Watching a lively onslaught on the ruling military council at Rawabet, Nehad Selaiha wonders why the Salafi danger was carefully skirted On a folded sheet of thin paper handed out at Rawabet by way of a programme, the team involved in Doroos fi Al-Thawra (Lessons in Revolting) described their performance, subtitled "a physical and visual political column", as 'a performance made by a group of Egyptian activist-artists who want to rewrite their recent history through images, movement, testimonies and sounds,' They go on to warn us that the scenes 'are created from their most personal perspectives' and that their 'purpose is not only to document or reminisce, but to share and reflect with an audience a work of contemporary political art.' The performance, they go on to say, 'does not only want to talk about what started on Tahrir Square at the beginning of 2011, but �ê� mainly wants to react to what is happening now in Cairo, because this revolution is far from over."' The key phrases in this quote are: 'most personal perspectives' and 'what is happening now in Cairo.' At the end of the show, I was forced to conclude that for the young artists who put this work together, the threat of militarism, or return to military dictatorship, is what looms largest when they reflect on the current political scene in Cairo. It is a real enough threat indeed, and one to the dangers of which many were very much alive from the moment the army decided to side with the people. A far more sinister threat, however, and one that insidiously spreads by the minute like a moral plague is that of Salafism; having initially opposed the first Tahrir rallies, this extremist religious movement soon jumped on the revolutionary bandwagon, pushing its own leaders to the forefront and claiming a God-given right to hold the reins. That the artists' 'most personal perspectives' on 'what is happening now in Cairo' should only see the danger, faults and abuses of the military council, many as they are, and be completely blind to the imminent terror of Salafism and the many crimes its ideology has prompted and sanctioned in recent months bespeaks a disturbing narrowness of vision. It is true that the members of the Lessons team �ê" many of them political activists with firsthand experience of police brutality and human rights violations �ê" have serious personal grievances against the army (some of them had been arrested and/or personally subjected to verbal and physical abuse, even torture, by members of the military police, while friends of theirs were committed to military trials in the course of demonstrations), which explains the sense of outrage rage and venomous ire that imbues the show. But does this justify total blindness to other dangers? Though designated by its makers as a 'political column', in a clear reference to traditional theatre journalism, it would be more accurate, bearing in mind David Hare's warning that 'good theatre should never be confused with journalism", to describe the true denomination of Lessons in Revolting as 'Verbatim' theatre �ê" a kind of documentary theatre in which plays are constructed from the precise words spoken by people in evidence, witnessing or remembering, when interviewed or questioned about a particular event or topic. Originating in the USA in the 1930s' federally funded 'Living Newspaper Project' as a form of tribunal or theatre journalism, it has since developed into a genre of immense range and power, focusing on politics, racial crimes, civil wars, sectarian feuds, man-made or natural disasters, or even sporting events, reaching something of a peak in Britain, the USA and Australia in the late 1990s. In the Arab world, it is mostly associated with the work of Lebanese writer and director Rabeh Mroue, whose How Nancy Wished that Everything Was an April Fool's Joke was seen in Cairo, at Rawabet, in November, 2007. Earlier that sane year, in February, Simon Sharkey, an associate director at the National Theatre of Scotland (launched in February 2006), had conducted a workshop on 'Verbatim Theatre in the cour4se of the 4th edition of The Bibliotheca Alexandrina's Creative Forum for Independent Theatre Groups. Requiring no particular skills in dramatic writing in a traditional sense, no imaginative mediation, manipulation of facts, or embroidering of real events, and thus offering a 'democratic formula' that could be easily and rapidly replicated, verbatim theatre seems ideally suited to our troubled, uncertain and volatile reality in post-25-Janauary Egypt. It is not surprising, therefore, that since that date, when reality suddenly upstaged any kind of theatrical representation, engrossing us all in a series of riveting spectacles, staged mostly in Tahrir Square, a number of young Egyptian theatre makers, including some who had never even heard of verbatim theatre, have taken to working in this mode, collecting and integrating personal narratives, factual media reports and interviews with real people and creating immediate forums for communal experience-sharing, free political expression and direct campaigning. The result has been a string of verbatim theatre performances, some of which, like Dalia Basiouny's Tahrir Stories: Pages from the Tahrir Diary, Hani Abdel Naser's By the Light of the Revolution Moon and Laila Soliman's No Time for Art 1 (an interactive theatre performance to honor the martyrs of the Revolution) and No Time for Art 2 (a performance about police and military violence against civilians), were authentic, compelling and deeply moving. Lessons, however, was an altogether different kettle of fish. It was multinationally funded, albeit on a very modest scale, and was designed to tour, playing to multinational audiences in several European capitals. The question of authenticity �ê" the authenticity of the personal narratives of the troupe's individual members of the harassment and abuses they experienced at the hands of the military during and after the January demonstrations �ê" which would never raised in Cairo, indeed, was taken for granted and had such an emotional weight, crucial in the reception of the piece, would automatically become an issue among strangers elsewhere. It would not do to only rely on video recordings played back in the actors/narrators' presence on stage, a ploy that makes them at once 'subject' and 'object' in their narratives, at once witness and arbiter of the veracity of the recorded evidence; theatre has been known to use such devices to pass off fiction as fact in the interest of a higher truth. In such a case as Lessons found itself in, only the authenticating power of art could be trusted to. And, indeed, it was in this power that Soliman and her partners �ê" (co-dramaturge and director Ruud Gielens, movement and choreography designer Karima Mansour, musical directors Maurice Louca and Mustafa Said, video artist Aida El Kashef, costume designer Lina Ali, and activists/performers Aly Khamees, Aly Sobhy, Maryam, Omar Mostafa and Salma Said, together with assistant directors: Hussam Hilali and Sherin Hegazy, technical director Saber El Sayed, technical director assistant Sherif El Daly, lighting technicians Shaimaa Gazzar and Mohamed Anwar, translators Ebtihal Shedid and Katharine Halls, graphic designer Adham Bakry, and publicity designer, Nagoud Nazmy) �ê" put their trust. That the ultimate result has not quite matched the creative effort and arduous, disciplined work they all unstintingly expended on Lessons is, perhaps, a fault of the murky, anxiety-ridden times in which we live. Indeed, while the video footage, projected on a large back screen (which made up the whole set) at the beginning of the show, seemed deliberately made to look fuzzy, or as if amateurishly shot by mobile cameras on the spot, in the heat of battle, presumably to recreate the feelings of chaos, vagueness and opacity that permeated those days, the accompanying captions, which flashed bits of information and irritatingly disappeared before you could read them, were perhaps meant to generate the same sense of frustration at the difficulty and uncertainty of communicating, circulating or receiving any information with any accuracy experienced by all at the time. Indeed, everything on stage was calculated to frustrate, confuse and provoke anxiety. At many points, the images flashing on the screen distracted attention from the actors on stage who, for most of the time, mimed throwing stones, dragging the bodies of the dead and wounded, writhing and crawling in pain, physically recreating what they have seen and been through in Tahrir Square. While the individual monologues were intensely subjective and only told what the speakers had personally experienced, some movement and dance sequences were metaphoric, projecting powerful images of oppression, expressed physically in terms of a conscious power struggle between individuals, ending ironically with the weaker-looking victor standing atop the burly prostrate figure of the vanquished, singing a lullaby to sooth him to sleep, or a cool, systematic contraction and distortion and of a helpless human body by a gang while the victim (Miriam) eerily intoned a poignant, epistolary song (addressed by a peasant father to his son at the front), drawn from the Sheikh Imam/Ahmed Fuad Nigm memorable repertoire. One could protest that, more than often, the video images distracted attention from the live performance on stage, that, except for some fleeting moments, the choreography failed to imaginatively match the powerful reality or the video image, that the monologues could have been better orchestrated to intersect and musically. poetically connect to intensify their impact, as, indeed, Soliman had done in her piece No Art 2, or that the show seemed more monologic than dialogic, failing to juxtapose the words of the victims to those of the persecutors and, therefore, seemed one-sided and at times a touch hectoring. To make up for this dialogic lack in terms of material, however, Lessons seemed to deliberately communicate, on the artistic level, a rising tension between the intimacy, immediacy and transparency of the personal accounts/reports/experiences that made up the individual monologues and their mode of spontaneous, emotionally coloured representation/voicing on stage, on the one hand, and the often stylized movement and dance, which worked to create an aesthetic distance that would free the verbal life-monologues, as signifiers, by placing them within a different system of signification that could hint at other meanings and interpretations. There was also what seemed like a remarkable determination on the part of the perpetrators of Lessons not to sentimentalize or romanticize the revolutionaries. Rather than downplay it, the show highlighted the rough ruggedness of the main male actors/testifiers, who, menacingly wielding knives and rough, improvised swords, unabashedly displayed the language and manners of the lower depths of Egyptian society, of the most deprived and marginalized sections of the population, of those who live in shanty towns and are smugly and stolidly dismissed as thugs and vagabonds by polite society. There was a lot of honest truth in such vulgar displays and, also, an abundant theatricality. The performances/testimonies of Ali Khamees and Ali Sobhi, two wonderful artists culled from the rubbish dumps of Cairo, were a rude and sobering challenge to conventional definitions of the 'good citizen'. Using the language of the dispossessed, in the context of richly possessed and socially privileged spectators, Ali Sobhi's final speech (based on an article by Mohamed El-Seedi) �ê" his last outburst of defiance to the military council, waving the threat of popular, guerilla warfare in the streets and alleys of Cairo and commando raids, like the ones conducted against the British when they occupied Suez �ê" was luridly quixotic and painfully naïve, as if pronounced by an alien, thoroughly out of touch with what Cairo, its streets and people have become. This pathetic, romantically delusional speech was followed by a final, repetitive dance of defiance, which went on and on, as if it would go on forever, making us marvel at the stamina of the dancers, some of whom flagged for a minute or two, withdrawing to the back to catch their breath before joining in again. When the music seemed to flag with the effort, the dancers continued fiercely, forcing it to pick up again and rejoin them. Rather than they moving to the music, they were the ones that moved the music to play at their will. They were literally 'calling the tune.' It was then that one realized that, apart of its faults and shortcomings, what Lessons in Revolting was all about and where its power lay. Masquerading as a 'political column' rather than an expression of lived experiences and raw emotions, this hybrid, multimedia musical performance that merged verbatim theatre with agit prop, seemed basically inspired by a will to enshrine youthful defiance and energy. However, in the process of doing so, it also involuntarily revealed the vulnerability of youth, its naïve understanding of freedom, its pathetic delusions of its own strength, and its lack of a clear vision of future goals and practicable plans to achieve them. It is to the credit of the Lessons' team that they did not simply put actors on stage, pretending to take responsibility for real-world events, in the old fashioned way, but real individuals, who, while being actors, had actually taken such a responsibility and suffered for it. Whatever the multinational audiences of this show may think of it, I sincerely hope that those who saw it in Rawabet, where it played from 19 to 23 August, did not go away feeling that, having been dutifully outraged by the representation of the abuses of the military, justice has been served. I would hate to think that, like many verbatim theatre pieces, Lessons was nothing but yet another instance in series of reminders that, as one blogger has put it: "when Bad Things happen it's easier to try (and perhaps fail) to represent an injustice accurately than it is to work to conceive of an alternative."
