Dancing around the issues

Nigel Ryan speaks to Walid Aouni about June's festival of dance theatre
The artistic director of the Festival of Dance Theatre, now in its third year, is more than a little equivocal about that much abused word appearing in the title of the event. The problem is, though, that without the correct nomenclature it becomes almost impossible to attract the media attention, let alone the funding, on which events such as this increasingly depend. Festivals have become the name of the game and without the name it is almost impossible to play by the rules, impossible, even, to get past go. So festival it is, this month long series of performances.
The secret, Walid Aouni has found, "is to keep organisation to a minimum. I do not think it would be particularly sensible for me to attempt something massive, something international in the manner of, say, the Experimental Theatre Festival. And my way round this is to focus each year on a single country. In the first year it was Belgium, last year Germany. This year we have five French troupes performing throughout June."
"For the first six months, I more or less did everything myself, contacting the groups, viewing videos of performances, travelling to see them, which if it means a lot of work means also that you remain in control. The more people involved, the more political it all becomes, which in the end tends to be very negative. And then there is funding, which is an uphill struggle. We pieced together this year's event with sponsorship from the Cultural Development Fund, from the department of international cultural operation and from l'Association Française d'Action Artistique, with the Opera House covering production costs and the French Cultural Centre funding publicity."
The audience for the event, Aouni believes, is growing. The press has been receptive and the public has kept an open mind. One important point, he insists, is that the event is non-competitive: all the groups and choreographers are well-established, have received critical acclaim internationally. The festival is not intended as a series of performances to be compared and contrasted and then judged as good, better, worst or best: the aim, instead, is to allow a local audience access to work that has attracted an appreciative international audience.
"It is depressing when you look at the CVs of major dance troupes, and they appear to have performed everywhere except Cairo. Why not Cairo? What is the problem? Of course there are difficulties. These works come from elsewhere, they are dance theatre pieces, the product of cultures that use the body differently. But if this is sometimes problematic it remains, nonetheless, something that should be addressed, something that a mature audience will be capable of addressing."
It is important, too, thinks Aouni, that even though the festival focusses, for the time being at least, on individual countries, it should, within that framework, also showcase a degree of internationalism. Hence the appearance, for the first time in Egypt, of a performance by the Japanese choreographer Carlotta Ikeda. Haru No Saiten has an entirely Japanese cast, and though the score is a reworking of Stravinsky's Un Sacre du Printemps, its choreography is rooted in traditional Japanese forms.
"There is, too, a piece by Angelin Preljocaj, who is not French. Yet both Ikeda and Preljocaj are currently based in France. That is where they work, where they are funded. And in itself this might serve as an eye-opener. The festival, though it does not fall beneath the rubric of cultural exchange, within its own framework does act against narrow, nationally defined chauvinisms."
In addition to the four French-based groups, the festival includes Gilet de sauvetage au dessous de ta chaise, a new piece by Aouni that he describes as African, and also inspired by Rimbaud's Ethiopian adventurism.
It is easy to be overawed by Aouni's energy: after June the whole process will begin again, as he starts to package next year's festival, which is likely, he says, to concentrate on Dutch troupes. And in the meantime he continues to pursue an extraordinary plan -- to bring Pina Bausch, Trish Brown and Carolyn Carlsen to Cairo. It would be a remarkable coup, having these three most lauded of contemporary choreographers bring performances to the city. "And they all want to come," he says. "The problem is money, and persuading the powers that be."
Yet if anyone can bring it off, persuade the powers that be, raise the necessary funds, one suspects it is Aouni.
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