Rania Khallaf attends several performances in the first week of Cairo's biggest dance event The 11th Egyptian International Modern Dance festival kicked off last weekend under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture. The event, which will run till 5 July, was officially opened by Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, and organized by the Lebanese choreographer Walid Aouni who chose the simple slogan "Dance and make your heart dance". "What really matters is to contemplate the reasons that lead to our actions rather than the actions themselves," Aouni says. In previous rounds the festival achieved national and international recognition and attracted significant dance companies to Egypt's theatres. The modern dance festival, Aouni adds, is a glance towards "the other", to his world and environment. "We get our knowledge about the other through his body, culture, and history, but it is music that has the ability to connect all these parts together," he says. Over the past 10 years several countries have been invited to join in the festival, including France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the United States and India, with Tunisia as the only Arab guest country. This year, for the first time, a Sudanese modern dance company will take part in the festival with their dance, "The Earth". This year's opening performance, presented at the Goumhuria Theatre on 16 June, was "The Women of Qassem Amin" and was choreographed by Aouni. This show, produced by the Egyptian Modern Dance Company, which is under the supervision of Aouni, was first produced earlier this year and received warm acclaim from the audience and critics alike. Since its theme was the women's emancipation movement in Egypt in the early 20th century and its impact on life in society today, the dance show is faintly in harmony with the festival's slogan. On Saturday came "Second Souffle", presented by the French Pockemon Crew Company at the Goumhuria Theatre. Choreographed by Riyad Fghani, who originally came from Morocco, the performance was given by eight male hip-hop dancers and one female. Hip-hop, which first appeared in the 1970s among the Afro-American and Puerto Rican communities of New York City, spread swiftly through Europe and the rest of the world. The trend made its way to become popular in some Arab countries, especially in Morocco, and Tunisia which are more grounded in and interactive with Western culture than most other parts of the Arab world. In the first scene of the "Second Souffle", all the male dancers came on stage wearing black trousers and white shirts. They started rocking the stage from the very first moment until the woman appeared center stage with gestures that portrayed a somewhat helpless attempt to cool their obvious anxiety. Throughout the hour-long show the men danced in a state of confusion and depression. When the woman appeared on the stage, however, a strong beam of light appeared on the back projection screen, a reference to the effect of woman in the life of man and in society in general. Although the female played a marginal role, continually disappearing from the scene, whenever she appeared she infused the stage and the movements and rhythm of the male dancers with life. The choreography of the dance depended heavily on hip-hop rhythms and used the genre as a means to convey a message about the fast-changing rhythm of life today. In one of these fantasy scenes, the back screen showed skyscrapers before which the dancers appeared wearing shirts in various bright colours, and this time they danced with enthusiasm and humor. In the next scene, however, the screen featured statistics, numbers and figures of accumulated dollars, as well as information on Dow Jones indicators. The dancers themselves, although they represented different cultures, were now all smartly dressed in business suits as if they worked in bank, and they all exuded emotions of extreme tension. The final scene featured the dancers apparently almost lifeless, lying prostrate on the floor, occasionally rolling from the stage into the wings. The female dancer again tried to wake them. They evidently had a pulse, so there was hope for change or a rebirth of a new world community. The first two Egyptian performances in this year's festival schedule were presented consecutively on Sunday night. "Adrenaline" was choreographed and presented by Salah El-Boroughi at the Opera House's Small Hall, while "Black Balloon" was choreographed and presented by Amr Abdel-Aziz in the Opera House's Open Air Theatre. "Adrenaline" was a one-man performance by Boroughi, who appeared alone on the bare stage to dance, half naked, in and out of the beam of a spotlight. Boroughi masters his posture so efficiently, and his movements so resemble those of the Sufi zikr (rhythmic chant) , that they express an inner call from a lonely and desperate human being trying to communicate with a higher power, be it within his curious and confused body or outside it. The performance, just short of 25 minutes long, was accompanied by strains of magnificent Asian music that added a surreal flavor to an already exotic show. A more effective factor was Boroughi's humming, which helped enhance his own suffering and his body's unwavering desire to escape to another world or remove a weight from his soul, mind and body only through dance. Born in 1984, Boroughi began his dance career with the Reda Folk Dance Company before enrolling in the Modern Dance School, from where he graduated in 2006 to become a soloist with the Opera House Modern Dance Company. He now dances with the Akram Khan Company in London and choreographed "Adrenaline" in 2009. It is his second solo production, and he has travelled with the dance to several international festivals including the Beirut International Platform of Dance and the Festival Les Hivernales d'Avignon in France. The "Black Balloon" by contrast was disappointing, a half-hour dance based on a pantomime-theme and featuring the contradictory moments in the life of a mime artist and the conflict between his black suit and his white- painted face; his joy and sadness; and his confusion and loneliness. The rhythm of the show was much too slow, as were the movements of the artist's own body which could hardly be said to be dancing. The performance was a very pale shadow of a dance, and did not move any emotions in the hearts and minds of the audience, who aspire to watch more interesting shows in the days to come.
