The first Festival for Children's Theatre attracted significant speakers but sparse support. Rashda Ragab was one of the few people in the audience Last week saw the official launch of the first Festival for Children's Theatre, hailed as a solution to the lack of an active stage for Cairo's budding thespians and shows they can enjoy. ''Egyptian associations responsible for children theatre do not work in harmony with each other,'' as Fatma Qabil, a lecturer at the Faculty of Specific Education put it. The small number in the audience at her seminar -- just 15 people -- was possibly indicative of the truth of that statement. Qabil was speaking at a seminar entitled "The absence of critical movement of children's theatre", one of the most important of the four seminars at this first Festival for Children's Theatre held by the National Centre for Child Culture in Sayeda Zeinab Cultural Park. The seminar, however, turned out to have the largest audience of the four, while members of the press were thin on the ground and very few newspapers covered the event. There is almost no status attached to children's theatre here, nor has there been for several years. "With very few and scattered productions of children's plays, we can say there is no real legacy of children's theatre in Egypt," said prominent children writer Yaqoub El-Sharouni. His words spoke for the 12 plays that took part in the festival's competition. "There is no single organisation responsible for the production of children plays, and there is no definite budget, and no regular plan," he said. "These shortcomings have led to the absence of a critical movement of this theatre. Irregular shows are either produced by private or NGO companies run by theatre fans who later on leave to do other activities,'' he added. El-Sharouni, author of the book Children's Theatre in Egypt and former director of the Children's Cultural Palace in Garden City, said a permanent place and regular shows were vital to attract audiences and critics to the theatre. According to El-Sharouni, the Puppet Theatre, which has a permanent location in Attaba in Downtown Cairo, has both advantages. It has already established a reputation and has a core of artists with great expertise. The festival audience could not learn about this fruitful experience because of the absence at the seminar entitled "International experiences of children's theatre'' of Mohamed Nour, the Puppet theatre's director. Noor's disrespect towards the festival and its seminars seemed to be adopted in various ways by other speakers. "It is very important to have talented children who can take part in shows produced in school theatres," Qabil said. The message of children's theatre, she went on, should always be delivered through children side by side with adults. Unfortunately, however, there was no cooperation between the ministries of education and culture. "It is a pity, especially when we recognise the important cultural role that educational organisations used to play before," she said. "The money that should be spent on the production of school plays goes to financial incentives and promotions of senior officials,'' said Khaled El-Kharboutli, professor of theatre at the Faculty of Specific Education, at Cairo University. Instead of spending millions on cultural palaces, money should be spent on theatre productions, he suggested. Afaf Oweis, professor of nursery school education at Cairo University, told the audience at the seminar entitled "The role of the educational associations in the promotion of children's theatre" that a new system was being used in the pre- school stage through which children could make use of their various artistic talents to give their opinion on any issue, and the system would be adopted all over Egypt. Oweis recommended that specialists from the National Child Centre should take part in the discovery and promotion of talented students. Rather to the astonishment of Al-Ahram Weekly, only university professors were invited to talk at the seminar. School teachers, whose views and suggestions should be listened to and taken into consideration, were absent. Artist Mohamed Abdel-Alim accused the Ministry of Education of adopting neither artistic nor innovative educational systems. Abdel-Alim, a professor of theatre at 6 October University, said a child never forgot the information he or she gained through the theatre. "Children's theatre has its rules which should be followed, and making money should not be an aim. It has to be independent of the unsuccessful administration of public theatre," he said. Yet according to prominent children writer Abdel-Tawab Youssef, educational theatre could take the class as its stage. "As young students we learnt the Arabic language through theatrical dialogue, monazarat," he said. "Our children today need to have such monazarat, as they cannot make use of the language to express themselves." Theatre, moreover, could be a means of changing society. In schools all over Europe, each group of schools had to put on an annual play by a famous playwright such as Shakespeare, Molière or Corneille," Youssef said. "Surprisingly enough, I have once read in an Egyptian magazine that children's theatre isn't suitable for pre-school children. How could this be true when 70 to 75 per cent of one's intelligence is developed at this age?" Youssef wondered, adding that in New York he had once enjoyed a play put on by children of this age. "When I was seven, I used to make my own paper kites," said Nabil Bahgat, professor of theatre at the University of Helwan and founder of the Wamda Company. "Nowadays, children get everything they want through international companies for toys, food and the media. So they grow up with a culture of incapability. They will never have the ability to deal with any problems they encounter in the future." Addressing an audience of just 10 people, Bahgat spoke of his experience with aragoze (clown) and khayal al-dhel (shadow puppet theatre) in the seminar entitled "International experiences of children's theatre". Bahgat was one of the three winners of an American competition to find a new artistic project that attracted 7,000 participants worldwide. His aragoze play Ali El-Zeibak was on for four months in the US, and was seen and enjoyed by 40,000 people. "We have our own arts that could represent us all over the world," he pointed out. Walid Kamal, who directs children's plays, commented that Bahgat's experience reflected a personal solution to the problems of children's theatre in Egypt, and one that needed to be adopted.
