Nehad Selaiha provides some notes on the 9th Festival for Modern Dance Theatre which has just ended This year, I did not catch as much of the annual Modern Dance Theatre Festival as I would have liked to do. Out of the 15 performances which made up the festival, I watched only 9, and of those 2 I had already seen earlier this year. What follows therefore is not a thorough coverage or evaluation of this year's edition, but rather a few impressions I thought I'd share with you. I missed the opening, but, fortunately, the same programme was repeated the following night. It consisted of a short speech by Walid Aouni, the founder of the festival, in which he dedicated this year's edition to the name of the world-famous choreographer and dancer, Maurice Bejart, who died on 22 November last year. Before he settled in Cairo in the early 1990s, founding the first Arab modern dance theatre troupe at the Cairo Opera House, Aouni had worked as scenographer, set and costume designer with Bejart. For 7 years, between 1983 and 1990, he was close to the great man, coming to regard him not only as a friend and artistic mentor, but also as a kind of guru. The relationship continued until Bejart died and Aouni would often dwell lovingly on their meetings whenever he went abroad. That night he spoke simply, with feeling, and his words communicated great sorrow and a profound sense of loss. As a tribute to Bejart, Aouni had also made a short film consisting of stunningly beautiful excerpts from the master's most famous works, interspersed with brief shots of him during rehearsals or speaking about his work. This film was shown on the first two nights after Aouni's inaugural word and, later, on 3, 10, and 17 June, 3 more films featuring works by Bejart were shown at the open- air theatre of the Opera with commentaries by film and theatre critic and scenarist, Rafiq El-Sabban. After the film, it was time for Aouni's Sheherezade Mona Lisa. I had seen his earlier Sheherezade Korsakov (2002), in which Iraqi composer Naseer Shamma had played some oriental tunes live on his lute, enhancing the oriental atmosphere, and The Secrets of Samarkand which was performed in the open air at the Cairo Citadel the following year, recapturing in the imagination the splendour of that once thriving cultural and commercial centre on the ancient 'Silk Road'. In both works, which have become connected in my mind through their distinctive ambience, it was Aouni's talent as a gifted set and costume designer, as a wizardly creator of theatrical images, that made the deepest impression. In the former, rather than being the centre of attention, the drama of Sheherezade and Shahrayar became a vehicle for a series of sumptuous images. It was as if the movement of the dancers and their deployment on stage were primarily intended to set off and accentuate the beauty of the resplendent sets and exquisite costumes. Samarkand, on the other hand, was blissfully unburdened with a storyline; as the richly sensuous fabrics shimmered and danced among the old ruins or floated on the night breeze, they seemed to hint at myriad fascinating stories and conjure up mysterious worlds. I found Samarkand much more poetically evocative than Sheherezade, firing the imagination with its reckless beauty and sending it to roam free into a legendary past. It is my guess that, unlike some modern dance creators, Aouni does not start with the body of the dancer, allowing its movements to suggest ideas, feelings and images and shape the space around; rather, he starts with a whirl of images, a kind of fluid, surrealistic and quite dynamic landscape in which images constantly float up, merge, dissolve and reform, then fits the bodies and movements of his dancers into it to highlight its beauty and intensify its connotative energy. Though he has drawn in his choreography on many cultures and dance traditions, including oriental (or belly) dancing, Aouni seems more interested in producing rich and complex visual compositions than in exploring the expressive powers of the human body and its hidden, spiritual resources. Rather than the body in stillness or motion, his primary source of inspiration is painting. As well as being a dancer, choreographer, scenographer and costume- designer, Aouni is also a gifted and exciting painter who has held many exhibitions. In his paintings, the human body is never portrayed as a separate entity, as something that has a formal integrity of its own apart from its surroundings; rather, it always melts into them so that instead of an arm you find the branch of a tree and in place of a head you see a lampshade. This impulse creeps into his theatrical creations where the dancers are sometimes weirdly attired, made-up or masked to suggest strange or mythological creatures and where, more often than not, the scenery, adopting an aesthetic of excess, seems to engulf and dwarf them, turning them into visual details. In Sheherezade Mona Lisa, the stage was dominated on all three sides by a number of larger-than-life reproductions of photos of beautiful women -- all of them, with the exception of Princess Diana, famous Egyptian and Western movie stars. On one side you could see Faten Hamama, Shadia, Samia Gamal, Madiha Yusri and Princess Diana, all bewitchingly decked out in elegant evening gowns, and, on the other, Hend Roustom, Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich in seductive poses and sexy dresses; even the old, 3-storey house at the back, with a metal staircase leading upward to a high balcony on which a female dancer in a traditional Egyptian galabiya and head scarf stood at the beginning, vigorously beating an oriental carpet draped on its rail -- even this single structure was plastered all over with blown-up photos of Soad Husni, Magda, Nadia Lutfi and some other old Egyptian actress, in a 1920s' outfit, whose features I could not distinguish since she was stuck up high, behind the door leading inside from the balcony. In front of this building, a number of male and female dancers, in a drab miscellany of modern attire, lolled in chairs round some tables, suggesting the customers of a café. Soon, a fight erupts between two guys over a girl and the party divides into two warring gangs. Their endless fights take up most of the performance time, with the girl periodically rushing into the arms of her lover and hugging him passionately, thus infuriating his rival and triggering another bout of fierce fighting. If you didn't know the title of the piece beforehand, you would never guess that this voluptuous girl, who generates so much passion and violence, is supposed to represent the legendary Sheherezade. It is only in the final sequence, when she and the rest of the cast switch to the kind of ornate, glittering costumes that we habitually associate with the Arabian Nights, and huge tapestries, featuring stock, oriental, garden scenes, in the style of old, Persian illustrations, descend from the flies that you grasp the forced, arbitrary connection. Equally arbitrary was the appearance of an enormous reproduction of La Gioconda, or Mona Lisa, first at the back, propped up against the building, providing a central point from which the gallery of photos of film stars fans out, then, later in the show, sliding across the front of the stage, from side to side, and pausing in the middle, for a couple of minutes, while a dancer climbs up on a chair to dust her face and kiss her on the lips. While the choreography suggested a tale of sex and violence, of love, hatred, death, jealousy and revenge, with some of the dancers mysteriously sprouting small wings on their backs in the course of the action, or manipulating two large, wing-shaped cushions at some point, the title and the scenography moved in another direction, identifying all women, through the pictures of the glamorous stars on stage, with both Leonardo da Vinci's young woman, made famous by her enigmatic smile, and the legendary fiction- weaver, Sheherezade. Indeed, in a note to the show, printed in the Festival's catalogue, Aouni writes that "all women, Mona Lisa or Marilyn Monroe, Hend Roustom or Princess Diana, are Scheherezade." Obviously, this was the basic idea behind the show; and though I find it quite reductive, since there is much more to Sheherezade than mere physical beauty, glamour and sex-appeal, the fact remains that it has inspired the show's highly original and visually intriguing scenography, not to mention its variegated soundtrack in which songs from Iran, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Morocco and Turkey alternated with Korsakov's familiar musical score. The choreography, however, not only fell far short of the scenic design, striking one as simplistic in conception and generally repetitive and banal, it also seemed to pursue a different idea. At many points in the show, I got so tired of the endless, clumsy fighting and so bored with the ungainly, heavy female posing as a modern Sheherezade, that I fervently wished the dancers would freeze, or, better still, completely disappear and leave us in peace to relish the strange and beguiling stage images designed by Aouni. This explains, perhaps, why I found the scenes where the dancers came nearest to forming tableaux vivantes -- like the final one in which the whole cast grouped round a throne, in their gorgeous oriental costumes, against the painted Persian tapestries, as if posing for a photo, or the one in which the female dancers stood on two rows of chairs, facing each other, carrying lampshades with lighted bulbs inside over their heads -- the most interesting and memorable. After this rousing start, the festival seemed to fizzle out, only giving off occasional sparks. Unlike its previous editions, this one hosted no foreign companies and only one from the Arab world: the Tunisian La Compagnie Haraka/Dance. Its Wasm (Stigma), a piece for two male dancers, choreographed and performed by Hafedh Zallit, with Mohamed Bahir as co- performer, was physically vigorous but artistically modest, suggesting a state of imprisonment, a frantic thirst for freedom, and involving a lot of taking off and waving about of shirts. The other shows in the festival were all local and at least two of them -- the Mouroni Studio troupe's Al-'Aberoon (Les Passagers), a word and movement piece inspired by Albert Camus' Mythe de Sisyphe, directed and designed by Omar Ghayat, and Mohamed Rushdi's Itr Al-Hob (Love Perfume), a comic mime show, with some gymnastics, some live music and lots of socks and stockings -- did not qualify as dance theatre at all, another, Mirette Mechail's Shiwayya, Shiwayya (Un peu plus doucement, or Softly, Softly) -- an aimless, spiritless concoction of music, dance, words, songs and video projections -- barely did so, while Nora Amin's Qitt Yuhtadar (A Cat Dying) was already 6 months old, had been seen in Alexandria and Cairo and was reviewed in the Weekly on 24 January, 2008. But while one could justify including a revival of a show like A Cat Dying in the festival on grounds of imaginative power and artistic inventiveness, one would be quite at a loss to explain the poor technical quality of some of the shows, the painful insipidity and vacuousness of others, and the random organisation of most. Though Monadel Antar's Alaat (Machines), one of the best items in the festival, featured some excellent dancing and had a guiding theme -- alienation -- which it metaphorically translated into a simulation of a spaceship which dominates the otherwise empty stage throughout, and out of which an alien from outer space, in the form of a dancing robot, emerges at one point before all the dancers file into it and disappear at the end, it seemed to lose direction at certain points, indulging in a pure display of skills which weighted down the show with more dances than was good for it. Two other works stand out in this festival, or, at least, among the nine I watched: , and Mohamed Fawzi's Zoo which he created and performed with members of his Studio Mansour 95 troupe. Both are political pieces with a powerful subversive intent, but the former is more pronouncedly so than the latter. Inspired by the popular call for a national strike on 6 April this year in protest against the rising food prices -- an initiative which came to naught -- it grimly looks ahead to the same day in the year 2030, forecasting for the ordinary Egyptian an even gloomier future than the present. With the help of a mask, four paper dolls with enormous heads, fixed at the end of sticks to the four corners of a table, representing the high and mighty in conference, a sound track of music, political speeches and news bulletins, a very short, angry monologue and, of course, his lithe body and skills as a dancer, Habib eloquently communicated the frustration, humiliation and mounting despair of most Egyptians, particularly young people. That unless we do something now, it will be less than two decades before we turn into monkeys, are forced to stand upside down and walk on our hands, and are reduced to kowtowing slaves to the rich and mighty, is the message of 6 April 2030. Fawzi's Zoo, though equally grim in its warning, is more subtle. It shows a serious looking, heavily bespectacled man pacing up and down an undefined, dimly lighted space, alternately ticking away at a portable, manual typewriter strapped round his neck, then tearing out the sheet to thoughtfully read over, aloud or silently, what he typed before inserting it back again and starting all over. Downstage left, in a strong pool of light, is a lecturer's stand with a microphone on top. One gathers the man is a scientist or professor preparing for a lecture he is about to give. Soon enough, the subject of the lecture materializes in the shape of two silent figures that emerge from the shadows, creeping and crawling, squirming and writhing, and slowly advance towards him. Though they look human, their movements are not, and while one of them goes to the stand in the corner, sits on the high stool next to it and proceeds to turn himself into a kind of monstrous porcupine, using an elastic lump of dough which he stretches over his head and shoulders and a bunch of straws which he sticks into it all over, the other engages the professor in lethal conflict. Like the soldier Woyzeck who was coerced by his superiors and made the helpless guinea pig of ruthless scientists before turning violent in Buchner's perennially relevant play, the two men here, Fawzi seems to visually suggest, have been reduced by the institutions of power to a sub human species and vent their rage on the symbol of their oppression but to no avail. Such good performances, however, do not justify or make up for the absence of foreign guest productions. Though the organisers claim that their absence was intended to showcase the Egyptian troupes and allow critics to concentrate on them and give them their undivided attention, such an excuse seems lame and can be detrimental; not only does it rob the festival of its international status, it also goes against one of its principal aims: namely, to acquaint Egyptian artists and audiences with the latest trends and developments in the dance theatre world and provide a forum for cultural dialogue and artistic interaction and exchange. If the decision-makers at the Opera House persist in this policy, I doubt very much that this festival will survive for long. 9th Modern Dance Theatre Festival, 2-21 June 2008, Al-Gomhouriya, Sayed Darwish and Small Hall of the Opera house theatres
