As the 17th Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre draws to a close, Hala Halim considers the impact of the controversy surrounding it As chairperson of the jury for the 17th Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET, 20-30 September), Mark Hall Amitin, a New York-based theatre director and actor, wrote an open letter to Cairenes regarding the event. Addressing the tragedy of Beni Sweif where on 5 September a fire at a Cultural Palace during a theatrical performance resulted in the death of about 48 people, Amitin expresses the "deep sadness and great sympathy" that he shares with everyone involved in theatre and with Egyptians. Simultaneously, he makes a "plea that every group, every artist here -- and all our Egyptian friends -- attend every possible performance -- to see and to share." The plea addresses the boycott of CIFET by different groups campaigning for proper investigation of governmental responsibility for the fire and moral as well as financial compensation for the families of victims, in what Amitin describes as an "expression of anger [that] is misapplied, though not misguided," punishing as it does "actors and artists from around the world who mourn with you". Amitin was to make a similar plea to the audience of his presentation, entitled "Visions for a Changing Theatre," given at the Supreme Council of Culture on 24 September. But the audience, which did not quite fill the small auditorium, was primarily an in-house one of directors and actors involved in CIFET, particularly from the international troupes. Likewise, for lack of communication channels, Amitin's open letter did not make it to the press, thus turning into a dead letter. It is somewhat symptomatic of CIFET this year, with its highly charged and embattled atmosphere, that these pleas went unheard. As theatre critic Nehad Selaiha observes, "the festival is falling apart: the performances are under-attended, with the bulk of Egyptian critics absent and the majority of spectators foreign and Arab guests; the daily bulletin issued by CIFET has been depleted of its best talents, of people like Hazem Shehata, Medhat Abu Bakr and Nezar Samak who died in Beni Sweif, and it is all about politics at this point. To talk about art and artistic merit at this stage seems somehow obscene, especially since many of the guest performances have been publicly dedicated by their directors to the Beni Sweif victims. As tributes to the dead, how can one subject them to critical assessment?" Tributes to the dead of Beni Sweif -- whether speculated (as in a number of troupes that withdrew from the festival, such as the Algerian troupe which was to present Shouf ya Ahmed ), or in the form of directors announcing at the beginning of a performance that they are dedicating it to the victims of the tragedy and having a moment of silence observed by performers and audiences -- have been appreciatively noted by campaigners, such as the ad hoc Fifth of September Group (FSG), says theatre director Hassan El-Gereitli. That this recording of such tributes by FSG was done by hearsay, based on reports from directors and members of the audience, is indicative of the degree of solidarity among the campaigners regarding the boycott. El-Gereitli, for example, regrets that, as a member of FSG, he was unable to accept the invitation by the Syrian troupe to their performance Higrat Antigone (Antigone's Exile), which he was urged to attend on account of the appropriateness of its funerary quality. Similarly, Azza El-Hosseini, an actress and theatre director who is also a member of FSG, says she herself "was not in favour" of the boycott, and that the desolate air of theatres at this year's CIFET she has been reading about does not surprise her, given that it is generally Egyptians involved in the theatre in some capacity or the other who attend. On the internal variety within any given group of campaigners and the coordination between different groups, El-Gereitli comments that "unanimity is not a given in Egypt, and we're all of different hues and stripes, but it's the first time that I'm in a movement where we are all unanimous in our stand -- it's a fantastic movement." Having held a protest at the Opera House on Tuesday, 20 September, the first day of CIFET, FSG, as well as other groups that have become involved in the campaign like Writers and Artists for Change (WAC), continue to pursue various demands that have yet to be met (see fiveseptember.blogspot.com for provisional lists of victims, statements, and so on). The work of documenting testimonies of victims and survivors of the disaster being now complete, says FSG member theatre critic Menha El-Batrawi, the group is currently working on securing moral rights and financial compensation for Beni Sweif victims and their families. According to El-Hosseini, a member of the FSG committee in charge of this task, whose statements are corroborated by reports on the same issue given at the WAC meeting on Saturday, 24 September, the sums are shamefully paltry and, moreover, not being processed smoothly. The Ministry of Culture announced that it would settle LE10,000 on families of those who died in Beni Sweif, but it is waiting to disburse these sums until it receives the relevant documents regarding inheritance claims (a time-consuming process); as for Beni Sweif victims, they were to receive LE5000, of which cheques for only LE500 were initially sent until, under pressure from various groups, the full sum was disbursed. The Ministry of Social Affairs, on the other hand, having announced that it would offer LE5,000 to the heirs of the deceased and LE3,000 to those injured in the fire, has yet to disburse any of these sums, according to El-Hosseini. Given that the investigation into the causes of the fire has not yet taken its full course, nor have the ministries of culture, health and interior been put on trial as the campaigners have demanded, FSG, WAC and a group of artists associated with the "Mass Culture" system decided to hold a joint rally in Talaat Square in Cairo on Wednesday, 28 September, to be followed by a press conference today, 29 September, in the Lawyers' Syndicate, to which international festival guests have been invited. Plans for picketing the closing ceremony of CIFET, scheduled for Friday, 30 September, are being discussed by the various groups, as well as the possibility of preemptive action on the part of the Ministry of Culture on that occasion. Preemptive and/or counter-action is an interpretation that has been put forward of certain recent pro-Ministry of Culture moves, not least a number of statements by academics, writers and artists in support of Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni following his resignation -- which was turned down by President Mubarak -- two weeks ago (see also Al-Qahira, 27 September). At the WAC meeting on Saturday, for example, playwright Fathia El-Assal, whose signature had been added, by what appears to have been a sort of sleight of hand, to one of the published pro- minister of culture statements, went to great lengths to clear her name by citing her presence among a number of WAC colleagues who went to protest to the public prosecutor soon after the Beni Sweif disaster, and her participation in the 20 September rally, which took place after the publication of the document (see also Akhbar Al-Adab, 25 September). Designating the ministerial resignation, as several other commentators have, "playacting," novelist Mahmoud El-Wardani, a member of WAC, writes that it was intended in part to distract everyone from the disaster in a ruse that he expects no one will be taken in by: "the file [of Beni Sweif] remains open" (see Akhbar Al-Adab, 25 September). For its part, the Ministry of Culture has made some commemorative gestures towards Beni Sweif at the CIFET. Apart from cancelling the opening ceremony while hosting at the Opera House a performance of a musical dance show, Dusk to Dawn, choreographed by Walid Aouni, scheduled for the same evening, this year's CIFET is dedicated to the victims of Beni Sweif. Furthermore, some of the festival bulletins (see issues one and three, for example) carried obituaries of a number of critics who died in the disaster and elegies for them, and a commemorative CIFET volume is said to be ready for release. Yet again, El-Hosseini remarks that while tributes to and bibliographies of works by victims of Beni Sweif are a valuable gesture, this is only the beginning, and an inevitably hasty one, addressing as it does only the more well-known figures and omitting obscure victims such as the members of the troupe from Fayoum who died in the accident. Despite the highly politicised atmosphere of this year's CIFET, there have been moments of contact between the international guest troupes and Egyptians. It is not only that, on their way in to the Opera House to attend Dusk to Dawn on the 20th, international guests stopped to speak to the campaigners standing in protest outside and picked up the statement issued by various groups. Josephine Igberaese, from the National Troupe of Nigeria, who directed Allamore, a play based on Yoruba mythology in modern, hybridised garb, speaks with empathy of Beni Sweif as not "a peculiarly Egyptian crisis, because every African country is going through a crisis -- it is peculiarly African." After a performance of their play at the Balloon Theatre, Igberaese and her colleagues were approached by theatre critic Mahdi El-Hosseini to offer a performance of their choosing at Al-Azhar Park at an event organised by Al-Mawrid Al-Thaqafi cultural centre where a group of school pupils from Upper Egypt, the Choral of Sa'id, was giving a performance of folk songs. "It was a wonderful experience of communality -- the way that the audience was responsive and interactive," comments Igberaese. Subsequently, El-Hosseini told Al-Ahram Weekly, he organised a session with the Nigerian troupe and a Sudanese one, Masrah Al-Boq'a, at the Hanager Arts Centre, to get as much as possible out of African theatre, which is not readily available in Egypt, and which has much to yield in that it does not follow the western, Aristotelian model. To Dario Facal, author and director of the Spanish production Morphology of Loneliness, "for us, coming to the festival was our way of sharing and expressing our sorrow about what happened [at Beni Sweif], which affected everyone who works in the theatre in Spain. It is a sign of courage that theatrical activity is going on -- because it means that political responsibility does not precede the need to express and show respect." Both Facal and his lead actor, Marcos Garcia Barrero, assert although this is "a mournful time", they have found in the festival an amazing exposure to theatres from countries they would otherwise have no access to in Europe, such as the Pakistani, sub-Saharan African and Egyptian theatres. Such comments only offer a glimpse of what CIFET could potentially offer, but what, if anything, the future holds for the festival, in view of the persistent demand for a complete overhaul of the structures within which it operates, is anybody's guess.
