Nehad Selaiha hails the current Meeting Points festival as a unique artistic and political event It is a painful fact of life in the Arab world that artists, especially independent artists, have little opportunity of sharing their experiences with audiences across borders independent of governments. This is what makes the current Meeting Points 5 international, multidisciplinary festival of contemporary art, launched on 1 November, such a rare, inspiring event. An initiative of the international, Brussels-based Young Arab Theatre Fund (YATF), it was designed as a roaming, one-month long event, covering 11 cities simultaneously, with the different items of the shared programme moving from one city to the next and performing in rotation. The idea is not completely new and, in fact, dates as far back as the Middle Ages. In those days, one way of presenting the different plays which make up any religious drama cycle was by performing them on mobile stages, or 'pageant wagons', one play a wagon. On a set date, for a set period, the wagons would set off in procession, performing in succession at different points on a specified route, one pageant giving way to another, so that by the end of the itinerary, all the spectators waiting at the different points would have seen the entire cycle without having to budge. In like fashion, by the end of November, most of the 98 performances (including theatre, dance and music), 48 exhibitions, and 45 film screenings the Meeting Points programme features this year will have been seen in Cairo, Alexandria, Menya, Amman, Beirut, Damascus, Ramalla, Tunis, Rabat, Brussels and Berlin. To provide a forum for young Arab artists, support their productions and help showcase and circulate their work is the raison d'etre of YATF and has always been the guiding policy of its founder and director, theatre-architect Tareq Abul Fotooh. But no where before has Abul Fotooh and his colleagues conceived of a project on such a large scale, covering such a vast geographical area, and offering such a wide variety of works. While the accent remains heavily on Arab artists, as in previous editions, this year's Meeting Points has looked farther afield and managed to rope in a few of the finest and most compelling contemporary works in Europe, Asia and Latin America for the benefit of Arab artists and audiences. In selecting these, and, indeed, every other item on the programme, Frie Leysen, the artistic director (or curator) of this year's Meeting points, was not guided, as she says, by one "over-riding theme", but rather by an ambition to bring together "artists with distinctly strong and independent visions" which they needed to share with an audience, and works that reflected "the complexity and diversity of contemporary art in the Arab world specifically, and the world, generally." But in opting for diversity and complexity, and in citing originality, 'an independent way of looking at the world', and the urge and artistic capacity to communicate it as her criteria of choice, Leysen ended up putting together more than just a successful artistic encounter. The fact that every Arab artist who fits these criteria invariably happens to be a rebel, a dissenter, an exile, or a deserted outcast on some godforsaken fringe in his/her country gave the whole event a pronounced political profile. By embracing such artists, and allowing them to move freely across the Arab world and Europe, and communicate their uncensored thoughts and images to people in truly democratic spaces, Meeting Points 5 has gone, wittingly or otherwise, and albeit for only a short time, beyond the merely artistic, acting as a force of liberation, a concerted campaign in defense of political and artistic freedom. Predictably, some of the works in the festival (and I have only seen a few, since it only started last week) have political themes; how can a work forged in Beirut or coming out of Ramalla, however subjective or philosophically oriented, avoid politics? But even when the theme has nothing to do with war, sectarian violence, military occupation, the destruction of cities and the souls of their inhabitants, or the struggle to survive in a ruthless, capitalist society -- even when the theme of the work is purely artistic and highly specialized (a choreographer's engagement with the vocabulary and prevailing, superficial perception and expectations of street dance and hip hop, and his in-depth exploration/ deconstruction of both modes to unleash their creative potential and expressive possibility, as in Bruno Beltrao's 3-part Brazilian dance performance, From Popping to Pop, or Vice-versa, Me and my Choreographer in '63, and Too Legit to Quit, presented at Al-Gomhouriya theatre on 8/11), or intimately subjective and woven out of personal memories (as in Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker Rosas' enchanting dance solo Once, performed also at Al-Gomhouriya, where the adult artist surrenders herself to the seductive tenderness of Joan Baez's songs which cradled her childhood and adolescence, playing the voice of her own body against that of the singer in order "to discover the gestures that are suggested by the spoken word and that, inversely, deny the text and give life to movement," as she says) -- even in works of this nature, one can detect, in the very style of the performance, in the dialogue of forms, the deconstructivist tactics, the breaking down of the familiar and synthesizing the fragments in new and strange ways, a subtle political dimension. And when I say 'political', I mean political in the broadest and most profound sense of the word -- a sense which involves a perception of reality as a socio-historical/ideological construct, supported by an invisible web of power relations, a radical questioning of this reality, and an honest, unflinching investigation of one's relation to the world -- to people, cities, nature and history. In this sense, the section of Meeting Points 5 entitled 'Unclassified' is deeply political. According to the festival brochure, "six curators (or curatorial teams from six of the cities participating in MP5 were invited to ... suggest an artistic programme, in, with and for the city they live in. The idea ... was to create a balance between the central programme ... which travels to all the participating cities, and local artistic realities." Involving a wide range of artists and cultural practitioners from different disciplines and generations, the six projects, though diverse in form and the way they engage with the city and their immediate audiences, are all intended to investigate "the position, acquired or desired, of artists and artistic production in their specific urban and cultural landscapes." Unfortunately, but quite naturally, being site-specific, these projects will not travel outside their cities. Reading the descriptions of the various projects -- the Damascene interactive video installation called Of Death and Cafes, the Tunisian Dream City, Amman's Reclaiming Footpaths, or Beirut's The Secret of the Peripheral City -- makes you wish for a magic carpet that could miraculously transport you to all four cities all at once. But in the absence of such a carpet, you can console yourself with something nearer home and equally exciting. The Alexandria project, called Booster: Public Relations Agency Simulator for Art and Culture, and "structured for the purpose of creating a re-conceptualized and re-defined public relations report for art and culture," in the words of its curator, Bassam Al-Baroni, can be seen at the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ASAF) on 24 and 30 November at 7 pm. There is also the Cairo contemporary art project, Arrasif: Tales Around the Pavement. Curated by Aleya Hamza and Edit Molnar, it seeks to explore the city's public spaces downtown "as a site in which the complex relationship between the city's dwellers and its various governing bodies is constantly negotiated and redefined." The works/events of the seven artists, designers and architects involved are intended to "subtly disrupt the urban landscape by reinventing some of the guerilla- style tactics and survival strategies employed by city-dwellers on a daily basis in the public sphere." Sounds familiar, like what I usually do whenever I try to park my car downtown. The Arrasif project is spread over ten days and four sites and the festival provides a map which you can ask for at Rawabet, the Townhouse, or Emadeddin Studio. Besides the two performances I have already mentioned -- the Belgian Once, where nostalgia and irony, joy and sorrow were mixed in equal measure and you caught your breath when suddenly the boisterous movement, the lively frolicking died down, giving way to stillness and silence, while dim and shadowy scenes of war were projected on the body of the dancer, and the Brazilian stunningly zestful and dizzyingly energetic revision of hip hop and street dance -- I watched two productions from Lebanon, both by the amazingly gifted, writer, actor, director and performance artist Rabih Mroueh. Though the first, Make Me Stop Smoking (presented in the Garage theatre at the Jesuits Cultural Centre in Alexandria on 5 November) was a one-man show in the form of a lecture performance, it came across as a vividly dramatic, highly absorbing and often moving confessional piece, alternately wistfully reflective and hilariously witty. Adopting a gentle, confidential tone, Mroueh told us that for nearly ten years now, he has had a compulsion to collect seemingly useless material -- curious phrases that could serve as titles for future plays, cut-outs from the local newspapers, photographs, news stories, interviews, excerpts from television programmes, video recordings of certain events, notices about missing persons and other sundry objects. Though it clutters his home and threatens to crowd him out, he cannot bring himself to destroy it or throw it out; he has come to look upon it as a kind of memory which, unlike his own, is immune to the ravages of time and never loses anything. Sharing with us this material which he has carefully arranged in the form of an archive, and which ranges from the comically absurd, to the mundane, the shocking and the nearly tragic, Mroueh would sometimes pause to reflect on the meaning of presence and absence (in relation to a huge poster carrying a shaded picture of the assassinated Lebanese leader, Rafiq Al-Hareeri, standing behind his son and towering above him like the ghost of king Hamlet), on the nature of human memory and its relation to documented history, or to poke fun at his own whims and obsessions. And all the time, whatever the mood or subject, he trod a fine line between reality and fiction, the person we know he is and the persona he projects, the real Mroueh and the fictive one. At no time could one tell which was which, or when one faded and the other took over. It was a masterful, sensitively orchestrated and rhythmically varied performance which intimately entwined the personal and the political so that you couldn't tell them apart. By the end of it, you realize that the seemingly disparate fragments of which it is composed had slowly, gradually, arranged themselves into a meaningful, intensely gripping design. As with all good theatre, every member of the audience came away with their own understanding of what Make Me Stop Smoking meant or was all about. For me it felt as if I had made a voyage through a creative and highly original mind, and it made the world, and the most ordinary of things in it, seem strangely fresh. The other Mroueh play which I saw at Rawabet theatre the following day (6 November) was intriguingly titled and turned out to be another story-telling piece with back projections, only this time we had four storytellers rather than one. However, no sooner did the show begin than these four began to proliferate, spawning other story-tellers who alternately narrated, in the first person, their adventures during the Lebanese civil war and subsequent conflicts. Though each story ended sadly with the death of the narrator, the effect was hilarious since the four actors made a point of pretending that each new story was an extension of the previous one and that its narrator was the self-same dead person. The effect was visually corroborated by the fact that with each narrated death, the poster commemorating the dead person was replaced by another, quite different, but still carrying the photo of the actor who told the story, albeit in different gear. The play took its inspiration from the posters of 'martyrs' or 'fallen heroes' traditionally plastered all over Beirut. "Well into the 'post-war'," Mroueh writes, "with the series of assassinations that began in 2004, and after the Israeli assault in the summer of 2006, portraits of the dead reemerged on the city's walls with renewed intensity, gazing at passers-by as if refusing to take leave of the city. The realms of the living and dead are so close that they intermingle, as if cemeteries overlapped homes." On stage, the dead keep on living through the four actors (Lina Saneh, Hatem El-Imam, Ziad Antar and Rabih Mroueh) who speak their words and live their death. How to lay the dead to rest and free the city from the shadow of death is the question the play leaves us with. It is not often that one comes across a black comedy which is profoundly thoughtful, poetically conceived and brilliantly witty, and How Nancy Wished, written and directed by Rabih Mroueh, with Fadi Toufiq as co-author, is of this rare breed of plays. Watching it was a thrilling, unforgettable experience. One hopes that Meeting Points 5 will give us in the coming days plays of the same caliber. But even if it doesn't, it will have been enough that it has introduced us in Cairo to the work of the magnificent Mroueh.
