Nehad Selaiha finds out what's on offer at the 10-day Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre which starts tomorrow It seems that the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET) has finally decided this year to publicly recognize the independent theatre movement in Egypt and acknowledge its valuable contribution over the festival's previous editions. Not only has the festival board chosen to make the independent theatre movement all over the world the topic of this edition's 3-day international symposium (with the first session focusing on 'the concept' itself and its 'beginnings', the second, on its 'artistic and intellectual manifestations', and the third, on 'the problems and dilemmas threatening its existence') it has also planned a special roundtable focusing on the movement in Egypt. Though the speakers at this roundtable will be all Egyptian -- mainly the founders and supporters of the 1990 movement and their troupes -- any foreign guests who care to attend it and take part in the discussion will be more than welcome. Artists like Hassan El-Gretly, Ahmed El-Attar, Nora Amin, Hani Ghanem, Effat Yehia, Abeer Ali, Hani El-Mettenawi, Mohamed Abul-Su'ood, Sayed Fu'ad, Mohamed Abdel-Khaliq, Azza El-Husseini and Rasha Abdel Mon'im, with whom the movement has become associated, are hoping to rally for support from fellow independent artists in other countries and do some trans- national bonding. Significantly, Fawzi Fahmi, the chairman of the festival since its incipience, has made the independent theatre movement worldwide the subject of his formal address in this edition. Acknowledging that the "alternative theatre constitutes a phenomenon that is not limited to one particular geographical area, but spreads in a variety of forms and manifestation all over the world theatre map," he goes on to recognize that in theory and practice alternative theatre "embodies its own choices and referential registers of ideas, values, meanings and conceptions," that "its target is to oppose the dominant trend in order to allow the culture of the times in which it exists to come effectively into its own," and that it has always had "to wrestle with the forces that attempt to push it off the cultural scene and to struggle, at every turn and twist, to continue to inspire and nurture free creativity, rejecting all systems of coercion and subordination, be they intellectual, artistic, or organizational." Quite heartening to read, isn't it? But more encouraging still is the following concession that "the alternative theatre has made its presence felt through different faces and voices that have embodied their protests in works of art which clearly demonstrated its bid to oppose the overweening impudence of the prevailing and dominant status quo. "In some cases," Fahmi adds, "the alternative theatre was not satisfied to simply coexist side by side with mainstream theatre and run parallel to it; rather, it sought to engage it in dialogue in order to change it, whether by urging it to explore new styles, revise what it traditionally regarded as the constants of theatrical creativity, or by suggesting new interpretations through performance methods, introducing new writings, separating theatre from literature, adopting a different course in dealing with the repertoire, opposing censorship, or clamouring for financial support." The representatives of the independent theatre in Egypt would do well to quote this at their roundtable to embarrass the ministry of culture into responding to some of their legitimate demands. It is possible, of course, as some pessimists cynically maintain, that this is all a show staged for the benefit of our foreign guests to peddle to them the idea that the Egyptian system and its cultural policy makers encouraged free expression and non-governmental initiatives. To corroborate their view, those pessimists could quote the mortifying item in the festival statute which stipulates that for any independent troupe to be allowed into the festival at all, even as a fringe performance -- let alone to be considered for the international contest -- it has to mask its independent identity and present itself under the name of a state theatre company or any government-affiliated organization. Examples are plentiful, you would have to admit; only this year, two of the four performances entered under the name of Al-Tali'a (Avant-garde) theatre are by independent troupes who had to forgo their names. In the case of Al-Hanager, two of its three entries are by independent troupes hosted by the centre at the last minute; but, at least, these get to keep their names on the billboards side by side with the centre's. Even if what the pessimists say turns out to be true, the fact remains that for the first time since the Egyptian independent theatre movement was publicly launched with the 1st Free Theatre Festival in 1990, the chairman of the state theatre committee at the Supreme Council for Culture has deigned to personally contact the independent troupes, urging them not to boycott the roundtable and to turn it into a forum for airing their demands, and promising to make it the basis for a solid, government-sponsored plan to support the movement in a systematic, less haphazard way than has been happening so far. Further more, any one perusing the festival schedule this year will be struck by the fact that out of the 27 Egyptian entries, at least 17 are contributed by independent troupes, regional theatre clubs, or amateurs working in the two creativity centres in Cairo and Alexandria. Of the 27 productions competing for the two places allocated to Egypt in the international contest, the selection committee appointed to execute this horrendous task has seen 10 so far. And of these, the most promising were Tashkil (Forging), by Dalia El-Abd's troupe, and Cafeteria, by the Alexandrian Wogooh (Faces) troupe, both independent and both entered under Al-Hanager's name. In Tashkil, El-Abd, who conceived, designed and choreographed the piece, forges a metaphoric illustration, through dance, video projections and pointed use of costumes, of the changes that occurred in Egyptian society under the impact of economic globalization and their effects on mental attitudes and physical appearance at all levels of society. Though the performance the committee saw took place in atrocious conditions, at the torn-down, gutted-out Al-Hanager centre, immediately after the fire which destroyed the stage at the National Theatre, exacerbating one's fury at the derelict state of that once scintillating centre and the general criminal neglect of our theatres in Egypt, Tashkil had enough power to make its beauty shine through regardless of surrounding gloom. Cafeteria, collectively thought up and written by Wogooh (Faces), an independent troupe from Alexandria, and directed by Mohamed Fu'ad, plays a variation on the same theme, but more intimate and personalized. Using dance, scraps of isolated monologues, a stirring soundtrack and live vocal motifs provided by a singer at the back, Cafeteria bodies forth the terrible loneliness, sense of alienation and feelings of futility and utter insignificance experienced by four young people, two men and two women, sitting at separate tables in a cafeteria. While one of them alternately reads a book and describes to some imaginary person a nature programme about leopards she has seen on television, another writes a letter to his parents which he tears up as soon as he has finished it, the third tries to talk to someone on her mobile and only produces meaningless sounds which end up in a crescendo of screams, and the fourth is busy chatting to some female on his laptop and occasionally baring parts of his body and exposing them to the screen. What goes on in their minds underneath this cool surface of mundane activities is intermittently glimpsed in the form of violent outbursts of interaction which at once express a desperate need for communication and a deadly fear of it. Finally, the performance which began with the bursting of two sacks stuffed full of cotton wool and sawdust and hanging from the flies, ends with a symbolic gang murder of one of the two young men and a bout of unbridled aggression. Fax, billed as a production of Al-Tali'a, is in fact, another offering from the independent sector, and quite an interesting one too. Conceived and directed by Sherif El-Mursi, it featured several different locations at once, some real, some metaphoric, playing them against each other and occasionally merging them. It began with a little girl dressed as a bride standing behind a man in a traditional peasant galabiya while he recited excerpts from the famous Egyptian Mawwal, or ballad, which tells the story of two peasant star-crossed lovers, Hassan, a singer, and Na'ima, the daughter of a well-to-do farmer. When this is done, the little girl is carried and placed in front of the corrugated metal shutter of a small shop on one side, owned by a man in a frayed, old-fashioned suit and tarbouche who proceeds to lift it up. The rest of the cast, who have been standing in the shadows, then gather round this structure and pull it down over the prostrate body of the little girl/bride turning it into a tomb. Then one of them, an American young woman in a short, printed, sleeveless dress, begins to deliver a frantic monologue against female genital mutilation and its disastrous consequences, hysterically repeating it time after time and obsessively combing her short hair all the while. A few steps behind her, in a softer pool of light, an Egyptian young woman, clad in black from head to toe, sits washing dirty clothes in a tub and muttering to herself. As the muttering grows louder, we catch words which express how she feels about her body and how people look at it, and at one point, she gets up and comes downstage to shout curses at some unseen man. When she resumes her former position, she begins to make a dough, mixing a heap of flour with dirty water from the washing tub and viciously kneading it. Further on, an African dancer, in a black, close fitting top and slacks, emerges from the shadows and performs a frantic, sensual dance, twisting and turning against a lighted rectangular screen the back, while the light picks up a thin, bespectacled man in an old, bedraggled suit and a tarbouche, sitting at old, cluttered desk on one side, against stacked, dusty-looking bookshelves, rummaging through piles of papers and fat files. A slim, loose haired woman in a long black dress repeatedly invades this office, in the absence of the man, then in his presence, rushing in suddenly to rummage in her turn through the papers and wildly scattering them everywhere. Because the performance-makers are mostly plastic artists, the show was a visual treat, exquisitely manipulating light and darkness to create haunting images and captivating silhouettes. The soundtrack too was quite intriguing and, indeed, Fax looked and sounded positively hypnotic. There was a snag, however, and quite a big one: the story of Hassan and Na'ima seemed thoroughly off point and was extremely distracting. My guess is that it was added as an after thought in the interest of clarity, or to provide the audience with some familiar narrative thread to hold on to. Unfortunately it produced quite the opposite effect, sidetracking the audience and sending them on a wild goose chase after connections between the old ballad and female genital mutilation. Worse still, it aborted all the interesting interpretative possibilities the suggestive images and whole composition invited. Either Sherif El-Mursi underestimated the power of his images and their ability to speak to us directly and hold the show together, or he did not have enough faith in the competence of the audience to make artistic sense of this charming work. Whichever it was, it was a great pity. Also interesting but far more flawed was the other independent production to which Al-Tali'h theatre has lent its name. Written, designed and directed by Rida Hassanein as a multi-media show, Gharqa fi Bahr Al-Shamal (Drowning in the Northern Seas) capitalizes on the illegal immigration craze which has lately smitten young men in Egypt, drowning many of them in the Mediterranean. Against the wreck of a sailing boat, three young men in white suits deliver long poetic monologues expressing their frustration, despair and golden dreams of the North, and as they speak, one becomes progressively uncertain whether they are living people or the ghosts of drowned men. The night we watched them we could make out neither what they were saying (due to week voices and atrocious elocution), nor what was projected on the sails at the back in the way of images (due to bad lighting). Equally baffling was the figure of a woman who kept flitting round the scene like a siren, causing the young men at one point to come to blows over her, the row of men in typical sailor suits who kept barging in softly or belligerently at odd moments (possibly coast guards or immigration officers?) and the painting on an easel on one side which one of the three young men kept working at frantically only to see it torn in half by one of his colleagues. Though the general idea was obvious, Drowned was extremely muddled in its images and details; with better lighting, it could hopefully improve. Another performance which badly needs better lighting is the Puppet Theatre's Muhima Rasmiyya (Official Task) -- a movement, dance and music show, with puppets, a few words and some black theatre sequences, scripted, designed, choreographed and directed by Ahmed Fawzi. It features a strolling artist wandering about the streets with his magic box of tales and thinking up images which materialize through his crystal ball with the help of puppets to comment on the negative behaviour and aspects of the Egyptian street. There are also a number of clowns at a bus stop who repeatedly fail to catch the bus or cross the road and end up as street performers, joining the magical world of the strolling illusion-maker. Though the verbal part here is embarrassingly naïve and sentimental and should be rewritten or removed, the visual aspect could be quite amusing if attention is given to the lighting effects. Nothing however could improve or hope to mend the entry of Folk Arts and Musical Theatre Organisation which should never have appeared anywhere, least of all on the selection committee's viewing list. Naguib Sorour's 1960s' Mineen Ageeb Nas (a political take on the 'ballad of Hassan and Na'ima', in which Na'ima is recreated in the image of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis and made to symbolize oppressed Egypt looking for the dismembered body of her saviour) is a cold, leftover from Ramadan. Sloppily adapted and directed by Hassan Saad, set to beautiful but quite unsuitable music by Mohamed Baher, limply choreographed by Inas Su'oodi and pallidly ranted by TV star Nihal Anbar and veteran actor Samir Husni, it was especially concocted for the holy month and was nightly dished out to unsuspecting audiences in search of a better aid to the digestion than the dozens of TV soap operas we were inundated with. Though Ahmed Zeyada and Gihan Soroor provided some very good singing and Gamal El-Sayed's lyrics vividly drew, like Baher's music, on old popular and folk songs, the musical part of the show failed to integrate with the play and seemed solely intended to shatter its gloomy mood and dilute its outdated message. Sorour's play follows Na'ima as she wanders across the country from south to north, carrying the decapitated head of Hassan to join it to his body which had been thrown in the river, meeting many people on her way, and gaining awareness all the time until she finally realizes that her own personal tragedy and grief are part of larger ones which involve all Egyptians. In this symbolic journey towards consciousness, from darkness to light, from the personal to the political and from submissive meekness to determined protest and rebellion, reality mixes with fantasy as in folk tales and peasant women rub shoulders with fairies and demons. Rendered as Sorour wrote it, against Mohamed Hashim's simple set (which consisted solely of a semicircular ramp at the back, in the form of a bridge across a canal, and various painted backdrops showing traditional scenes of the Egyptian countryside) the play would have passed. But director Hassan Saad would not leave well alone. In a bid to update the text and force upon it some contemporary relevance, he did some writing himself; the result was burdening Sorour's already undramatic and verbally overblown text with more squelchy and turgid declamatory speeches, interpolating references to the Euro and the invasion of Iraq, introducing a confusing song which identifies Na'ima with Bahiyya, the heroine of another Mawwal, which Soroor also made into a play called Tell the Eye of the Sun, and borrowing a scene from that same play in which we see Na'ima, now called Bahiyya, dressed in jeans and a sleeveless printed blouse, but still keeping her black head band, and married to the same actor who plays Hassan, only now he speaks the words of Amin, the defeated hero in Tell the Eye, and describes himself in a frenzied fit of self-flagellation as a 'donkey'. It was a 'dog' Amin compared himself to in Sorour's play, if I remember correctly; but never mind; the performance had enough dogs as it was and one less would not make a difference. Here, dogs are always and repeatedly invoked in the parables, speeches and cautionary tales the hapless Na'ima is bombarded with as she trudges through the countryside, and are alternately lauded for their fidelity or abused and cursed for their servility so that by the end of the performance we don't quite know how to take the poor beasts. In the scene that follows this senseless interruption, Na'ima resumes her mourning weeds for no rhyme or reason and retrieves Hassan's swaddled head -- and don't ask me how or why; and after an old popular song about a teacher called Am Hamza and his pupils (El-Talamdha), accompanied by another dance featuring teenage dancers who are supposed to represent the hope for the future, the play abruptly ends, and you only realize it because the dancers stand in a row and bow down or courtesy in expectation of applause. I suppose we should be grateful that the performance ended on a cheerful note and did not take more than two hours to reach it. Still I have not lost heart. With another 17 performances to watch, lined up between the date of writing this article and the opening of the festival, something better is bound to turn up. Keep you fingers crossed and I will tell you how things panned out next week and give you some more tips.
