Quizzing out two of the country's best-known acting coaches, Nesmahar Sayed attends a workshop by one of them Gamal Thabet and Ahmed Kamal, two prominent acting coaches, share a love for this seemingly arcane profession -- an aspect of the actor's work that seems to have taken on a life all its own. A coach must be an accomplished actor, as they both agree, referring to the occasional moment of jealously towards their students, not so much of their professional achievements but of their ability, at a given moment, to express a feeling or an image. They have both had extensive experience of coaching, but each loves it in his own way. Yet they happen to share the same academic background, strangely enough, being graduates of the history department of the faculty of arts at Cairo University. Kamal remembers his years as a student with particular fondness of it was at this stage, he says, that he first received acting direction from teachers doubling as informal coaches. He developed a great love for the profession. For Thabet, however, significant memories came at a somewhat later stage. He remembers when he travelled to the US to study cinema and theatre: "Teachers would often ask my opinion of a particular actor's acting and how it might be improved, I don't know why. But I found myself responsible for actors and their performance." Since then Thabet has developed enormous skill: "From one session, if I find out that there is no space between the feeling and a performer's expression of it, this means that this performer has the raw material to be an actor." Thabet acknowledges, in particular, his debt to Shozo Sato, the Japanese coach with whom he worked on a version of Othello to represent the US at the 1996 Cairo Experimental Theatre Festival held. Sato introduced Thabet to a methodological approach to coaching. But it was Nabil Mounib, an acting and directing professor at the Cairo Theatre Arts Institute, who laid the foundations of coaching in Egypt, working, as Kamal explains, among students, out of his love for directing actors. Both Kamal and Thabet later trained to be professional coaches. Kamal attended numerous workshops in Europe, the US and the Arab world. "I gained my coaching experience from 23 coaches around the world," he says, "in addition to my readings in acting, psychology and drama, and watching all kinds of arts." Following his stint with Sato, Thabet took one more course with a French coaching teacher, then quickly started coaching the actors working with his director friends. "By 1996, I started working on my own, eventually joining the well- known John Robert Powers Agency -- established in 1927." One might conclude that the profession of coaching remains closely tied with that of acting. But Kamal -- for one -- says he will coach anyone who wants to act, out of his belief that acting is a form of self- expression to which anyone who wants it has the right. "Coaching," he insists, "is not always for the purpose of performing professionally. It also helps people develop their character and improve their tools of communication to be used with other people." Yet to what extent do actors, professional actors, need coaching? Kamal believes it is precisely to the extent to which they need to renew or improve their methods or regenerate their abilities. "Regeneration is a principal concern of the actor regarding concentration, imagination and how they experience life." Thabet agrees, but says there is more to coaching than simply aiding in the natural process of regeneration and renewal. "A coach should know everything about the actor -- enough to be able to adjust and fine-tune the tools with which they work." A coach, says Thabet, is neither a teacher nor a lecturer: "His role is to help an actor confront the audience persuasively, to show them how to pace words and when to cut a phrase." Many feel that it may well be the absence of coaching that accounts for a perceived drop in the skill of Egyptian actors, particularly film actors. For Thabet this is part of a much wider trend in society, which suffers from hypocrisy and dishonesty. Where a community loses its truthfulness, its purity, Thabet says, "It is only natural for members of that community to be happy watching acting that lacks truth and lucidity of feeling." Few actors now feel instead of indicating the feeling, Thabet goes on to explain: besides the late idol Ahmad Zaki, actors from previous generations like Mahmoud El-Meligi, Zaki Rostom, Mahmoud Mursi, Zeinat Sidki, Fardous Mohamed, and the veteran Faten Hamama could "live the moment", and so can younger actors like Menna Shalabi, Yehia El-Fakharany and Hend Sabri. Yet the vast majority, he feels, make do with "indicating", partly due to lack of interest in coaching. Its precise role notwithstanding, coaching is increasingly seen as an essential part of the production process, with a rising number of casting agencies taking it very seriously. One such is the Acting Studio Agency ( Studio Al-Mumathil ), founded by actor Mahmoud Hemeida 16 years ago. According to Kamal, "Out of his belief in the importance of coaching, Hemeida was the first in Egypt to establish a studio to train actors on a daily schedule -- not aiming for profit but to introduce acting to people in general and to the new generations in particular." Kamal has been responsible for the Studio for six years, and regards coaching as ongoing homework for actors. "All intelligent actors do it to stay fit," he says. "Otherwise they'd be employees." Nor is there a maximum age to start. As Thabet puts it, "It is never too late to start acting." You can be any age, he explains, and you can have any kind of career: once the impulse to act is felt, there is no reason not to join a workshop. Thabet remembers coaching a 73-year-old female body builder whose job was to advertise sporting products; when it was time for her to say a few words in the ad," Thabet recounts, "then it was my responsibility". He has coached children, elderly people and lawyers as well as actors; people from all kinds of backgrounds have passed his studios. The issue, he says, is to eliminate the space between what people feel and how they reflect it. He has a specific phrase for this process -- living the moment. Living the moment -- eliminating the omnipresent distance between the feeling and its expression -- is much easier for children, who make much better coaching students. "The child," says Thabet, "expresses what they feel directly without calculating or predetermining the consequences, without thinking about their image or what other people might think -- whether they will be accepted by society after expressing themselves." That was the motivation behind Kamal's work with NGOs in the field of development through art; his role was to train teachers to train students to express themselves creatively through dramatic arts. "In advanced countries," Kamal says, "the importance of developing the imagination of people in the 18-30 age bracket is now widely recognised. It improves not only communication skills and the will to self-improvement but also love of life." It is everyone's right to have a go at acting, Kamal argues. It was in recognition of the fact that art is akin to instinct, with people singing, dancing, writing and of course acting to express themselves that drove the government in the 1960s to establish the institution of the cultural palaces. "Sadly that institution is no longer playing that role," Kamal goes on to explain, "which has now duly shifted to the NGO scene." But development and self- improvement are not coaching's only fields. As it turns out, coaching is also a form of psychiatric therapy. Already ten psychiatrists have trained with Kamal over a period of three years with a view to implementing acting methods with their patients. Creativity is not new to psychiatry, which -- aside from its medical constituents -- is "the profession of performing characters". But few Egyptian professionals had resorted to acting as such. Since then, Kamal declares with pride, patients have responded very well to drama and activity therapy: "Some of them even joined workshops at the Studio and they were interested in particular in the character-development exercises which helped a lot." *** Thankfully I have had occasion to test these hypotheses on myself -- a 37-year-old journalist with two children, who wears hijab. I was somewhat afraid of embarrassing myself when I first received the invitation to join one of Thabet's workshops. So I phoned the friend who made the suggestion to find out if it was really intended for me. "But of course," she laughed, explaining that it had more to do with self- expression than professional acting as such. I was persuaded. I had not acted since primary school, when I played the role of a mother whose baby another woman was vying for at court; the judge, secretly to find out which is the true mother, suggests splitting the baby into two -- to which I had to cry out, "No! Never! Let her have it if you must but do not do that." So, in addition to wondering whether it would work as stress relief therapy, which I really needed, the workshop made me feel as if I was ten again, without responsibilities or troubles. Thabet wasted no time. I had barely arrived when he stood us all in a circle and we began a communication warming- up exercise -- a kind of meditation I had never practised -- namely to concentrate, while we stood there, on creating a protecting circle around myself and regulating my breathing while I did so. The idea was to exhale all those negative feelings and images that might upset my soul, inhaling images and feelings that I might love or enjoy -- relating to people, events, even photographs with a particular emotional value could be recalled for the purpose. The step, as we were told, was meant to replace the blackness inside us with a brightness and an openness that would facilitate access to the feelings we would be evoking. While still in the circle, we did some stretching exercises and tried to think of our bodies as mirrors of our souls. Some of those movements, I was doing for the first time in my life -- and I found them to be truly relaxing. Then we were asked to open and close our mouths periodically, forming our lips into a circle and uttering an elongated "ah" while we did so; the test of whether the exercise succeeded, indicating that focus did replace lack of focus, was whether or not the circle appeared at the same time as the sound was heard. The whole group except for one member would be asked to do the exercise, then that member was asked to explain what the sound meant to them be it a voice, an image, a colour, a place, or nothing at all. Or only one member would do the exercise, thinking of a particular feeling, and each of the others would talk about what it meant to them; in the latter case, success was determined by whether or not that particular feeling was transferred to the others. Thabet constantly indicated that success, in this regard, was not the opposite of failure, making sure none of the participants felt any negative pressure. Thabet was particularly pleased with the ability of one teenager, Badr, to express his feelings clearly, never forcing an image or an idea on himself. It was already time to move onto the next exercise, and these preparations had evidently proved effective in preparing each and every one of us for it. The location was a bus station, but the scenario was different for each one: each was expected to sit at the bus station and project a particular story- line determined by Thabet. In mine, I was a 44-year-old mother with a 17-year-old daughter; and I had just found out that I was terminally ill and was wondering whether to tell my daughter and the rest of the family. The object was to communicate the fact without uttering a single word -- and I did it. After seeing my performance, one member of the group said that I had heard bad news about myself or a very close relation; another, that the bad news was about me, the files I had pretended to look out were medical test results... "Great!" said Thabet. And I went home overjoyed. (The experience was to repeated at every other session, which each involved a different exercise.) The workshop had provided much needed relief from my daily routine -- something I had needed for a long time without knowing where to get it. Thanking my friend, I told her about weeping as soon as I thought of dying and leaving my own children behind, about the immense sense of joy that had overtaken me after weeks of stress, and my excitement about attending a session in which I would be expected to speak. Perhaps the most remarkable part was that, being in a place other than my own, having an experience I had never had, I was able not only to have but more importantly to communicate a specific emotion. I could see life as someone else would, and it was the most liberating moment in my life. For a few weeks, I thought, I was cured.
