Nehad Selaiha reads a deeper meaning in the second independent Cairo International Theatre Forum for Children and Young People On 21 February last year, the first Cairo International Theatre Forum for Children and Young People was launched at Al-Arayes theatre off Ataba square. The story of that festival was told in great detail in the Weekly issue of 8 March, 2007 (No.835). In it I described how Mohamed Karim, the founder of a small troupe for children's and puppets' theatre called Manethon (after the famous third Century B.C. Egyptian priest of Sebennytos and author of the Aegyptiaca ), had managed, single-handedly, to win Egypt the membership of the International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People (more commonly known by its French initials as ASSITEJ). In the same meeting in Linz, on 29 June, 2006, the executive committee of ASSITEJ nominated Karim head of its Egyptian branch via his Manethon company. The festival which followed was organised and funded by Karim and his troupe and was meant to make that membership a fact. Though modest in size, with only five companies from five countries, including Egypt, taking part, and poorly publicised and attended, it was a step in the right direction and the fact that Ashraf Zaki, the head of the state theatre organization, allowed Manethon the use of the state-owned Al-Arayes and Al-Tali'a theatres augured well, leading one to hope that in future years the ministry of culture would continue to support this independent initiative and help it to grow and become a prestigious international event. Such hopes were cruelly dashed this year. One month before the festival, Karim secured the official approval of the minister of culture to use both the small hall and the open-air theatre of the Opera house and scheduled the festival's performances accordingly. Two days before the opening however, he was suddenly asked by the Opera administration to pay LE200,000 in rent, later reduced to LE160,000; when he protested that he had been promised the two venues for free, plus three roundtables to be hosted at the Supreme Council for Culture, and rushed to the minister's office to complain, he was barred from seeing the minister and his desperate cries fell on deaf ears. The poster and schedule announcing the eight-day event beginning on 21 February had already been printed and circulated and there was nothing to be done about that. The damage was done: both Karim's reputation as an organiser and the credibility of the festival itself would suffer in consequence. The people who went to the small hall of the Opera on 21 February found nothing and went away furious, thinking it was all a hoax. As for the guest artists, Karim had to suffer the humiliation, both personal and national, of having to explain to them how he had been let down and how uncertain and haphazard things generally are in Egypt -- not a very palatable job, and one likely to stick in one's throat. But was the Opera house management solely responsible for this disaster? Wasn't Karim also to blame for shooting too high, too quickly? -- for succumbing to the allure of the much-sought after Opera venues thinking they would confer the necessary prestige on his festival? Wasn't he a bit naïve when he innocently thought that history could repeat itself and that the two Opera venues which had hosted the first Free Theatre Festival in 1990 would be willing, without pressure from influential people, to host another independent venture for free in 2008? And was it not a mistake going straight to the minister, cutting through all the red tape, and bypassing Ashraf Zaki, the head of the state theatre organization, who had helped him out last year and publicly declared, in a symposium on the independent theatre movement in Egypt, held on the fringe of the National Theatre Festival last July, that he would be willing to support Karim's festival provided he was treated as a partner and consulted on all the details beforehand? But would Zaki have been able, or willing, to provide the needed spaces without changing the date of the festival? Only last week I told you the story of Al-Hanager's season of new independent productions and how Hoda Wasfi, the director of that centre, had failed to secure any state-owned theatre and had to finally take her plays to Rawabet and rent the space for two months. Was Karim afraid, with very good reason, perhaps, that the theatre organization would hijack his life's project, take sole credit for it and turn it into a thoroughly official affair? Was this the reason he went straight to Farouk Hosni and appealed to him as a fellow artist? It is heart breaking to read Karim's original announcement of the festival when he innocently thought that Hosni would take the festival under his protective wings and guard its integrity as an independent venture. In it, he thanks him warmly and gratefully acknowledges the 'generous' offer of cinema critic, Ali Abu Shadi, to host the three planned symposia on children's theatre at the Supreme Council of Culture which he heads, regarding their support as a hopeful sign of future collaboration between the ministry and independent artists for the glory of Egypt. But it all came to naught. Situations of this kind can give one a stroke if one dwells on their consequences and implicit messages; fortunately, Karim had no time for that. The urgent thing was to save the festival, to find an alternative venue for free. All the funds he had managed to muster were just enough to secure food, accommodation and internal transportation for the visiting troupes. Luckily, he didn't have to worry about administrative and running costs: all his assistants and technical staff are devoted Manethon members whose only payment is their pride and joy in the event. By a stroke of luck, Karim hit upon the Workers' Association in Shubra Al-Kheima, an organization which cares for the social and cultural welfare of factory workers in that poor and overpopulated suburb of Cairo. Though the space it offered was technically primitive, it would never lack an audience. For years, this association has been the only cultural and artistic lifeline for the deprived population of this area and the workers and their families flock to it every night. The fact that children and adolescents form a high percentage of the population there would make it an ideal place to stage a theatre festival for children and young people. In short, this compulsory change of venue turned out for the best. The much-deprived children and youngsters in Shubra Al-Kheima had a feast of performances which they hugely enjoyed, and the foreign artists were happy to give the gift of their art to people who really needed it, thirsted for it, and deeply appreciated it. Rather than 21 February, the festival began on 24. Of the nine originally publicised companies, seven actually arrived with their performances: the Moroccan Taza group with Danse Satanique ; the French Atomes mime and dance theatre with The Genie and the Magic Lamp ; the Swiss Kunos Circus theatre with The Butterfly ; Turkey's Karagouz and the Poor Indian, by the Tempo theatre troupe; the Croatian Mala Scena theatre's Parachutists, the Irish Goldilocks and the Three Bears, by the Miriam Lambert Puppeteer company, and the Dutch T-Magisch theatre with A Little Fairy Tale and Panta Rhei. Barring the Dutch company, all the participants, including the Manethon troupe who presented A Day, played twice in Shubra Al-Kheima, from 24-26 February, then the Dutch performances took place at the Townhouse Factory on 27 and 28 February, together with repeats of the Irish, French and Moroccan performances. The move to the Townhouse was intended to bring the festival closer to audiences who did not know of the existence or whereabouts of the Workers' Association or could not make the trip to Shubra Al-Kheima. And it was at the Townhouse that I spent the evening of 27 and the whole of 28 of February, enjoying, with a lot of adults and children, five delightful performances from Holland, France, Ireland and Morocco. Though a frequent visitor to the Townhouse and its two converted garages, the 'Factory' and 'Rawabet', I don't recall ever going there in broad daylight. As I wondered through the alleys around them last Thursday, stopping at small, picturesque cafes, tucked away between buildings, for a glass of tea or a cup of coffee between performances, I realised what a wealth of beautiful architecture I had missed all the years I visited the area at night. I felt at home, in the Cairo of my childhood in the 1950s, when buildings were graceful or quaintly ornate, a pleasure to look at, and people were warm, friendly, courteous and tolerant of all kinds of difference. I was grateful to Karim for bringing me to this area in the late morning and forcing me to spend the whole day there till the fall of night. I had stumbled upon the Dutch T-Magisch theatre's Panta Rhei the previous evening by pure chance. As I was coming out of Rawabet after watching the second new production in Al-Hanager's season, Effat Yehia's Embroideries which I shall tell you about in a future article, I was told that a Dutch performance was about to begin at the Factory next door. There, I learnt for the first time that the children's festival had moved downtown for its last two days. I was angry I had not been told of this and was about to rebuke Karim about this negligence and give him a piece of mind about the shoddy performance of his publicity people when I suddenly noticed how tired and wilted he looked, like someone who hadn't slept for days. Immediately my anger swerved in a different direction and I embraced him in a wave of terrible sorrow difficult to describe. The next hour was pure magic. For once my reception was not conditioned by any prior information about the artists or expectations about the work they were going to offer. Panta Rhei, by the Dutch T-Magisch theatre, vindicated the name of the troupe that designed and performed it. It had the look of a peep-show: a hooded booth with a lighted circle in the middle where surrealistic and poignantly evocative images streamed, created by costumed fingers, glove and shadow puppets, face and whole- body masks, a live performer, voices and atmospheric music. As the tall, silver-haired, sage-like master puppeteer told the audience at the beginning, he and his female assistant were not there to tell a story, but to project images as in dreams. The onus of linking them together and making sense out of them fell squarely on the shoulders of the audience from 14 years onwards. That I cannot tell you the name of these two wonderful Dutch puppeteers or the meaning of the title of their show is a sign of a terrible breakdown of communication between the festival and the public. I was there the following day at 12 noon sharp. But nothing in Egypt begins when it should. Outside the Factory, a group of foreign artists were sitting on wicker chairs, sipping tea and coffee or eating Kushari (a mixture of rice, macaroni, black lentils and boiled chick-peas, doused in hot, red sauce and sprinkled with fried onions). A diligent young man promptly appeared and escorted me to a nearby alley-side primitive café, telling me the performance had to wait for the pupils of a nearby school to arrive. At the café, I met Rashid Fanasi, an actor and singer in the Moroccan Taza company scheduled to perform at 7 pm that evening. We had an interesting conversation about the difference between performing for adults and children, about what it takes to preserve the child inside the adult person, and about the Taza company. What fascinates him about children's theatre is that it allows for a transformation of personality, offers a strange, defamiliarized image of reality, and actively invites the participation of the audience. He has been with the Taza company, in the North/East part of Morocco, for seven years and has taken part in seven of its productions. As he was telling me how each production takes at least six months to prepare, we were summoned to attend the Dutch A Little Fairy Tale. The peep-show-booth structure was the same, but the story, here targeted at 5-year olds, was much simpler: a girl who, through disobeying her mother's instructions, loses her baby brother to an evil witch and has to undertake a dangerous journey through the dark woods to recover him. The subtle moral there was not to trust appearances or custom, that creatures habitually regarded as ugly and evil can be vitally helpful and actually save your life. In short, tolerance of difference and resistance to habitual, culturally determined perceptions was the message, and it was so beautifully and imaginatively processed that I found myself totally engrossed in it. The following show was a mime and dance imaginative French take on the legendary story of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp. Here, the genie, with a colourful, painted mask and in an exotic, unisex oriental costume, was the sole focus, and his craving for love and struggle against the powers of evil -- old, wealthy merchants -- constituted the story. The French mime that dexterously took on all the parts was simply enchanting and I am only too sorry I cannot give you his name. The Irish Goldilocks and the Three Bears, by the Miriam Lambert Puppeteer company, took place at Rawabet at 5pm. Lambert, who devised, wrote and performed the show, stood inside a black booth, and was quite visible as she manipulated her puppets and props. You would think that such open visibility would take away from the charm of the show; on the contrary, it enhanced it and kept the audience spellbound. The opening in the booth consisted of two levels, and as Lambert deftly and humorously moved her dolls between them, telling the story and acting all the parts, one was completely captivated and briefly transported to the days of joy and innocence. At 7pm, it was time for the Morrocan Taza group and their Satanic Dance. It was a didactic story with an obvious lesson, performed by human actors with a lot of recorded songs, clumsily choreographed dances and some puppets -- the kind of children's play I would run a mile away from. Curiously it captivated me, thanks to the versatile set and the colourful costumes and the bubbling, childlike energy of the actors. What I liked most about it was its skirting of any facile solutions. The devil is always there, bespelling temptation, and you can never hope to capture or tame him. A lesson that Karim has learnt the hard way. Children and Young People, 2nd Cairo International Theatre Forum, 21-28 February, at the theatre club of Al-Mu'assassa Al-'Umaliya (Workers Association) in Shubra Al-Kheima and the Townhouse Factory Space, off Champollion Street.
