Following her overview of the Festival for Women Directors last week, Nehad Selaiha reflects on some of the artistic fare at that event I was delighted but a bit worried when I heard that would open the Cultural Palaces' Festival for Women Directors at the Fatma Rushdi Floating Theatre on 10 June. The decision was made by the festival's five-member selection committee following 13 days of rushing round Cairo and its suburbs and travelling to Alexandria, Fayoum and Menya to sift through and choose the best from among the works of the 30 female directors who had applied to take part in the event as soon as the announcement was made. It was an exhausting itinerary, particularly the trip to Upper Egypt in this heat, and one wonders if it was at all necessary, if the festival wouldn't have been far richer and truer to its nature as a forum for women, a political move intended to empower them, had it disposed of this business of "selection" and allowed everyone to participate, even if this entailed extending the time allotted for the event a few more days and coughing up a little more of the taxpayers' money. Another negative aspect, in my view, was casting the event in the inherently male-form of a contest and having women creators wrestle for prizes (as males are fond of doing) rather than share experiences and draw strength from each other. But this was only to be expected, perhaps, since the organisers of the festival were all men; significantly, both the selection committee and panel of jurists had only one female member each. As it turned out, only 22 productions out of the original 30 were ready for viewing, and out of these only 13 met the committee's artistic requirements. Of these the committee judged that Ghorba was the most sophisticated and technically polished and, therefore, the fittest for the opening night. I had watched the play a week before the festival at the American University in Cairo's Falaki Studio and liked it as much as the committee did. Against a flimsy, low geometrical structure of intersecting wooden poles designed by Nagui Shakir and sensitively lit by Layla Sami, and a vaguely nostalgic, lute- based musical score by Mustafa Saad, finely interlaced and regulated by the rhythms of percussionist Shams, Ghorba unfolds like a musical composition made of densely textured variations, in the form of lyrical, confessional monologues and brief dialogic sketches, on the theme of loneliness. How to break through the siege of self and circumstances and relate to parents, children, the other sex and the dominant socio-moral codes is the irking question at the heart of the show. At every step, in every scene, the fears, anxieties and anguished doubts which surround and often preempt this attempt are vividly and economically bodied forth and shot through with comedy. As the four performers (Yara Gobran, Farah Youssef, Aser Yassin and Hani Seif) thread their way into the cramped spaces outlined by Nagui Shakir's at once pathetically frail and forbiddingly rigid design, they successively take on the many intriguing characters they had put together in Suliman's workshop over weeks of improvisation and material-gathering. Those characters which Suliman formally arranged and verbally scripted in the final stage of the workshop feature a young, unmarried mother who has lost her baby and comforts herself with an empty, tiny rocking chair while narrating in a whisper her harrowing experience at the maternity hospital; the daughter of a professional prostitute who spent her childhood and teens moving from one "uncle's house" to another's and could only feel secure when she stuck her head into the washing machine; a daughter trying to break free from the crippling grip of her sick father and his voracious demands for love and attention; a young homosexual who wants to get away with his partner to escape society's wrath and make a life for himself and his mother who desperately tries to fend off his attempts to tell her what she already suspects and is divided between feelings of repulsion, anger and profound, protective love (the evasive dialogue in this scene is a real dramatic treat); a young prostitute who tries to seduce a foreigner, represented by the naked upper half of a wooden male dummy, and goes to ridiculous extremes of self debasement in the process; a confused, sexually frustrated and guilt-ridden young man who, as the netted cap he wears indicates, seems on the verge of joining some extremist Islamic group in search of salvation; and a lovable, hilariously extroverted, low-middle class artisan who regales us with humorous stories of his amorous conquests and displays all the inherited traditional male attitudes about women. Ghorba is definitely worth seeing, but how anyone could have thought that such a delicately spun show, designed for a black box and requiring intimate reception conditions, could work on an almost primitive stage in a vast, semi-open-air amphitheatre quite beats me. No wonder Suliman and her crew took one look at the prospective space and fled away in terror. Suliman's opting out at the last minute, after the first issue of the festival's daily bulletin was printed, sporting photos of Ghorba on its cover, was a humiliating blow which caused an uproar and lots of resentment. How could you expect privileged graduates of the American University in Cairo to leave the safe, rarefied cloisters of the Falaki expensively-equipped spaces to mingle with the rabble, many people sardonically scoffed at the selection committee. It did not help Suliman's defenders that in the festival's commemorative book she had stoutly stated that her cherished ambition was to form a company that could tour everywhere and grapple with real, pressing issues among the people. None of Suliman's virulent critics stopped to think that, faced with a choice between credibility and artistic integrity, she had chosen the latter. It's a great shame and one only hopes that Leila, a highly gifted, imaginative and serious artist will continue to seek a wider audience outside the Falaki Centre. Instead of Ghorba, Amira Shawqi's Shahed 'Ayan (Eyewitness) opened the festival and was quite impressive despite the many technical hitches, particularly where voice was concerned, which dogged this festive occasion. Like nearly half the women directors in this festival, Shawqi provided her own script and performance text. In some instances, though, including Shawqi's Eyewitness, it was a case of writing upon writing, of superimposing a feminist reading on a widely acknowledged and celebrated male text. Alfonso Sastri's The Condemned Squad is a popular play among young theatre-makers off the main stream and has been repeatedly adapted and performed on the fringe. Shawqi's use of Sastri's play, however, has far outstripped all former handlings in audacity and adventurousness. For every male member in Sastre's squad, she imagined a female partner and wrote a parallel text which pictures the plight of women in war times. In her text, one discerns recurrent features in many of the performances presented in this festival: the rejection of traditional dramatic structure -- of a logically-developing linear plot, unfolding in a rising action and ending in a climax; the use of metaphoric situations as starting points then building a dramatic action in the form of horizontal expansions, of revelations and in-depth explorations; the proliferation of narratives, intersecting monologues, violent, erratic exchanges and impassioned explosions at the expense of ordered, rational dramatic dialogue; the predominance of mechanisms of decentring and fragmentation over the drive for focalisation, logical connectedness and formal unity; the heavy dependence on spatial and temporal imaginative leaps and the voyaging through memory in the context of a closed, claustrophobic, threatening location; an overriding sense of collectivity which ignores the traditional hierarchical arrangement of the dramatis personae and gives all the characters equal status and importance; an almost hysterical harping on the themes of waiting, loss and impotence, and an obsessive linking of the intimately personal with the historical and political. Against a neutral white screen which the lighting coloured to suit different moods, Shawqi's six, all black-clad young female performers, each armed with a small wooden chair and four long scarves (white, red, blue and yellow) which they alternately bound round their heads, waists, necks or legs, or spread and waved around, filled the stage with energy, emotion and vitality. The show, however, could have done with less movement and more attention to the vocal aspect of the performance. The quality of the actresses' voice production was deplorable, not to mention the many horrendous mistakes they made in speaking Shawqi's classical Arabic text. Indeed, if it wasn't for the fact that very few young Egyptians nowadays could speak classical Arabic correctly, one would have been tempted to read in the cast's consistent abuse of their classical linguistic heritage a deliberate disruption of the language of patriarchy. In a similar vein, but less adventurous in conception and execution was Mona Abu Sedeira's rewriting of Naguib Sorour's last play Kalimat Mutaqati'a (Crosswords). In print, Sorour's text strikes one as more of a blueprint for a projected work rather than a complete play. It was written in his last days, when he was almost homeless and penniless and lived in a constant alcoholic daze, nursing a persecution complex. The shock of discovering the faithlessness of his beloved wife was compounded by the shock of Egypt's 1967 military defeat against Israel which he saw as a betrayal of the national, socialist dream. Like his wife, his adored Nasser had turned what was once a beautiful vision into a horrible nightmare; and with no faith left to hold on to, Sorour seemed to sink into a dark pit, occasionally surfacing to pen vitriolic denunciations and fiercely, almost scandalously vituperative poems. Crosswords was written in one of those fits and Abu Sedeira's production, though she rearranged the text, introduced new scenes in the interest of topical relevance, and strove to turn the play into a grotesque black satire on the mores and morals of the contemporary artistic world -- indeed, of society at large after globalisation -- stuck faithfully to Sorour's bleak vision, bitter misanthropy and misogynist representation of the female sex. I found this show particularly offensive and could only explain it as a residue of the director's formal training at the theatre institute where Sorour, who studied at the same establishment, has since his death become the icon of the rebellious artist and is venerated like a martyred saint. Fortunately, Batoul Arafa and Safaa 'Alameddin, two other young graduates of the theatre institute, steered clear of Sorour; nevertheless, their choice of texts left one uncomfortable. While the former opted for Albert Camus Le malentendu -- a play about two innkeepers, a mother and daughter, trapped in some godforsaken spot, who, in their attempt to escape their dreary, miserable life, can only think of poisoning their male guests and robbing them and end up killing their only hope for salvation, the absent son and brother they had hoped would return one day -- the latter chose Musafir Leil (Night Traveller), an all-male, verse political allegory of the reign of terror under Nasser by Salah Abdel-Sabour. It was as if both young women had decided to play it safe, avoid all contentious ideological issues, and concentrate on beating male directors at their game and proving their competence as trustworthy, professional theatre- makers; and they did. Everyone admired Batoul's concentrated, well-controlled Too Late, the name she gave her production, and loved its atmospheric music and evocative, quasi-expressionistic set. Particularly effective was the catwalk which sloped upward from the stage, through the auditorium, to a metaphoric sea at the back where the bodies of the two women's victims invariably end up, carried by an aged, ghost-like servant holding a lantern. Likewise, 'Alameddin's compressed version of Abdel-Sabour's verse drama was widely applauded. Making subtle elisions that few could detect, she treated the audience to a taut, uncluttered production in which the exquisite vocal delivery of her actors coupled with austere visual economy foregrounded the poetic text. Two slatted wooden benches, like the ones you see in third- class railway carriages, faced each other on a small, round platform in the middle and were flanked on one side by a suspended, twisting train-track, hanging in mid-air like a vicious serpent, and, on the other, further upstage, by steps leading upwards. 'Alameddin's real and quite remarkable contribution, however, was replacing the original male narrator in tails with a woman in sky- blue evening wear. This made all the difference and gave the play a definite feminist touch. While Abdel-Sabour ends his play with the elegant male narrator/commentator helping the conductor (who represents all tyrants down history) drag the body of the hapless passenger he, the conductor, has arbitrarily tortured and killed, 'Alammeddin has her conductor suddenly climb up the steps at the back, where the female narrator stands, to ask for her ticket. He had done the same thing with the dead passenger at the beginning and his action here clearly indicates that the female narrator would be his next victim. Throughout, the female narrator, whose first appearance is ironically accompanied by the opening strains of Rimsky Korsakov's Scheherazade, acts as a detached spectator, staying firmly outside the circle of political conflict. Her passivity, however, does not save her. That women can no longer afford to look on passively at the tragic follies and crimes of the male world and have to cast off their fripperies and take up arms against all oppressors seemed to be the message of the production.
