Nehad Selaiha reviews the 3rd 2B Continued Laboratory and Festival at the AUC Falaki main stage Getting the AUC's Falaki main stage downtown back in action, even intermittently, after the university moved its main campus to New Cairo is a great achievement and a dream come true. For saving this excellently equipped theatre from being turned to other uses, as has been the sad fate of other Falaki (black box) theatre, we have to thank Frank Bradley and Ahmed El-Attar and whoever else made an effort in this direction. It was a wonderful experience going to this lovely venue once more after more than 2 years to see what the 3rd edition of the "2B Continued Laboratory and Festival for Theatre and Contemporary Dance" had to offer. Like the two former editions (in 2009 and 2010), this one, held from 13 to 18 January, was a joint venture by Studio Emad Eddin Foundation (Sweden) and Orient Productions (Egypt), within the framework of the Euro-Arab Multidisciplinary Cultural Exchange J. M. Liverato Project (in which the Young Vic Theatre of the UK, the Descent Danse Association of France, the Dancing on the Edge of the Netherlands and the French ZINC/ECM are also partners) and was sponsored and supported by the EU Commission, The Culture Fund of the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Cairo and the Swedish SIDA and Tamasi Group. Describing the project in the Festival's programme, Nevine El Ibiary, the Festival Director , wrote: " Moving from an idea to a performance is a whole process. My vision of the 2B Continued Laboratory and Festival is that young artists come to the Lab with an idea. During the Lab, the idea is then developed and matured under the mentorship of experienced professionals and then realized in a performance in the Festival. The Lab is a place where creativity is respected, supported and realized under the supervision of professionals who care enough to believe in new talents and in offering equal opportunities to create. These professionals were generous enough to share their time and experience with these young, talented artists for three months, guiding them towards the final realization of their visions." The outcome of the 3-months Lab were two contemporary dance pieces, two theatre performances and a piece called PsychOpera by Adham Hafez that combines multimedia, opera singing, text and an integrated visual score and ambitiously aims at repositioning Opera within a contemporary performing arts frame as an experimental and open medium. Besides the directors and choreographers who attended the Lab, El-Ibiary also mentions "four light designers, four scenographers and four stage managers all fresh, young, talented and full of energy." Their "ambition," according to her is "to rock the world of the performing arts in Egypt." A very tall order indeed! Accidentally, or by design, the two theatrical performances used plays by Eugene Ionesco, rendered in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, and both treated them in the same unfortunate manner. Ahmed Shawky El Bohy's version of Amedee or How to Get Rid of It -- a play that Richard N. Coe has described as "a gruesome portrait of marital bickering, loneliness and frustration ... whose inspiration is fully worthy of Strindberg's Dance of Death " -- used only the first of the play's 3 acts, with some cuts and robbed the play of its essential theatricality by failing to reproduce Ionesco's grotesque, concrete stage metaphor of the expanding Corpse and proliferating, poisonous mushrooms. Though in his Director's Word, Shawky El Bohy says, somewhat vaguely: "In this play, Ionesco monitors the reality of a society not so different from our modern day society", his conception seemed to be guided by Marc Beigbeder's explanation of the Corpse in the play as "the living corpse of what was, or might have been, or should have been, their (Amedee's and Madeleine's) love -- a corpse that both he and she have murdered, robbed suddenly of life through not knowing how to love each other, and which now exacts its revenge." Such an interpretation, though obvious and somehow reductive, can be justified by Amedee's words when he says in Act II: "do you know, Madeleine, if we loved each other, if we really loved each other, none of this would be important. Why don't we try to love each other ...Love puts everything right, you know, it changes life." Performed by Ahmed Abdel-Ati El-Sayed, as Amedee and Dalia El-Guindy as Madeleine, with choreographed movement by Dalia el-Abd, music by Mohamed Yousri, set and costumes by Nashwa Maatouq and light design by Gamal El Debawy and Nashwa Maatouq, this version of Ionesco's Amedee, though sadly lacking in poetry and humour, was more tolerable than Yousra El-Sharqawy's severely reduced version of Ionesco's Frenzy for Two. It is not that El-Sharqawy failed to grasp what the play is all about. Her Director's Word gives an adequate description of the play; in it she says: "Do we purposely concern ourselves with trivial matters or do we only concern ourselves with them in order not to see what happens around us? Do I deliberately shut my eyes so as not to see you? Or am I really unable to see you? The play tells the story of a man and a woman who have lived for many years in disagreement about the similarity of a tortoise and a snail, whether it is appropriate to open or close the window and whether it is best to go out or stay indoors. As a backdrop to this dispute, one hears in the background echoes of rebellion, the roar of machine guns, the explosion of bombs, screams of the wounded and the rattling of the dead." However, in trimming the text to fit within the allotted 40- minute performance duration, El-Sharqawi kept the argument about snails and tortoises almost intact, while cutting out most of the arguments about the senseless conflict going on outside and the winners and losers as well as many significant details, like the soldier looking for his Jeannette, the neighbour and his wife who can enjoy themselves "anywhere, so long as there's a battle", the no-man's-land where the house of the married couple is located and their grimly hilarious comments on the activities of the warring parties during peace, not to mention the many headless bodies and bodiless doll's heads that hang down from above. Though set designer Yara El-Walid Ahmed, lighting designer Maryam Raafat and musician Mahmoud El-Sherif made some limp and rather ridiculous efforts to suggest the chaos and devastation outside, with sounds of loud explosions, flashing neon lights and bits of the set falling out at intervals, the performances of Mohamed Abdel Rahman, as He, and Dina Mohsen, as She, were singularly lacking in any kind of tension and replete with comic clichés. In their hands, the play came across as a silly and rather heavy conventional farce about a nagging wife and a henpecked husband. Unfortunately, I only caught the tail end of Shaymaa Shoukry's dance performance Exit Does Not Exit ; but the little I saw was choreographically impressive and quite interesting. With the help of Laurence Rondoni as Mentor, Shoukry had her dancers -- Ezzat Ezzat, Mounir Said, Ahmed El Guindy and Mirette Michel -- perform a series of intricate and varied street fights without ever really touching each other. The timing of action and reaction among the dancers was perfect and was effectively accompanied and framed by Mahmoud Waly's music, Asmaa El Sharqawi set, Ahmed Borey's lighting, Dalia Hassan's media installation, Mohamed Borhan's animation, and Emma Banany's interactive media. In the programme, the choreographer's word read as follows: "The city. Borders...doors and bridges...Is there a way to exit [out of] the economic-socio-political-global system? What reality should we choose to live in? Socially integrated? Politically aware? Up to speed with current events? In harmony with nature? In vivid, lucid dreams? As we connect to one, we disconnect from another... turning.." What exactly she had in mind and how much of her vision was realized in the performance can only be judged by those who saw the performance in full. The other dance performance in the festival, Maha El-Maraghi's Galatea's Twilight, was even more impressive and exciting and, since I saw it in full, thoroughly satisfying. Using the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the Sculptor King of Cyprus who creates a statue of the perfect woman, calling it Galatea, falls in love with it and has Venus turn it into a living woman with whom he lives happily ever after, El-Maraghi views it from a feminist perspective and gives it sharp feminist twist. In the first part of the performance, dancers Mohamed Fouad (in black, as a modern Pygmalion) and Aga Miley (in white, as the statue of Galatea), framed in Mohsen Abdel Hamid's modern set of a sculptor's studio and Shaymaa El-Gazzar's ethereal lighting, beautifully enact the old myth with great physical and emotional eloquence, accompanied by Dina El-Wedidi's eerie and haunting songs, Nancy Mounir's live viola, and Mohamed Shafiq's recorded electronic music. Even in this part of the performance which closely follows the myth, the inspired choreography has a clear, feminist stamp, first showing Pygmalion's obsessive, possessive passion for his creation, then, when Galatea comes to life, his ruthless efforts to bend her to his will. The last sequence of that part ends with Galatea heaped on the floor, like a lifeless bundle, with Pygmalion towering above her, then carrying her away, leaving the stage empty but for El-Wedidi's and Mounir. shocking finale. When all is quiet, For a moment you think the piece has ended, but then comes the Galatea walks in, in dark top and bare legs, having removed her white, flowing, muslin robe, and proceeds to violently and systematically wreck the studio, while a female voiceover recites a monologue, over and over, in the background. It is Galatea finally speaking, and her monologue is at once sensuous, rebellious and poetic. She compares herself to the nymphs of Cyprus (the Propoetides) who, in one version of the Pygmalion myth, defied Venus and were turned by her, in punishment, first into the earliest prostitutes in history, then into flint stone statues, which Pygmalion fled in terror. She also identifies with Scheherazade of the Arabian Nights who was nightly raped and had to tell stories to king Shahrayar to save her life. In another reference to The Arabian Nights, she describes herself as "the hostage-bride raped by the ruthless Jinni on her wedding night and kept in a box within a box," and goes on to say: "Under the sleepy watch of my brute kidnapper, I unflinchingly accumulate the rings of my successive lovers, lovers harnessed to my unquenchable rage." El-Maraghi's Galatea will no longer be meek and obedient, or bow down to the male tyranny of a Pygmalion or a Shahrayar. Nor will she allow her self to be genitally mutilated in the name of chastity. She will revel in "the shameless passion of [her] flesh," break her chains of gold, chastity belts and the "stitches sealing the abode of [her] lustful joy." In this monologue too, the Venus who punished the nymphs in the myth for their rebellion and brought to life man's image of the ideal woman is compared to all the women who imbibe patriarchal ideology, become its staunch champions and oppress their own kind in its name. Galatea's Twilight was a stirring experience -- a performance at once thoughtful, daring, committed, and artistically exhilarating. The last performance in this festival was PsychOpera, composed, choreographed and directed by Adham Hafez and performed by popular opera singer, Nevine Allouba, with dramaturgy by Ismail Fayed, video by Ahmed Rouby, costume design by Reda Ghareeb, psychoanalysis research by Hazim Shoaira, score writing by Nader Hafez and graphics by Ikon. The creative team, according to the programme, also lists Anke Koschinski as space consultant (whatever that means) and James Booth as rehearsals pianist and choir master. Sponsored by YATF (Brussels), ZINC-ECM (Marseilles), 3BisF (Aix-en-Provence), the Amsterdam Theatre School, SEE Foundation (Sweden) and Orient Productions (Egypt), PsychOpera was hyped "the first multimedia Opera production in Egypt and the Arabic Speaking Region" and described in the Director's Word in the festival's programme as a work that "introduces the use of multimedia, opera singing, text and an integrated visual score, repositioning Opera within a contemporary performing arts frame as an experimental and open medium." He goes on to describe PsychOpera in a somewhat pretentious vein as "a performance that invites the audiences into the realm of intense visual, sonoric and performative presences, proposing complex ways of perceiving and of understanding, exploring the human mind boundaries from ethno- psychiatric, operatic, visual and textual entry points, placing the performer, the audience and the work itself on the boundaries of image, real presence, objects, density and invisible information." More soberly, you can describe the performance as the hallucinations of a mad woman in a lunatic cell, probably a would-be singer or actress who never made it and who has failed in love to boot, processed through flashing images that you never have time to make out, a repetitive, cacophonous soundtrack at the beginning that seems to last forever, some high notes vocalized by Allouba, a monologue at the beginning repeated in various languages, Arabic, English, French and German, and at different speeds and pitches, part of a conversation voiced at firs in whispers then rising in a mad crescendo punctuated with frenzied laughter and light projections that frame the performer in rectangles of light different in size and intensity. I don't know about 'exploring the human mind boundaries' from God knows how many 'entry points', but PsychOpera was certainly a curious piece of work and definitely innovative. That it was not uniformly pleasurable -- was alternately irritating, captivating, hypnotic, frustrating, or simply weird, is, perhaps, a sure sign of its experimental orientation. However, I fail to see how it this performance could have worked without Allouba's superb vocal endowments and expertise. The festival also included a brief demo performance by 1st year dance students of Dalia El-Abd at the Artistic Creativity Centre of the ministry of culture and a choreography seminar, in which a group of international dance makers, mentors and researchers, invited by HaRaka Dance Development and Research, reflected on choreography practices within cultures that escape contemporary discourse and aesthetics. On the whole, this edition of 2B Continued was exciting and provocative and hopefully the project will keep scouting for and supporting genuine young talents. In fact, I am already looking forward to next year's edition which, according to Nevine El-Ibiary, "will add multimedia to both dance and theatre performances as a further step in developing the performing arts scene in Egypt."
