Nehad Selaiha finds a lot to applaud in the first theatre festival for female directors On 10 June, a theatre festival for women directors, the first ever to be held in Egypt, opened at the Fatma Rushdi Floating Theatre in Giza, at the tip of Kobri El-Gamaa (university bridge). The event, which lasted for 8 days, was sponsored by the Cultural Palaces Organisation as part of a laudable drive to dispel the gloom that has settled over the fringe and provincial theatre since the Beni Sweif tragedy and provide the huge army of amateur, professional and semi-professional artists and writers who continue to believe in it and selflessly serve it with a fresh impetus, new challenges and some hope. It is true that most of the spaces owned by this vast and vitally important cultural establishment are still closed pending having them secured against fire hazards, that its former major Cairene venue in Agouza, El-Samer Theatre, which was pulled down years ago has not yet been rebuilt (its beautiful site facing the Nile stands derelict, a vermin-infested rubbish dump fenced in with garish billboards), and that to mount any theatrical event, be it a small production or a big festival, the new head of the organisation, Ahmed Nawwar, has to beg around and be grateful for anything he can get, however unsuitable or shabbily equipped. Nevertheless, Nawwar and his new team of artistic assistants, led by poet, writer and critic Mahmoud Nessim, seem determined that however grievous and irreparable the loss at Beni Sweif has been, the show must go on and the wheel has to start turning once more. Since Nawwar has taken office one senses a gradual awakening of enthusiasm, a shy but palpable optimism. In the few past months, dozens of new projects have sprouted up and down the country, including a string of new productions of varying sizes, staged in borrowed or improvised, makeshift spaces, a few small regional festivals and some workshops, the most exciting of which is one currently conducted in Alexandria to provide technical training for close on 50 young female theatre-makers. Still, after Beni Sweif, a major festival in the capital was definitely needed, it was felt; it would be a positive statement, a new declaration of hope and a big morale-booster. But why one solely dedicated to female directors?, many wondered, including women. What has gender got to do with theatre, art, or creativity in general? In the daily roundtables and discussions held during the festival this question kept cropping up and was debated over and over again, provoking widely divergent responses and by the end the festival it had developed into a violently controversial issue. Some accused the festival organizers of discrimination against women; others against men; some welcomed it as a positive political act intended to empower female creative artists and give them their proper place on the historical theatrical map; others, particularly women, resented it as a fulsome condescension, a calculated chauvinist move to bracket off women directors as a minority, and an insignificant one at that, place them in a glittering, well-publicised and widely celebrated ghetto, and consign them to an inferior place in the chronicles of history and the hierarchy of artistic and cultural value. But apart from such deeply contested concepts as the nature of female creativity, its relation to female biology and experience, and any gender-specific aesthetics that may exist -- concepts which I do not think will ever be finally resolved but will continue to generate exciting explorations of self, sex and society (and therein lies their value) -- those heated, ardent discussions brought people, male and female, together and produced more intimate revelations, cathartic confessions and moments of recognition than Aristotle could have ever dreamed of. As Marwa Farouk, a slim, tall, dark young woman from Menya, in Upper Egypt, spoke to us of her daily struggle in a highly conservative, fiercely repressive parochial community to guard her own integrity and independence as woman, person and artist, she seemed to be reciting a well-known script and summing up the problems of women artists in Egypt, perhaps in the whole Third World, past and present. It is a depressing scenario which explains why we have such few female playwrights, directors and stage-designers, why women have always opted for acting as the safest way to indulge their passion for theatre and why the few of them who dared step into the director's seat never produced more than a handful of experiments. As I listened to Marwa Farouk, Samaa Ibrahim, Effat Yehya, Abeer Lutfi, Batoul Arafa, Abeer Ali, Amira Shawqi, Reem Higab, Mona Abu-Sedeira and many others -- women of different ages, backgrounds and world views, but all bubbling with rebellious energy and defiant enthusiasm, I remembered Leila Abu-Seif and Leila Saad who suddenly opted out after a glowing start in the 1970s, Zeinab Shumais, a wonderfully promising director in the 1980s who seems to have melted into thin air, and Huda Sha'rawi who has sold out to patriarchy in order to be able to continue and ended up being allowed to stage only low-cost productions every five or eight years. When Effat Yehya stoutly declared that, now, at the age of 40, having invested twenty years of her life in independent theatre-making, she would never advise any woman to embark on such a fruitless course, I felt a lump in my throat and something tugging at my heart. Much as she loves children (she always works with them in-between projects) and would have loved to have a family, Effat has had to sacrifice this in the pursuit of her seductive theatrical visions. While a man is allowed to do this and still fulfill himself as husband and father, a woman is not. How many of the 30 hopeful young female directors who initially wanted to take part in this festival, or, indeed, or the 12 who were chosen by the selection committee and were allowed to perform in the festival, would be in existence a few years from now was a far more important concern to me than any ruminations over the "be or not to be" of gender-specific aesthetic discussions. In the preface to his book Performance, Marvin Carlson spoke of a "major shift in many cultural fields from the what of culture to the how, from the accumulation of social, cultural, psychological, political or linguistic data to a consideration of how this material is created, valorized and changed,... and operates within the culture by its actions"; in other words, that the meaning of culture has now to be "sought in its praxis, its performance." And though I do not think that we have as yet honestly encompassed and verified the "social, cultural, psychological, political or linguistic data" of our culture in its historical march and seem adamantly reluctant to trace its effects on the lifestyle and thought processes of women and, indeed, men (such a long way to go, someone disconsolately said), each of the 12 performances I watched last week, seemed like historical documents, fragments of hidden, forgotten records that indirectly speak of all the cultural tensions and compromises that interpellate and insidiously control cultural production in Egypt today. In what conditions do Egyptian artists, women or men, work? What cultural and material influences unconsciously direct their courses, and how much knowledge and technical know-how is accessible to them seemed the crucial questions this festival posed. Reception, according to the experts of this theory, is invariably controlled by one's horizon of expectations. And in the case of this festival, I found myself invariably looking, not for the usual artistic qualities I love in theatre -- a hangover from my patriarchal upbringing and academic training -- but for what the performance could tell me, in praxis, about my culture and position as an Egyptian woman in today's world. Instead of the usual criteria, I found myself evaluating shows by the amount of anxiety and degree of existential, rather than dramatic tension they provoked in me. Except for the shows which safely opted for classical, foreign or local texts -- like Batoul Arafa's well-disciplined production of Albert Camus' Le malentendu , Safaa Alameldin's intelligently abridged version of Salah Abdel-Sabour's Musafir Leil (Night Traveller), Mona Abu-Sedeira's rambling rearrangement of Naguib Sorour's Kalimat Mutaqati'a (Crosswords), or Amira Kamel's tedious rendering of Mustafa Saad's Leeh, Ma'rafsh (Why? I Don't Know) -- Nora Amin's Risala ila Abi (A Message to My Father), Marwa Farouq's Kharbasha (Scratchings) and Samaa Ibrahim's Shereet Ahmar (Red Tape) were original compositions by their directors while Amira Shawqi's Shahed 'Ayan (Eyewitness), based on a text by the Spanish Alfonso Sastri, Reem Higab's 'Ardahal (Case Statement), and Abeer Ali's Hakawi El-Haramlek (Tales of the Harem) were collectively devised, scripted and constructed and therefore displayed definite "out-of-the-establishment" traits and a positive delight in the marginal and fragmentary. Whatever the artistic quality of the show, and whether I liked it or not, I found myself invariably challenged to view these productions from a different angle, as a feminist, student of culture or ham social historian, and in every case the rewards were immense. Every performance in this festival seemed to challenge our basic assumptions and values about what constitutes art and beauty and to carry in every detail traces of the story of its production and of the underlying ideological and historical processes and pressures which have contributed to shape it. And, finally: holding a festival for women directors at a theatre which carries the name of a great actress who founded her own company in 1927, was proclaimed in her day "the Sarah Bernhardt of the East" and for whom Ahmed Shawqi, the poet laureate at that time, especially penned his poetic tragedy Masra' (The Death of) Cleopatra in imitation of Shakespeare, would have seemed a perfect choice had it not been for the mosquitoes. To make this idyllically situated open-air theatre operable throughout the year, Ashraf Zaki, the new head of the State-Theatre Organisation, had it roofed over with a fixed plastic and metal tent which stops one meter above the original auditorium sidewalls to provide ventilation. The end result of this ingenious plan was shutting off the cool Nile breeze (the major attraction of this venue in summer) and creating a veritable trap for mosquitoes, or, rather, for the hapless audience who happen to be caught there. For eight whole nights (the duration of the festival), those blood-sucking pests seemed to infest the vast, beautifully tiered auditorium which rises from the Nile upward to the lovely garden outside and fight with the actors for the attention of the poor, beleaguered, ruthlessly bitten spectators. And while this farcical vampirish dance went on in the auditorium, the artists and technicians had to nightly wrestle with the theatre's poor and antiquated sound and lighting systems and the dismal conditions backstage. But beggars can't be choosers and compared to some of the spaces provincial artists and independent groups are often forced to put up with, Fatma Rushdi seemed a vast improvement. No wonder that every time I stepped into that auditorium an old Egyptian adage kept flashing through my head: "a clever woman," it boasts, "can spin with the hoof of a donkey". Right; but for how long.
