At the 5eme Festival des Jeunes Createurs (11-18 Jan), Nehad Selaiha watches young artists struggling to make sense of the world What do people smitten with an all-consuming passion for theatre and no feasible outlet do? Latifa Fahmi, the head of the cultural activities department at the Centre Français de Culture et de Cooperation du Caire (CFCC), is one such person. She tried acting for a spell, appearing in a few plays at Al-Tali'a theatre, including a delightful production of Fernando Arrabal's antiwar satire Picnic on the Battlefield. She soon realised, however, that it took more than just talent, dedication and rigorous discipline to get ahead in this profession and do the kind of theatre you want. Nothing that was realistically on offer seemed to quell her thirst and, inevitably, the slovenly conditions of work appalled her. But though she opted out of acting at an early stage, her love for theatre continued to smoulder inside her. Through her job as cultural programmer, she was able to get a lot of satisfaction hosting Egyptian and foreign performers and assisting young theatre-makers and many critics to attend the prestigious Avignon theatre festival. Then, five years ago, in a moment of sudden inspiration, she discovered that the best way she could serve the art she loved and constructively channel her pent-up theatrical energies was to support young theatre-makers in a more systematic way, to give them the kind of help she sorely missed as a young, struggling artist, and provide for them regular opportunities to freely air their talents and get the needed media coverage. An annual theatre festival for young artists was the formula Latifa hit on, and her Festival des Jeunes Createurs was launched five years ago, attracting hordes of budding, aspiring theatre makers. It is amazing how much theatrical talent, in different stages of formation and maturity, this annual event has brought to the surface. Latifa herself was truly surprised by the scores of applications she received once the event was announced. She would have loved to stage them all, but logistical considerations led her to form a selection committee of experts to help her sift through what struck her as a real avalanche of fiche-techniques, videotapes and offers of live performances. Harking back to earlier experiences and remembering the shabby, sordid treatment young artists usually got in professional, mainstream theatre, Latifa Fahmi made it a point of honour to get for her young participants some of the most illustrious, respectable names in the profession, as both selection team and jury. The four previous sessions of Latifa's festival were extensively covered on this page, and if you care to consult them, you will realise how much heart-rending effort has gone into making them a reality and how valuable this festival has been in monitoring the emotional pulse and mental directions of a substantial segment of the nation's youths. You will also realise how I invariably came away from it with a paradoxical mixture of wonder and dismay. For five years, Latifa Fahmi has been providing space and time for lively encounters between performers and audiences, and what do we get? Grim readings of reality, visions of fragmented selves, poignantly absurd utopian longings and nightmarish dreams. Out of over 60 applicants, dance professor Maya Selim and theatre director Isam El-Sayed, who made up the selection committee for this year's festival, had to pick seven. They chose the best, of course; but was it just a coincidence that most of them harped on the theme of death in different variations and none of them, even the most hilarious, carried the slightest ray of hope? What's come over our young people? I kept wondering every night as I was bombarded with one volley of bleak images after another. But for the sheer physical energy of the performers, some flashes of real beauty, some glimpses of true talent, albeit half-baked, and a certain ring of defiance that came to the surface every now and then, my spirits would have sunk beyond recovery. All the shows reflected a dismal postmodernist sensibility shorn of any supportive ideological systems and battened on a nihilistic, sardonic dismissal of questions of value. All the symptoms of the postmodernist spiritual malaise were there -- fragmentation, de-centring, irony, senseless repetition and outrageous parody. The inaugural show was emblematic of this mood and the whole mental drift of the festival. Qabil lil Kasr: Al- 'Aberoon 2 ( Fragile: Les Passagers 2 ), conceived and directed by Omar Ghayatt and his Studio Moroni group (they had won the best production award -- 'le grand prix' -- in the third and fourth rounds of the festival) was a dreary theatrical rendering, conducted in near total darkness and choked in clouds of smoke, of Albert Camus' Mythe de Sisyphe. The vanity of human life, of all toil and labour, of all hopes and dreams, and the basic absurdity of existence were the focal themes and unfolded, to the music of Maxime Dunuc and Goran Bregovic, in a series of disconnected, surrealistic images which kept rotating and included: a body dancing on the edge of a grave, or trying to break free of a semi-transparent, white cocoon (wistfully performed by the enchanting Dalia El-Abd), men and women with square boxes for heads who move like robots and keep bumping into each other blindly (Deya Helmy, Sekina, Philippe and Root), a man who is repeatedly shot only to spring back to life again, and another (Emad Isma'il) who sits at a low table ( tabliyya ) working a traditional vegetable chopper ( makhrata ), as if eternally doomed to chop mulukhiyya (Jew's marrow). Summing up his show in the festival's brochure, Ghayatt says: "the mill of time grinds on; he lives his life contentedly, obeying the rules of society until one day he perceives the absurdity of existence and its relentless march towards death." When some days later Ghayatt came to thank me for my Arabic translation of Nick Kay's book Postmodernism and Performance, I knew where he had got his inspiration and why his show had struck me as disturbingly déjà-vu -- affectedly calculated. Ramad Mushta'il ( Embers, or Sous le Brasier, la Cendre ), by a new group called Artiste, was slightly reminiscent of Beckett's monodrama Act Without Words, except that here we had two actors or, rather, dancers -- instead of Beckett's one. The visual metaphor of trying to organise the world and make sense of life by arranging different-sized blocks on top of each other in such a way that they would not fall down and being thwarted every time was prominent. Beyond this idea, however, the show, which reportedly, according to its creator and director Ahmed Hisham, intended to explore the struggle for supremacy and dominance through the possession of science and technology, amounted to no more than a wrestling match between two competent dancers over who will prove to have more stamina and endurance and sustain more rough and dangerous wrenches and falls. Both Fragile and Embers were silent, except for a few meaningless words in the former, played more for their aural effect than their sense. It was, therefore, quite a relief to find language restored to the stage on the third day; and not any language, mind you, but real poetry. Horriyyati (My Freedom, or, Ma Liberté) featured a young man, strung up on a rope by the neck, with both his hands and feet tied to other ropes by invisible forces, and constantly spouting off lines from Amal Dunqul's famous poem Spartacus, the choral prologue of Mahmoud Diab's play, Bab Al-Fotooh (Conquerors' Gate), and excerpts from various works by Naguib Sorour. It was an effective theatrical metaphor which would have worked quite well had it only lasted for five minutes. To drag it on to 35 could only stretch it too thin, making it seem like embarrassing emotional wallowing, and force one's thoughts to stray in the direction of Saddam Hussein's recent controversial hanging. Horriyyati, however, managed to scoop the best award for music and songs, thanks to composer Mohamed Rashad. Poetry fared better in Salah Abdel-Sabour's Musafir Leil (Night Traveller, or, Voyageur Nocturne), adapted, designed and directed by Khaled Hassanein, and performed by his Karakeeb (Junk) troupe. Here, Mohamed Shaaban as the traveller, Khaled Kamal as the murderous train-conductor, the symbol of all tyrants past and present, and Ahmed Tawfik and Basma Maher as the helpless chorus who are finally terrorised into becoming colluders in the tyrant's crimes, delivered Abdel-Sabour's lines with clarity, understanding and the right amount of feeling. Together, they managed to bring out the macabre comedy and grotesque brutality latent in this tragic political satire with admirable finesse and substantial force. For their labours, the play won the awards for best director and best actor (jointly between Shaaban and Kamal). Compared to Night Traveller, Sartre Huis Clos, in an adumbrated version by the group Sotouh (which could mean roofs, terraces, or surfaces) seemed a pallid, and tediously ponderous ham affair. It was obvious the actors -- Ahmed Tawfiq, Fatma Ibrahim, Nadine Emile and Mohamed Mustafa -- were embarrassed by the lesbian theme central to the conflict and did not know how to handle it. El-Gaw Gamil (Lovely Weather, or Beau Temps), an adaptation of a play called A Rich One and Three Poor, or so I think, since I have failed to trace either the play or its author, Jean Louis Calvert, according to the notice in the festival's brochure, was quite a relief after Sotouh's No Exit. I had watched it some months ago at Al-Falaki Studio theatre of the AUC and thought it a cheeky, delightful theatrical prank with some depth to it. Made up of a number of sketches featuring four figures, two men and two women, impersonating different characters, in different situations (very ordinary and quite mundane) in the course of a single 'fine' day -- a pampered, rich woman (Nadine El-Kashef), and three less fortunate humans (Akram Abdel-Aziz, Sherif Madkour and Noha Al-Ostaz) -- the play bubbles with acrid humour and sour fun. With the help of a few mobile white screens and some portable blocks, the cast was able to change mood and scene in the flicker of an eye, thanks to Hala Emam's stage-design. Adaptor and director Nada Sabet, in the true style of a postmodernist, managed to level everything, taking television, where detergents and shampoo commercials are slotted side by side with footage of hair-raising massacres and bloody conflicts, as her model. Towards the end, she nearly drowns her actors, and the audience, in a crazy medley of video images -- ranging from chat shows, old movies, soap operas, news bulletins and documentaries to insipid commercials -- which leaves one literally out of breath and reeling. For its light- hearted ruthlessness in projecting the chaos we now call reality, El-Gaw Gamil -- a blatant misnomer, if there is any -- won the special jury award, plus best actress, which went to the irrepressible, highly versatile Noha Al-Ostaz. On the last day, however, or, rather the day before the final ceremony and the announcement of the awards, we were in for a real surprise -- a show that seemed spun out of flickering golden rays and silvery silhouettes. Al-Samt Al-Abyad (White Silence, or, Un Moment de Pure Silence), spun out of Crista Wolf's Cassandre and Jean-Paul Sartre's Troyennes, his adaptation of Euripides's Trojan Women, by the Katja and Assem Dance group, conceived, choreographed, designed and performed by Katja Bosmass and Assem Rady, with music by the Elle group and the contribution of dancer Khaled El-Masry, was literally breath- taking. Dressed in black, with only black curtains around them and two chairs for props, the three dancers probed our memories deeply, using body language, covering a whole gamut of emotions and vividly recapturing our moments of hope, terror, expectation and sorrow. Assem's lighting plan, together with the music and the eloquent stretches of silence, sensitively orchestrated the visual and emotional flow of the show. As Katja stretched her hand tentatively up towards the light, then was summarily blacked out, I felt something burning in my mind. I remembered Peter Brook's words, in The Empty Space, when he asked: "When a performance is over, what remains?" Then answered: "When emotion and argument are harnessed to a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself -- then something in the mind burns. The event scorches on to the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell -- a picture. It is the play's central image that remains, its silhouette, and if the elements are highly blended this silhouette will be its meaning, this shape will be the essence of what it has to say." I doubt if I shall ever forget frail Katja reaching out falteringly to the light and suddenly being eclipsed. That White Silence garnered the awards for best female dancer, best male dancer (jointly) and best scenography; le grand prix for best production was no surprise to me.
