‘Advanced Conducting Techniques' at Cornell University. Understandingly enough, the management decided to wait five months for me to finish my commitments there, and I started three weeks ago as soon as I returned to Egypt.” “The Arts Centre is one of the most significant departments at the Bibliotheca, it supervises all art activities held there: the music section; the orchestra and chorus, the cinema section holding film screenings and seminars; the theatre section that hosts performances and organises festivals and workshops; a school for art education for children and adults teaching ballet, music, drawing (it has collective classes and private classes as well as an amateur orchestra of students, which is supposed to play with the main orchestra once a year); and a separate section for underprivileged children… The Bibliotheca has two theatres: the main hall has 1,700 seats and the small hall 400. The plaza is the open space between the main building and the conference centre, and it's a spacious place that usually hosts the summer festival for a whole month.” Gabr's dedication and experience were enough for him to develop a vision for the Art Centre in these challenging times. “The Art Centre always presented individual performances for the orchestra, chorus and theatre,” he says. “This year I'm willing to implement a plan to present collective performances featuring a mix of opera, orchestra, chorus, actors and singers on stage, and we can use video projection as well, if we can raise the required funds for a grand performance. I believe this will generate satisfying exposure. Using our small divisions in chorus, we can exploit all our resources. When we do individual performances it is not noticeable enough, especially when these performances take place outside Cairo — sometimes just because an event is not held in Cairo, it doesn't gain the required exposure, in spite the fact that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina presents high-quality events.” Regarding the lack of publicity for cultural events at major institutions like the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Cairo Opera House, Gabr says, “It's different at the Cairo Opera House; the Cairo Opera House gathers great talents in terms of musicians and performers, yet its advertising department isn't working efficiently to cope with such talents and promote them as they should be promoted. Before the 25 January Revolution the Cairo Opera House appointed a huge number of people in administrative positions that overloaded its administrative apparatus to the point of complicating the work and slowing its pace.” “The Bibliotheca Alexandrina's real problem, by contrast, is simply that it's in Alexandria, not Cairo. Yet it's a wonderful place for Alexandria, and we need a place like it in every governorate in Egypt. The orchestra concerts in the library are usually fully booked, but still a lot of people have no idea of the happenings in the library, likewise the Planetarium Science Centre receives daily hundreds of child visitors to whose mental development it offers an unequalled experience, yet there are many others who don't know such a place.” “One cannot create a career outside Cairo,” he says about Alexandria-based artists. “For example, most orchestra members are originally from Cairo, they go back and forth between Cairo and Alexandria. As a consequence they have a double life, with a house in each city. They perform in Alexandria but they still have time to work as professors in the Conservatoire in Cairo with their artistic life and career intact. The same is true of theatre actors. Likewise I'm working on two parallel solutions. The first is to assign and exploit talents from Cairo in Alexandria, the second is to strive to form a new generation that appreciates art in Alexandria.” To the latter end Gabr has come with this plan: “The Art Centre this year will give orchestral concerts for children, making arrangements with schools in Alexandria to schedule the students' attendance, forging a link between the child and this type of music.” “I'm eager that a child should eventually learn how the orchestra works and be introduced to musical instruments in an event called ‘The Instrument Fair', hopefully one day a passion will grow between the child and some instrument of interest to them. Romantic as it may seem this is a sustainable idea with cumulative potential that can pay off for some children. I believe that an engineer who learned music and appreciates art will definitely be different from an engineer who doesn't. Art will add to that engineer new mechanisms of creativity.” And indeed the audience's readiness to engage with art is an intriguing factor. “To be honest, I feel the Alexandrian audience is enthusiastic for arts and more dedicated than the Cairo audience. In time if there is a political determination to provide easier access to the arts, altering the concept of art for the elite – though in fact classical music in the whole world is only really for the elite – we might be able to invest in engaging the middle class and giving it more exposure to this kind of art. For the young, the Bibliotheca makes some room for independent music at the main and the small theatres. If we break this thin line connecting us to that type of audience, the result will be horrific, the audience will stay the same and we won't manage to attract a larger audience.” “The geographic problem of Alexandria involves the threat of isolation if you grew comfortable enough with the small group of people you interact with every day. I see this as dangerous for a talented person, I'm assigned to nearly 12 concerts per year, the ballet and opera concerts are each 10 shows, and I only have to be in Cairo for these and their rehearsals. So it's not that time-consuming to work for the Arts Centre and answer other international commitments. It generates exchange and cooperation with world renowned artists through their embassies.” “I have this project with RD [Radio Denmark], which is a gigantic organisation and more significant than just a radio. It has the National Symphony, one of Europe's most significant orchestras. So I made an agreement, not official yet, to swop musicians. It is useful for Egyptian musicians to experience and observe the discipline and dedication in other countries in the world.” Indeed long-term planning for cultural events in Egypt in the past three years was out of question, Gabr says. “Most opera houses around the world, like the Cairo Opera House, have annual schedules. My plan is to implement this for the first year in the Arts Centre — an annual schedule starting from September till next June. Due to the country's circumstances over the last three years, long-term planning at the Cairo Opera House for example was impossible. There were security disturbances especially with the Opera so critically close to Tahrir Square.” “The Bibliotheca Alexandrina location was equally critical with protests setting out from Al-Qa'ed Ibrahim Mosque on Fridays. The university too is right across the street from the library, so they also had real problems concerning security measures, making activities shrink in a noticeable way. They too gave up long-term planning, which affected the popularity of the concerts, especially on Fridays, generally the most popular day. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina offers chances for independent musicians to perform at the library theatres with convenient regulations, much easier for example than regulations at El Sawy Culturewheel. They can perform at the main theatre, offering them a very well equipped stage, and they can take 75 percent of the ticket revenue. We only take 25 percent, which hardly covers the expense of the stage.” “When I started to write the mission of the Arts Centre, I realised that the former director Sherif Mohieddin made many achievements but then he left his position three years ago, directly after the revolution, and the Arts Centre was without a director since then. Bit by bit the system started to collapse. I'm trying to rebuild a system with precise job descriptions for everyone. Declaring the mission of the Arts Centre, which is to encourage local and independent artists by offering them a platform, and to present other performances for them to look up to. The problem of the independent scene in Egypt in my view is that they only watch each other, which compromises their standards. Besides, the Alexandrian audience deserves performances on the same level as in Cairo.” Gabr will always support independent artists at the Arts Centre by “hosting professional performances with a kind of agreement on choosing an Egyptian musician to attend rehearsals with Marcel Khalife for instance, to observe how celebrated musicians deal with the whole process and merge with the professional rhythm. That is essential. The problem of independent artists in Egypt might be concentrated in the fact that they don't have a point of preference. Still they should have a chance for exposure. The revolution created a momentum, it's a positive thing, yet the idea of rebellion against all traditions was a bit too extreme so the standard of quality vanished, which is understandable and positive as well but it's about time the audience did some quality filtering, something that is directly related to the concept of exposure.” “Arts and culture are the first things to be affected by any unrest and the last to be restored,” Gabr concluded, “but with stability the necessary filtering will come about as well. I'm very optimistic regarding the potential of the Arts Centre of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina despite all the challenges we might face. I'm yearning to succeed in implementing my plans and to give the Arts Centre as fulfilling a value as possible.”
