Medhat Fawzi shows Youssef Rakha the identity of life and theatre "All the world's a stage;" and, in some significant sense, all Egyptian society is El-Warsha Theatre Company. Himself a largely Westernised, relatively privileged agent provocateur of the arts, Hassan El-Geretly, its principal founder, and devoted director, is eager to include as many grass-root ideas as he can muster. On conceptualising the nascent troupe's make-up, he rejected the notion of exclusivity, opting instead for an open, interactive convergence of social and cultural planes; and it remains the case that only in the kind of space he created could AUC graduates and nobly-born businessmen mix seamlessly with working-class (ex-) revolutionaries and street performers. Contrary to charges of exoticism and festival-oriented compromise, El-Geretly's interest in folk arts, their aesthetic power and theatrical potential notwithstanding, sprang directly from their relevance to the day-to-day lives of people whose thoroughly ordinary backgrounds, while limiting their cultural access and money-making capacities, made for an altogether more representative and vastly more interesting combination. First the troupe focussed on madih (chants in praise of the Prophet) and the mawwal (ballad). Their attention drawn to the quicksand mountain comprised by Sirat Bani Helal, El- Warsha's so called researchers eventually discovered tahtib (stick fighting) and other arts of the stick. Many discoveries acted to enrich the human constitution of the troupe, with the relevant local parties abandoning careers in which they could not realise themselves to join El-Warsha; bringing with them, on joining, all the living (potentially theatrical) experience they had accumulated. Medhat Fawzi -- a stick dancer, executive producer, many- sided performer and (sales) man for all seasons -- was one such acquisition. He is exemplary, not only by virtue of what he brings to contemporary theatre, but also due to the way El- Warsha changed his life. "I returned from Iraq to settle back in Mallawi," Menya. "Don't write this down, but women and drink had got the better of me over there; and I had not, in the end, saved as much money as I had planned when I left. I had some gold ornaments of my own; I sold them and collected all I could before coming back. In the end I entered the town with seven bills [of $100 each], I got engaged to the girl for whom I wanted to save money in the first place -- that fell through in the end -- and I went back to the market to sell shoes." "Not the sort of shoes you'd be wearing yourself," I am told, "which you buy in shops and spend a lot of money on. It was simply a little cart, the sort you see in Moski and such places; and it had all manner of cheap footwear, shoes for simple people. After that I couldn't stand the hard work any more, and I went back to the Thaqafa Gamihiriya [Cultural Palace]; there wasn't much money in that, no. They used to have a strange financial year, the regulations of which ensured that, in order to gather the required papers in time, you only received three or four months' wages. But to tell you the truth my happiest memories go back to this time. The best life I could possibly imagine living. And this is because of the way we were all friends -- gathering to have a good time and telling jokes and going away together. I was in both divisions of the group, the choir, in which I sang, and the folk dance troupe, in which I assumed a bigger and bigger role until 1991. "Hassan El-Geretly and Naguib Guweily had followed our work in Menya. And they came to see me on the roof of the Thaqafa building, our training space. We performed in the 6 October City, in Cairo. Then I had a three-hour meeting with Hassan and Khaled Guweili in [the celebrated Menya café] Eddahabeya. Hassan spoke on and on, about art and culture and the state of things. I just kept nodding and saying, 'Yes, of course.' I understood nothing at this point." It had been a trying journey through the untimely death of his father at the age of 30, growing into a town tough, love and loss and the more recent, gradual, long-in-the-coming deliverance through art. Eager to take some time off the army, Fawzi's father had ingested the reputedly fever-producing combination of halawa and hot peppers; the resulting fever proved so intense, it not only granted him leave but killed him. Fawzi's mother, barely an adult at this point, married again; and despite her eventual divorce it was in the house of his father's aunt that Fawzi grew up. "I worked in every imaginable field; did everything. Even as a primary school student I would leave school and go to work, the point was to make money, it didn't matter what the job was. At the cattle market, I would buy the five-piastre contract forms and fill them for the [illiterate] buyers, selling them back for 25 piasters. I worked in cafés, in restaurants, in bakeries, and in construction. I was very successful as a painter but I settled in the market selling cassettes. "This was the time of [Sadat's] open-door policy and it was lucrative, but incredibly tiring work; you couldn't do anything else in your life. I would start at eight in the morning and work until nine or 10 in the evening, every day, seven days a week. Yet I was a very good student until preparatory school, where I was put off by English and made friends with fellow footballers; we would run away from school to play. It was in secondary school, 1978 or 1979, that I joined the Thaqafa Jamihiriya, through friends who worked there. I went to watch and I liked what was happening, so I began to join in." Fawzi eventually earned a secondary school diploma. "Then there was this love thing," a complex drama of mythic proportions, "which prompted me to go to Iraq. There too I did everything..." Significantly, though, Fawzi ended up dancing with Egyptians. "All the performers there were Egyptians. At first these people used dancing terminology I didn't understand. So I said show me what you want and I'll do it. One of them came and told me I was a wild dancer, like wild plants; the movements came to me without any need for practice." It wasn't until an Iraqi decree that no Egyptians without official permits to practice, should be allowed to perform in Iraq that Fawzi returned. From such an earthy standpoint, the Eddahabeya monologues must have sounded too ethereal, too unreal to be convincing. El- Geretly's initial overture was thus ignored. It wasn't until he phoned Fawzi back and invited him to perform before the entire troupe that the link was forged. "First I did what I was doing with the Thaqafa." Fawzi credits actress Hanan Fawzi with drawing his attention to the fact that what was required was the authentic traditional dance, not the Reda Troupe-style innovations current in Menya. "If someone danced at a wedding," she asked him, "would he be doing this?" The question was magic. "I remembered the older masters' work," Fawzi recounts, "people who had come to coach us like Sayed Abu- Sabra. What I was doing before was the air-oriented figurative dancing inspired by ballet; now I did the earth-oriented, poised movements rooted in tahtib." Fawzi brought to El-Warsha the unique majesty of this mode of performance and all the streetwise know-how of his years of "doing everything". As executive producer he now manages the troupe's funds. Soon after joining the troupe, he married and settles with his wife and three daughters in Cairo. He commends his work with Mohamed Abdel-Azim, a former El-Warsha performer who specialises in movement. "What is good about El- Warsha is that for once you are given the space to do what you really want to do, what you feel is good. That's how something really good comes out, when you talk to people like [academic] Hoda Eissa, when you watch the response of colleagues... In 1995 we founded the Stick Dancing Centre in Mallawi, and for the first time ever people there are learning from each other; this too is due to the orientation of El-Warsha. In Upper Egypt the attitude tends to be that if you know something from which you benefit you don't hand it over to anyone. The way you grip your stick, to defend yourself, should be your secret. But if there's anything that I've come out with from my involvement with El-Warsha, apart from my three girls, is that if you posses something, don't be afraid to share it with whoever wants or needs it. And in the end you gain as much as he does."
