By Nehad Selaiha Within a few days of CIFET's opening, American playwright Karen Malpede started wondering about the size of the contribution of women writers and directors. You couldn't tell from the printed programme which lists only the name of the company, its country of origin, and the title of the work. And since the festival's comprehensive catalogue was not yet out, to satisfy her curiosity and mine, I had to wade through massive piles of paper and consult the fiche technique of every single company taking part in the festival. In some cases, it was difficult to decide whether the name belonged to a man or a woman (e.g. Vankanat Zhakipbai, co-author of Kazakhstan's Cycle of Despair or, to a lesser extent, Maija Apine, author and director of Latvia's Swan Lake). But these were few, and at a rough estimate one can say that in at least 12 of the festival's 50 productions this year women figure as writers or directors -- which is quite an improvement on previous years. Karen would have found a more flagrant instance of gender prejudice had she attended the round-table discussion held on Saturday, 5 September, to commemorate the centenary of the birth of venerable playwright and thinker Tawfik El-Hakim. It was an eminently patriarchal, all-male table, and far from round. The tone was generally celebratory and all the speakers, even those who dared question some of the intellectual or artistic aspects of El-Hakim's work, uncritically confirmed his hallowed status as the 'father' of Egyptian literary drama. The classical model he initially embraced, and continued to blindly uphold with all its sharp dichotomies, sexist orientation and implicit patriarchal premises and assumptions, even in his so-called late 'experimental' stage, received no attention whatsoever. While one of the speakers took him to task over his idealistic, anti-socialist view of art and his elitist concept of the artist as a hermit living in an ivory tower, no one seemed to mind his perpetuation in Egyptian drama of the classical, fictional representation of the female gender and its association with sexuality and nature -- "forces that must be tamed in outside activities and within the inner person for the survival of the polis'," to quote Nancy Hartsock. When I openly objected to the structure of the table and mentioned that a feminist perspective on El-Hakim and a deconstructive approach to his work and intellectual legacy would have been a welcome contribution, I was rewarded with bantering and sarcasm. To top it all, the head of the table invited to the microphone a well-known socialist woman playwright to comment on what I had said. She blithely announced that contrary to his reputation, El-Hakim (who used to joke that his criterion for female excellence was the ability to cook a good meat and potato casserole) was not a misogynist, that, in fact, he adored women. "As a thinker, he thinks for us all, and I have always been guided by his ideas," she said and proudly added, "he once told me in a private meeting at his office in Al-Ahram: "the best thing I love about you, Fatahiya, is that I think and you carry out." After that you can imagine what a welcome relief and a real pleasure it was to walk into the small hall of the National Upstairs and meet a 'person/performer' of 'ambiguous/dual' sexual identity and watch 'him/her' for an hour examining, analysing, and deconstructing the ideas of male and female identities and gender-specific roles and attributes. In her haunting, provocative and profoundly disturbing M/F (a production of the Dutch Skorpio company, directed by Terence Roe), Kris Niklison (who wrote the script) combines parody and cross-dressing with various aspects of physical theatre and circus techniques to expose sexual identity as an artificial construct, an arbitrary sign-system, a socio-cultural codified structure. As s/he switched between male and female attire, picking up various items from a huge pile of second-hand garments which occupied centre-stage, and parodied several of the male and female stereotypes popularised by the media, the familiar and traditional distinctions between the sexes were revealed as artificial and sham. In the process, the barriers and distinctions between stage and auditorium, and art and life, were also seriously challenged and dislodged. What made M/F such a poignant experience for me, and endowed it with a tremendous sense of urgency, was its intensely personal feel. Here the performer was not acting out a scripted role, but, rather, stepping out of all codified roles to grapple with an intensely felt personal dilemma. Niklison took us into her confidence, shared with us her thoughts and anxieties, showed us that what we take for real life is in fact a masquerade governed by codes and conventions, and, in the process, exploded the artifice of theatre, throwing the sanctified 'aesthetic distance' to the four winds. "This raises the question of whether this is theatre at all," someone told me after the show. His objection reminded me of the feminist redefinition of the salon as a personal type of theatre -- a theatre without assumed characters, where people speak their lines as themselves. Like many of our notions about theatre, the concept of aesthetic distance is another patriarchal invention meant to enforce the gender-specific division of life into public (the property of men) and private (the property of women), and with it the distinctions between nature and reason, physical needs and intellectual pursuits, body and soul, and life and art. The question of aesthetic distance cropped up again in relation to the British Klub -- a furious and aggressive assault on reality and, according to one friend, on the senses as well. The deafening soundtrack (from Andy Cleeton) was frequently accompanied by waves of smoke that billowed from the stage to engulf the auditorium in a thick pall of white fog that made the eyes smart and the nose twitch. There was also Stephen Kirkham's violent choreography with lots of hurtling and dashing around and brutal hurling of bodies to the floor. This seemingly chaotic and frenzied medley of sound and movement was punctuated with welcome moments of relative peace when each of the six performers, representing Generation 'X' and the '90s club culture in the UK, stepped forward in turn to a microphone on one side of the stage and spoke directly to the audience, without guises, in a confidential, almost confessional tone, of his/her memories, worries, disappointments and aspirations. And whether talking to the audience or to each other, the performers used their real names. Again, this made the stage an indivisible extension of the auditorium and gave the performance an intensely real feel. Neither M/F nor Klub make any direct reference to politics, but both are profoundly political in the sense feminists mean when they speak of the personal as political. In each case, the stories, memories and personal experiences yield insights into the system of values and structures of power and social relations governing society and the private lives of its individual members. The Australian/Bosnian Secrets also deals with the effect of politics on the fates of individuals but in a simpler, more straightforward way. An Australian man and a Bosnian woman, divided by race, culture, and religion, are forced into contact and sharing the same fate when they are held hostages in a list by terrorists (of unspecified denomination). The lift, which is only a skeletal structure of upright and horizontal metal bars, inspired some quite original and intriguing movement and dance sequences while allowing the two excellent dancers to spread into the space around which was metaphorically transformed into the realm of the imagination. Admittedly, the political element here is somewhat spurious; it mainly serves as a vehicle or a launching pad for the excitingly fresh and intricate choreography. Still, the theme of cultural difference and interaction, the theme of CIFET this year, was at the heart of Secrets and yielded a delightful soundtrack which fused Oriental and Western music. The music, together with the grace and elegance of the dancers, and the delicate, wistful lyricism of the general mood, made the Australian-Bosnian contribution quite a favourite with the festival's audiences. The personal-political dialectic (with a tentative synthesis in art) also figures, in different measures, in two treatments of Buchner's Woyzeck, one by El Globo Teatro of Spain, and the other by the studio Ensemble of Germany; in Macedonia's Happiness is a New Idea in Europe, where it is projected in a series of vivid theatrical metaphors, with echoes from Hamlet and lots of skulls; in the Brazilian Theatre of the Oppressed The Couple/The Worker which defies political oppression and economic exploitation, as well as the traditional heterosexual definition of the 'couple'; in the Egyptian El-Haramlek (The Harem), written and directed by Maher Sabri, which sensitively expands the idea of love beyond the narrow heterosexual boundaries and argues through poetry, music and movement that the patriarchal values and power structures which created the Harem in the past continue to maintain it in the present under different guises; in Palestine's Bridge to Eternity; and, in a lighter, more humorous vein, in Austria's The President and I. Curiously, the few shows intended and billed as comedies in this year's festival failed to produce any laughter; a case in point was the Italian Alice in Wonderland which came across as limp and pallid and miserably devoid of fun and magic. Compared to it, Poland's Fin (inspired by four texts of Antonin Artaud -- Le theatre de Serafine, La pierre philosophale, Samurai ou le Drame du Sentiment, Il n'y a plus de firmament, and Le jet de sang -- and written and directed by Andrzej Dziuk) was positively cheerful. Despite its tragic view of the human condition and contemporary life, its many dismembered bodies and headless babies in plastic garbage bags, the frantic, frenzied suffering of its three characters as they travel back and forth through history, re-enacting its grim absurdities and gory conflicts, their frayed black coats and battered suitcases which contain nothing but dust and rubble, the Polish Fin had a tough and robust sense of humour and was vigorously funny in places. For once, the tragic vision of life typical of many Polish productions was strongly laced with cynical humour and even farce. Artistic virtuosity and creative energy have always proved potent and effective antidotes to nihilism and despair, and the Poles have proved that yet again, and transformed misery into an exhilarating experience. Other plays worth mentioning, though they are not among my favourites, are Romania's The Lady of the Camellias, which had a powerful actress, an austere, uncluttered set of black and white, and live cello music, but was too cloyingly romantic and a bit too sentimental for my taste; and the Tunisian Othello where l'amour et la mort were combined and projected through thick clouds of incense, funerary chants and ritualistic movement and gesture. But here the attempt to invest this severely reduced version of the text with political meaning did not pay off: the combination of a black Desdemona, a white Othello, a videotape of Orson Wells's film version of the play and recordings of a Hitler speech and George Bush's declaration of war on Iraq was a little too pretentious and ultimately distracting and confusing. I wonder what the few remaining days of CIFET have in store for us. Personally, I am looking forward to Venezuela's Diary of a Madman. Hopefully, there will be method in it.
