Nehad Selaiha searches for the healing power of theatre on the fringe of the 17th Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre In moments of terrible crises I always turn to theatre for solace and a glimpse of hope. When my husband was fighting for his life at the Gustave Roussy centre for cancer in December 1992, I always rushed to the theatre after hospital hours, often taking long train trips to the outskirts of Paris when I could not afford the ticket prices in downtown theatres. It did not matter what I saw and I rarely noted the artistic quality of the show; what mattered was to be inside a theatre, sitting among a lot of people, albeit all strangers, and watching actors play at fabricating alternative realities. And even though their imaginative fabrications were often far from pleasant or cheering, they were, perhaps by dint of some aesthetic logic and formal order, or simply because they pitched you right inside imagined experiences of suffering other than your own, invariably mercifully cathartic. For an hour or so, I could ignore my terror, the chilling facts of pain and sickness which haunted me throughout the day. The very flimsiness of the pageant on stage, its pathetic transience despite the hustle and bustle, the light and glitter, gave me a strange kind of defiant comfort, like a child sticking out her tongue in a gesture of false bravado at a horrible creeping shadow. Some people thought I was heartless, going nightly to the theatre while my husband lay in hospital. I did not blame them; for them theatre meant simply fun, a form of entertainment and not a last defence line against nothingness as it was for me. Sometimes, in a dimly lighted train winding its way through the guts of Paris, deep under ground, I found myself wondering at this feverish, compulsive urge which drove me mechanically every night in the cold and rain to the theatre. I would lose my sanity if I did not go, perhaps also my weakening grip on life, was all I felt. Years later, on the evening of 11 September, 2001 (which coincided with the closing ceremony of the CIFET, before its opening was shifted to the 20th of that month to avoid the tragic associations of that date), I sat in the auditorium of the main hall of the Opera House in the company of Eugenio Barba (who was among the honorees that year) and Julia Varley who represented the Odin Teatret with her solo performance The Castle of Holstebro. It was an eerie experience; reports and images of the twin towers disaster had been all over the media the whole day, generating wildly divergent, disorienting responses, and the American guests of the festival, including the head of the jury, were in a terrible panic trying to get news of their loved ones back home. Worried sick about my brother who lives in New York, quite close to the towers, and rushing back and forth among the distraught American guests to provide them with what little comfort one could, I nevertheless found myself at the end of the day going to that dismal closing ceremony, which, I kept thinking, should have been cancelled in honour to the victims of that disaster. Physically, however, I was grateful to be inside a theatre with dearly loved friends, even though the event was thoroughly dismal. The applause which greeted the hasty, embarrassed announcement of the winners rang hollow in the half empty hall and was followed by a performance of the Palestinian show which had won the best production award. As the actors emerged from the heaps of crumpled newspapers that filled the stage to give us stories and sketches of daily life in the occupied territories, I found myself hurtled back across the years to those lonely evenings in the theatres of Paris and suddenly realised, with a stunning, shattering clarity, the meaning of a phrase that had dimly shadowed the borders of my consciousness like a miasmic cloud then -- a phrase I had read while studying TS Eliot at university, back in the distant 1960s. What Eliot had described as a "dissociation of sensibility", a rupture between thought and feeling, heart and mind, which he located in 17th Century England as a cultural phenomenon, suddenly took form, striking me as an aching physical/mental experience. Though the senses captured and recorded the formal beauty of the piece, its delicious ironies and grotesquely painful paradoxes, the passion was gone, as if the lines of communication between mind and heart had been broken. In the years that followed, one tried to regain that feeling of integrity of body and mind, of perception and imagination, of the mundanely factual and the teasing dream of a ravishingly beautiful and authentic reality, which makes the essence of the theatrical experience. And despite the many blows, one could always find comfort in the fresh creativity and dedication of young artists -- students and friends you long to protect from the onslaughts of philistinism, bureaucracy and suffocating dictatorship. However dark the hour, or hopeless the prospects, they clung desperately to their faith in a better tomorrow, and this faith gave one the power to continue. To lose one's survival props in one horrible sweep of flames is more than the mind can cope with. It is not natural that the old should survive the young, or that mothers should be condemned to bury their sons and daughters. This bespeaks something unnatural -- a terrible upheaval in the natural order of things. When members of the Writers and Artists for Change (WAC), the Fifth of September Group and Al-Warsha company lobbied for a boycott of the festival at the Press Syndicate on 14 September, l was puzzled and horrified. Given all the CIFET's shortcomings and its off-putting authorial profile, it still remains a valuable meeting point for artists working on the fringe. Most of the groups who come have to work hard to provide the price of air tickets and most of them are as politically and economically beleaguered as our own independent groups. Having taken so much trouble to get here, the foreign groups and scholars, our theatrical kith and kin, deserved an audience. Where theatre was concerned, I told Khalid El-Sawi, the most vociferous spokesman of WAC in the lounge of the Press Syndicate, no one has the right to dictate to anybody what they should do. The artists who had prepared shows and signed financially binding contracts with the state authorities could be taken to court for dissipating public funds if they did not deliver the goods. Conditions of work being as severely debilitating as they are, we didn't need any more victims, I argued. As it turned out, however, all this talk of a boycott proved redundant. Regardless of any governmental machination, including a printed statement supporting the minister of culture, issued by his office and circulated among the foreign guests with a courteous, quasi peremptory plea to sign, or the silent demonstration held outside the Opera House on the opening night, the fact of the matter was that people simply kept away from the festival. And who can blame them? They would have ended up experiencing the same dissociation of sensibility I talked about earlier and finding themselves emotionally alienated and failing to make any real sense of the aesthetic experiences thrust upon them. I wanted to be left to myself, I told Khalid El-Sawi, and would not tolerate any imposition, particularly where theatre was concerned. Disciplined from childhood to do the tasks assigned to me in the name of duty, I went through the rituals of chairing the first session of this CIFET's central seminar, meeting some of the festival's friends, whose sympathy was overwhelming, and putting in an appearance at some of the shows, especially the ones dedicated to the victims of the Beni Sweif fire. As I moved around, I kept looking for the dear faces of lost friends and feeling the taste of dust and ashes in my throat, and the burning smarting of tearless eyes. More painful and mortifying was the feeling of being ashamed of being alive, of not having joined them on their last trip, of having been spared the fire. Weren't we always in the same boat, fighting together against the ravages of blind authority? Why should they leave and I remain? The fire which reduced the Beni Sweif Cultural Palace to a ball of flames has left in its wake a thick pall of dark smoke that has engulfed this year's CIFET. This wicked, devastating fire, however, has ignited a new sense of cultural responsibility among the fringe of Egyptian theatre; no more will they put up with the kind of crass, supercilious treatment and vapid, unfeeling exploitation they have been subjected to over the years. Absence has miraculously become a positive force, inspiring all lovers of theatre to fight for its survival. As I tramped with the mournful Egyptian selection committee among theatres, watching mechanically trotted out shows that seemed to have lost their authentic verve in the Beni Sweif fire, I kept remembering the faces of dead friends and feeling that awful sensation of being split down the middle. At the first session of the central seminar, I looked around, expecting to see Hazem Shehata with his broad, dark forehead deeply furrowed in a thoughtful frown. To try to stem the flood of tears was all I could do. But when Dutch playwright Rob de Graaf spoke, I felt as if his paper had been designed to give me, and all my bereaved colleagues and friends, some comfort. "Theatre will have to claim its position in a world that is dominated by the entertainment industry, by commercialism, by communication that is as quick and as technically advanced as it is fleeting and superficial," he said. "We all know that, apparently, art is of little influence. Entertainment, commerce and even sports are much more powerful when it comes to reaching the masses and, at least at a superficial level, change the face of the world. But art can be a hidden power, not as spectacular as an assault but as effective as a long-term guerrilla. One word, one gesture, one performance can change a spectator's view of the world -- and this in its turn can become the first ripple of a movement that in the end will shake the fundaments," he added. "Theatre should be the alternative," he went on to say, "a parallel world which keeps reminding us what that other world, the one we call reality, may one day look like -- or might once have looked like. It is the power of change. We will invent new words and we'll rediscover the old ones. We won't be afraid to speak about the little we know and we'll be even less afraid to speculate about all that we don't know; we'll make this world more bearable by creating a world of our own." How I longed for Hazem, himself a gifted playwright, to hear those words. I know he would have struck an instantaneous friendship with Rob. What such a friendship could have produced in terms of theatre will remain a teasing conjecture. "But still, theatre will be -- as it has always been -- about loneliness and silence, about the individual who is at a loss towards the forces that surround him. I believe that theatre can only remain of importance if it dares to be simple, if it chooses to be silent where the world is yelling, if it gives us individuals when the world is concerned with masses, if it cherishes words when the world believes in phrases, if it speaks out loudly what we usually only dare to say with a hand hiding our lips," Rob de Graaf goes on to say. I never meant to boycott the festival. But I virtually boycotted it emotionally as I walked around seeing things I did not feel. Water off a duck's back is the hackneyed description of what I felt. Only in spaces which have had no connection with the CIFET was I able to experience that healing power of theatre. The theatre hall at the Supreme Council for Youth and Sports has never in my experience been part of the CIFET. And it was there that I finally found that healing, integrating power of theatre. It was a very simple show, featuring an elegiac choral recitation in honour of the six members of the Theatre Institute who died in the flames of Beni Sweif, with video projections of their works and old photos. What I missed in Butterflies Depart in Light, however, was all the other victims of the Beni Sweif fire. Cathartic as it was, and even though I hooted at the end of it like a braying donkey gasping for breath, I still regretted its selective quality and the omission of the victims who shared the same fate as the celebrated figures. The Butterflies, however, excruciatingly harrowing as it was and though lacking in certain respects, gave this CIFET a measure of cultural and human credibility. As I left the theatre that night, I kept remembering Rob de Graaf's soothing words which I felt were eloquent statements of how we all felt: "I believe that theatre can only remain of importance if it dares to be simple, if it chooses to be silent where the world is yelling, if it gives us individuals when the world is concerned with masses, if it cherishes words when the world believes in phrases, if it speaks out loudly what we usually only dare to say with a hand hiding our lips."
