Nehad Selaiha finds enchantment and food for thought at the Creative forum for Independent Theatre in Alexandria The star performance in this year's edition of the Creative Forum for Independent Theatre Groups -- a Euro-Mediterranean, cultural-theatrical encounter that the Arts Centre of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has been holding annually since 2004 -- was Iphigenia in Aulis by the world-renowned Gardzienice company from Poland. When in 1969, this selfsame company, which Wlodzimierz Staniewski set up in 1977 with the idea of creating "a truly new theatre, one rooted in life," to use his own words, brought its 1990 production, Carmina Burana, to the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre, it literally bowled over the fortunate ones who were able to watch it. It was like nothing we had ever seen before in Egypt. Staniewski' method of fusing 'high' and 'low' culture, drawing on a wide variety of ancient literary sources and folk traditions in original, exciting ways and dissolving the elements he chooses from them into one vocal/physical mobile totality, together with his actors' stunning psychic energy and unique style of combining semi-acrobatic movement with intensive, ecstatic song, made Carmina Burana an electrifying and utterly unforgettable experience. You can imagine how lucky and excited I felt watching Gardzienice's reworking of Euripides's ancient text. Here, as in Carmina Burana, music formed the basis of the performance and provided its structure and dramatic substance. But, whereas Carmina Burana had merged the legend of Tristan and Isolde with other Celtic tales, calling up the figure of the magician Merlin and his earthly lover Vivian, together with folk songs and religious hymns from the 13th century, the present production used a more familiar source which spared the audience the task of trying to construct a story-line and allowed them to concentrate more on the style of presentation and enjoy its inspiring beauty. The story of king Agamemnon's decision to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, a virgin on the point of marriage, to the gods to facilitate his invasion and sacking of Troy in revenge for Paris's abduction of the fair Helen, wife of his brother Menelaus, and the failure of his horrified wife, Clytemnestra, to prevent the slaughter was broken up into 20 scenes, or fragments and presented in the characteristic style of the Gardzienice, in a space entirely filled with music and song. The performance unfolded in the presence of a live orchestra and grew out of the dialogue between Euripides's text and Zygmunt Konieczny original score and the collaboration of the actors/singers, or 'perpetrators of the performance', as Staniewski prefers to call them, and the musicians. Together, they created 'a musical structure wholly dependent on the architecture of sound', in the words of the Polish theatre-scholar and critic Zbigniew Taranienko. Though the story is familiar, everything seemed excitingly, refreshingly strange at the beginning; the music seemed to break all the known rules and forms and go its own sweet way, often making a virtue of dissonance and antinomy and following contrasting rhythms; instead of defined characters, with clearly assigned roles, most of the time, the actors acted like a choir, with some of its members occasionally differentiating themselves as individuals and speaking the words of a certain character, then merging back into the collective body; moreover, their singing was often antiphonal and seemed linked organically to their physicality, producing a new, demonstrative and extremely direct style of performance where every gesture and movement, every action or activity was often multiplied, thickened, and fused with music; whether they sang, declaimed, danced, or leapt around, or acted like clowns or acrobats, they kept us enthralled and seemed to cast a spell on the whole auditorium. Their performance was spun out of contrasting, pulsating rhythms, a mixture of the sacred and the profane, and was characterized by counterpoint, and overstatement, the play of opposing moods and sudden changes of key, stressing all the time the ambivalence of meaning. Rather than tell a story, or treat us to another interpretation of Euripides's pay, Iphigenia in Aulis spoke to us, in vivid, audio-visual terms, about the contrasts of life and the simultaneity of opposing phenomena. Played on boxes, which the actors kept rearranging in different formations, dispersing them, or piling them up on top of each other, it seemed to take us back to the origins of theatre in magic and to transform the stage into a Theatrum Mundi displaying the play of primeval passions, cosmic forces and erotic drives. Eschewing realism in a drastic way, and putting us face to face with the magical powers of theatre with devastating directness, it created through its dynamism and ecstatic scenes a new, overwhelmingly intense reality, full of dissonance and tensions, songs and dances, shouts, whistles, moving processions, clowning, high leaps, sensual desire, incantations and magic. The impact was positively euphoric. The method of work initiated by Wlodzimierz Staniewski and his Gardzienice troupe was very much in my mind at the roundtable discussion which centered this year on the question of whether theatre was a life necessity. I had read a summary of a book written by Zbigniew Taranienko on the troupe, and when many of the participants, particularly Angie Bual, from Scotland, spoke about the need to work outside mainstream theatre, and away from its moneyed, bourgeois audiences and respectable venue in the big cities, and take theatre to new spaces, to the deprived and socially marginalized, breaking class barriers, and transforming it into a communal life- necessity rooted in a spirit of sharing, I remembered that Taranienko had quoted Staniewski saying, at the international ITI congress in Sofia, in 1979: "I believe that if there is to be a true new theatre, one rooted in life, then we ought to fight for something more basic, a new natural environment of the theatre. For the past two years, this idea, this concept has served the Gardzienice company (which I head) as the elementary principle. This new, natural environment in our experience consists of: "- leaving the town, not only the theatre building but also the city street, "- addressing oneself to people -- the audience, consumers, who are undefiled by 'routine behaviour', undefiled by inculcated and modeled reaction or stereotyped scale of values, a conventional scale of assessment, "- entering the space that is unknown, or has been abandoned by the theatre." Defining this undefiled space, he had gone on to say: "By space, I do not mean yet another 'closed' circle', fortified by dry rules and rituals. I do not mean yet another stage. By space I mean an area and the substance of the land and the substance of the sky bound by that area...My concern is that these substances become the living participants in the event." Fortunately, Zbigniew Taranienko was at this roundtable, but when I enquired as to the whereabouts of the wonderful Staniewski, he said that he was in the Western desert, exploring the Bedouin cultural heritage and hunting for more authentic folk material among the oases dwellers to incorporate into his training method and use in future shows. Guided by Mikhail Bakhtin's interpretation of folk culture as an inexhaustible source of art -- a treasure trove of archaic gesture and rich song, he had gone to the desert in search of 'Bakhtin's conception of a folk, dynamic picture of the world, the sense of which is determined by the ruthless force of life,' to quote Taranienko's words. There were other delightful performances in the Forum which I hope to tell you about in my next article. But, as you know, there is more to the forum than just hosting exquisite performances for the delectation and edification of its audiences. It has a serious cultural and educational side as well: and this year, besides the roundtable on theatre as a life need, the Forum organized another 2-day roundtable discussing the reality and prospects of the training programmes in the performing arts currently available in the Arab world. There were also, as usual, several training and educational programmes running simultaneously side by side: the international classroom for theatre students, a new 9-day, 45- hour, free educational programme for beginners in theatre jointly sponsored by the Bibliotheca, the Swedish Institute and the International Association for Creation and Training (I-act), an Egyptian NGO established with help from Sweden, launched in 2007; a number of training workshops for actors, technicians school theatre activators; not to mention a special children's workshop called Get Moving/ Street Dance offered for the first time this year and conducted by the exuberant Phax Ahamada from Sweden, himself a professional street-dancer who works a lot with immigrant communities in Sweden. The Forum also diligently pursued its publication programme. And, as in the previous edition, Arabic translations of five new dramatic texts by foreign authors from different cultures, plus an English translation of a new play by a promising young Arab writer, were published by the Library in a bilingual form and their authors were hosted in an open meeting with the public. This translation/ publication programme, which seeks to establish and maintain an ongoing dialogue between cultures through theatre, was initiated by the Forum, like the international classroom, also in its 4th edition in 2007, in cooperation with the Swedish Institute in Alexandria and the Goethe Institute in Egypt. Its first fruits were: The Immigration Theatre, a volume containing 5 plays by expatriate Arab authors, from different Arab countries, and another entitled Three Texts from Contemporary German Theatre. In the next Forum, in 2008, five more new dramatic texts from Europe were translated into Arabic while Bissat Ahmadi (idiomatically, the all embracing rug where all can sit, openly speak their minds and behave quite naturally, without ceremony by the Tunisian Hakim Marzougui was done into English. This year, the cultural/theatrical dialogue gained momentum as six more new plays by young playwrights, all of them by women, and published in the same bilingual form, were added to the list of the Forum's publications. Moreover, the meeting with the authors, which used to be held at the conference room of Swedish Institute in was expanded this year and turned into a larger and more elegant and ceremonious public event. To accommodate more people and make it more accessible to the public, the Forum organizers transferred the meeting with the six writers to the small theatre in the Bibliotheca and prepared a specially made documentary film about them, which was played at the beginning of the event while they sat on stage before us in a semicircle. This was a brilliant idea which nearly made up for the absence of Maltese writer, Clare Azzopardi, who could not come, but whose lovely presence in the film matched the vitality and bewitching appeal of her poignant and extremely hilarious text L-Interdett That is-Sodda (Interdiction under the Bed). One day I would like to have the opportunity and time to write more extensively about L-Interdett That is-Sodda -- a haunting play which consists of two monologues, one by a prematurely dead young woman who was excommunicated by the Catholic Church and consigned to burial in unholy ground for her socialist beliefs, and another, by a sardonic gravedigger, very much like the cynically wise and clowning gravediggers in Hamlet. I think her text would ring a bell with many young women in Egypt today; and in my case, it has let loose a jangling din of memories. But these are all after reflections; what I am describing now happened after the event I am trying to describe, when I had had time to read the texts. On 3 February, when the meeting with the authoresses took place, I, like all the audience at the small theatre in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, had not read the texts and were there only to celebrate their presence. At 6pm, on 3 February, writer Sahar El-Mogi, acting as hostess/translator, invited us all to watch the documentary, then asked each of her guests to introduce her translated work or read bits from it; this done, she invited the audience to the stage to get free copies of the plays autographed by the writers. It was a delightful ceremony, which I hope would become a tradition in the forum in future sessions. At the end of this event, however, and just as we were preparing to leave, we were shown an 8-minute film that the Palestinian Al-Hara theatre troupe had sent to greet the Forum and explain that they could not join us because they could not get permits to cross from Ramallah into Egypt. You can imagine the effect this had on all of us. Another guest who could not join us, but this time for health rather than political reasons, was Croatian writer Lydia Scheurmann whose famous Maria play about a mother and her daughter who gets raped during the conflict in former Yugoslavia was performed in this session by a Syrian troupe. So far, the play has been performed in over 12 countries, in different languages, and Lydia did see an Egyptians version in Cairo over a year ago. She was so keen to see the Syrian interpretation that she was willing to pay her own passage to Alexandria since the Forum does not pay travel costs but had to cancel everything at the last minute. Though I saw many friends at the Forum, nothing could compensate for Lydia's absence, or that of Scottish director Andrew McKinnon, who had also planned to come. I left Alexandria with one consolation -- Gardzienice's Iphigenia in Aulis. 6th Creative Forum for Independent Theatre Groups: Europe-Mediterranean, Alexandria, 1-10 February, 2009.
