Nehad Selaiha wonders how far beauty can keep company with horror The 5th Festival for Contemporary Dance: Egypt-France 2004 caught me in the middle of heavy exam duties and long, tedious physiotherapy sessions. The ankle I had badly fractured in a car crash last March still hurt and the trip to Al-Gumhouriya Theatre in a battered taxi, alternately rattling and coughing, was painful and costly. I resented the choice of venue for the opening: why not hold it in the Opera house? The choice of date too, 5 June, was far from happy -- the sad anniversary of the beginning of the disastrous six-day war in 1967. It brings with it bad memories -- booming sirens, the din of airplanes overhead, the sound of distant and nearby explosions, images of gutted out military airports and vast stretches of sand, littered with bloody corpses, torn off limbs and burnt human remains. Many people, including myself, do their best to avoid 5 June when it comes to doing anything of importance or holding a festive gathering. Curiously, the opening performance, May B, by Compagnie de Maguy Marin, seemed particularly suited to the sombre mood of the day and its painful memories. Created on 4 November 1981 at the Theatre Municipal d'Angers, it recreates in visual, kinetic terms the dismal, nihilistically reductive view of human existence embedded in the dramatic works of Samuel Beckett. The empty stage, strewn with dust or ashes, eerily lit and framed in black, vividly evokes the setting and atmosphere of Waiting for Godot, Endgame and a host of other plays -- a "grey, zero" world, as Clov says, "light black. From pole to pole" -- and the figures which occupy that dreary, hopeless landscape seem like replications of Winnie and Willie, Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky, Hamm and Clov and Nagg and Nell -- all drawn from their respective darknesses and thrown together, like specks, into a timeless, murky void. Outwardly, however, by virtue of their costumes, movement and make-up, Marin's dancers looked more grotesque, more repulsive and pathetic than Beckett's characters usually look on stage. Their collective image in the first part of the performance presents them as a weird group of dazed, deformed humans, with white face, false noses and black blotches for eyes, dressed like the inmates of a concentration camp or a 19th century lunatic asylum. In their shroud-like uniforms they look like ridiculous moving corpses, freshly released from the grave and doomed to crawl and grub in an eternal, twilight desert, somewhere between life and death. They slouch, huddle together and shuffle around in circles, raising clouds of dust; at intervals they break into bouts of awkward, clumsy, frenzied dancing at the abrupt sounding of a military march. In the second part, a variation on the first (which appears in retrospect as the negative of the picture we now see), they appear in warmer lighting and modern dress (vaguely 1940s' shabby-genteel) and look like a group of travellers with suitcases, marching rigidly in line and trying hard to stick to the outward forms of respectability despite the rigours of the journey. On and on they march, with a snatch of a song monotonously repeated at the back, over and over, like a broken record. Round and round they go, into the darkness at the back then out into the light, never varying their pace, though varying their number with each circle. Sometimes only one or two emerge, circle the stage, then disappear. For seconds the stage is empty and you think this is the end; but, no, others come back to repeat the sequence. The journey seems endless and, indeed, May B cannot be said to have a proper ending. When the lights finally come down on a man holding a suitcase and poised to take another step forward along the same absurd route it seems an arbitrary decision; whether we see them or not the travellers will keep on journeying into the dark and back, alternately changing their clothing, as they did before. Far from constituting an end the blackout seems a momentary interruption and the final image leaves you expecting the show will either resume or begin all over again. It amounts to the same thing, since both parts are variations on the same theme. As soon as this lone figure disappears his companions, one feels certain, will begin to crawl out into the light once more, dressed as travellers or in shrouds, and continue the senseless actions. Marin did not need to trot out Ham on his wheelchair, with Clov stiffly beside him, or Pozzo dragging Lucky at the end of a rope tied round his neck to tell us that we were in Beckett's bleak landscape. His unrelenting nihilism, obsessive dwelling on the sick and ugly and gruesome sense of humour could be felt everywhere and permeated every detail. Indeed, May B could be accurately described as an extended, imaginative illustration of Beckett's famous dictum that we are born across the grave. Marin's challenge, it seems, was to capture the flash of pale light, the physical tension and painful, ungainly twitchings and convulsions which mark this fleeting moment of suspension as we slip out of one dark hole and into another. The secret was to avoid beauty, the traditional aesthetics of dance at all costs, explore the body in states of immobility, deformity, paralysis or lack of coordination and from there construct a startling choreographic vocabulary made up of the body's crude, banal or vulgar gestures and movements in moments of pain and weakness and states of stressful waiting or forced action. The second production in the festival, Josef Nadj's Woyzeck, was another classic of European contemporary dance, though younger than May B by 13 years, and also with a literary source -- Buchner's unfinished play of the same title. Here the grey that had enveloped the vision of human life in May B deepened to lurid black and Buchner's characters, who had precariously hovered on the edge of humanity in the play, were shown here as having finally taken an irreversible leap into the downright monstrous. Crowded into a cramped, cluttered, rotting set, every inch oozing sordidness and filth, they struck me as the morbid creations of a sick mind -- sinister travesties of humans, vicious and mechanical, with enormous destructive energies, cannibalistic tastes and necrophiliac appetites. Apart from the one female figure, Buchner's Marie, here made into a dummy then a corpse, the characters took turns at playing torturer and victim, grotesquely savaging each other and sometimes their own bodies, with the violence reaching a nauseating level at one point, as one of them slits open his belly, drags out his liver, a real, brown-red, quivering piece of liver, takes a slice off with a knife and bites into it before offering it to the audience. This, coming on top of scenes which featured vomiting, breaking raw eggs and letting the contents dribble to the floor or fiercely rubbing them into the surface of a rusty metal table, dancing around with a corpse then making love to it, as well as a character tearing a chunk of flesh (a real piece of raw meat) off another's back and proceeding to munch it with ghoulish pleasure, sent one of the audience running and retching out of the auditorium the night I was there while the rest of us groaned in disgust or giggled nervously. Nadj's Woyzeck seemed to revel in pain, filth and violence and conducted its morbid display of them coolly, against Aldar Racz's music which clearly parodied the musical tracks familiar in silent movies. And not only the music, but the stiff, abrupt movement of the characters, their senseless, arbitrary actions, the excessive, farcical physical battering, as well as the lighting, the framing of the action and performance space and the seating of the audience on tiers on stage all conspired to create a faint, mocking illusion of watching an old, silent movie. Were we supposed to receive all that horror on stage in the same spirit and even laugh at it? Why not, the show seemed to answer; you are fed similar horrors through the media on a daily basis without turning a hair. All one requires is a really strong stomach and plenty thick skin. Gone are the days when such horrors could be blithely brushed off as impossible fabrications and confidently consigned to the realm of the fantastic. Grimmer, more chilling and graphically violent than May B, Nadj's Woyzeck seemed more intent on eschewing anything remotely resembling what normally passes for dance and beauty. Both were drastically redefined here in the light of a new aesthetic -- an aesthetic of the ugly and repulsive, of horrified fascination born out of deep revulsion. Artists have been known to sift through mounds of rubbish and come up with odd assortments of human refuse which are then knocked into some sort of shape and presented to the public as artefacts. Underlying such efforts is the claim that form sublimates the material, however base. In Nadj's Woyzeck, however, the material seemed to mock any formal transcendental activity and to drag me deeper into the muck of despair. It reminded me of the debate surrounding war photography which Susan Sontag thoughtfully examines in her book Regarding the Pain of Others. The more superior the photographer, the more horrifying the images s/he produces. What do such images do to us as they stream through the media while we bite into our breakfast or dip into our lunch? Do they put us off our food? Make us angry? Goad us to action? Or do they simply habituate us to horror and thicken our skin? If May B left many of the festival audience marvelling at the direction contemporary dance has taken and wondering whether the body in pain, debased and shorn of all grace, has become its object, Woyzeck seemed to call into question the very meaning of dance, beauty, and art. Such concepts, many felt, needed drastic rethinking. It is by far the most shocking, provocative and disorienting foreign show to have visited Egypt as far as I can remember, which is perhaps the reason why Walid Aouni, the director of the festival, brought it over and, perhaps, one should thank him for it. But watching it within a day of May B was like being dragged into a slaughter house after having been taken for a stroll round a cemetery with open graves. It was all too much and left one reeling. Fortunately, the Egyptian contributions were more merciful to the audience and not quite bereft of hope. But this is meat for another article.
