Discussing the views of two expert foreign guests, Nehad Selaiha adds a final note on this year's CIFET, which ended last Tuesday, 11 September Our ancient Egyptian ancestors must have turned frantically in their sarcophagi on the evening of 11 September last week -- not because the closing ceremony of the CIFET 2007, supposedly a festive occasion, coincided with the sad memory of the thousands who were tragically killed in the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington six years ago, but on account of an unfortunate and highly disagreeable slip on the part of director Khalid Galal. Entrusted, as usual, with directing the opening and closing ceremonies of the CIFET, he came up this year with a startling prefatory sketch to the closing. It featured a mock pyramid flanked by some ugly, deformed representations of the Sphinx. At the foot of the pyramid were two men in turbans and galabiyas, representing the derogatory comic stereotype of the ignorant, local dragoman, hosting an American actress participating in the festival and her new Egyptian male friend, a swarthy director from Upper Egypt. After a silly, heavy-handed parody of such encounters, during which the guides raucously bawl out a folk song and the American attempts some belly dancing, all four fall asleep. What follows is meant to be the couple's joint dream. In it they wake up to find themselves alone and are suddenly snatched by mysterious forces into the inside of the Pyramid. The painted pyramid then goes up to reveal a pyramidal structure of stone steps infested with shrouded mummies and typically costumed ancient Egyptian dancing girls. Then comes the really offensive part which consists of a battle in which the dead attack the living and the latter retaliate with blows and vicious kicks. Imagine a mummy getting knocked on the head and kicked in the bottom!!! With the ghosts of the past defeated and sprawled on the lower steps, the couple finally reach the top, remove a stone, and behind it, lo and behold, is a little, golden statuette of a kneeling Horus, the festival's trophy. As the couple lift it up squealing with joy, a painted blue pyramid bearing the CIFET logo slowly descends from the flies to the sound of a fanfare while the announcer arrogantly compares the 20-year old festival to the ancient pyramids at Giza. Such bombastic descriptions and rhetorical exaggerations are common enough in Arabic and one would have easily let this ridiculous hyperbole go had it not come after Galal's show with its dubious, unintentionally offensive message. That the past can sometimes be an oppressive weight which one has to shake off in order to move forward is true enough, and to choose to signify this metaphorically by beating up some of its representatives is understandable; but to pick on the harmless pharaonic past, which poses no threat to the present, rather than other phases in Egyptian history which have survived into the present and are pulling us backwards, then parade it in the form of sinister walking corpses (in the manner of the old western horror movies about mummies) and suggest that both the East and West (or, more precisely, the Egyptians and Americans) should unite in giving it the boot was singularly infelicitous. I know that parody and irony are the two legs on which Galal as director moves, and they usually serve him very well, giving his work a cheeky, humorous aspect and a nimble gait. This time, however, he carried them a bit too far, and in the wrong direction, and they ended up betraying him. I think he wanted to say that artistic creativity has deep roots in Egypt, that if we dig deep enough we can find them and make them inspire and enrich the present, and that in this effort we can collaborate with other artists from other cultures. This message, however, was totally obscured by the silly stereotypes, the inanity of the couple, and the undignified kicking of the mummies. Most of the critics I talked to in the interval were dismayed by the piece, with some describing it as a sellout to globalization or a disgraceful bid to curry favour with America at any price. The second part of the evening was taken up with a repeat performance of the Egyptian Kalam fi Sirri (Thoughts in my Mind, or, literally, Unspoken Words in my Mind), by the theatre club at Al-Anfoushi cultural palace in Alexandria, which won the festival's award for best ensemble performance. I had watched it the night before at the Creativity Centre and thought it refreshingly daring. If the amount of risk taken by the artist is the criterion of judging what qualifies as truly experimental, as Karen Fricker, the head of the international jury declared in her speech at the ceremony before announcing the awards, then Kalam fi Sirri is of that category, at least in this part of the world. Focusing mainly on the sexual longings, fears and frustrations of three young, veiled, but sexily dressed young women, it bravely broached dangerous, forbidden subjects and broke many taboos, including lesbian relations and the sexual abuse of women. Though the actresses spoke in Arabic, their body language and movements were so eloquent that even a foreigner who does not speak the language could understand and appreciate it. This is how one of the guests of honour this year, the distinguished Australian performer and dramaturge Clare Grant, described it in an email: "Last night's Egyptian show by three young girls was cheeky, sexy, quite moving and funny, eliciting much laughter from both sexes -- a much more effective way to talk about the status of women than The Mask (a Jordanian production on the same theme)!" Another guest of the festival, Dutch musicologist, theatre researcher and critic, Niel van der Linden, had a lot more to tell me, and not just about the performances, of which he saw an incredible number, but also about the central seminar on theatre and technology in which he participated. In the seminar, he presented "some examples of advanced multimedia drama from Iran ... and two scenes from Peter Sellar's staging of Nixon in China" to illustrate "the influence modern mass communication means have on writing text and music for the stage." But, "there was not enough time to deal with Steve Reich's 'interview' music theatre piece 'The Cave' and for Peter Greenaway's stagings of music theatre, using new approaches to text and using video and film on stage." Indeed, not having enough time has been the recurrent complaint of guest speakers for years. What is the point of inviting experts who come fully prepared to communicate valuable knowledge and then giving each less than 15 minutes to communicate it in? Fortunately, Niel was able to air the material he had brought along at the AUC where he was invited by Nahla Mattar to give two presentations on the staging of modern music drama for her music classes. The seminar, or "colloquium" as Niel prefers to call it, "is assembled a bit too randomly," he thinks; "there are too few students and too many senior theatre representatives from something, who then all repeat comparable stances, like the ones about Jarry (in the first session), and when you see the work from their countries you think what are these countries doing with all the knowledge they seem to have, even if it sounds all like copied knowledge. Also, ... many of the Middle-East experts who were supposed to give favourable examples of the development of new media and new technology in theatre don't need each of them to start with the same looking back to the origins of drama in ancient Greece or before if you want to say something about technology. It is often as if they gave the same speech as last year and the year before, with a slightly different end adapted to the theme. And as the contributions are often so long, they often have to cut that end." But if the seminar was a bit frustrating, the roundtable and workshops on digital theatre were "wonderful", Niel says; they "taught us all to rethink the basics of theatre, like building characters and designing stages, even if for the moment this new technology seems more fit for designing new, more convincing videogames than stage manifestations." When he moves on to the performances, Niel prefaces his comments with an expression of concern about the process of selecting shows for the contest and the festival as a whole, the same concern that Karen Fricker voiced in her jury report on the last evening. He thinks Al-Hanager's 7 Colours for a Birthday, the offshoot of a workshop by Mohamed Shafiq, was excellent and deserved to represent Egypt far more than Walid Aouni's When Clouds Speak which he describes as "aerobics on Wagner." The "editing of the music was totally misconceived," he explains, "ignoring fitting keys and rhythmic stream, not to speak of the beat elements, which initially were funny, but then became killing when it went on and on. Meaningless, if even he can't make anything of Isolde's Love Death." As for the choreography, Aouni, "asks his dancers to do what they are technically incapable of doing, instead of, like the great examples he tries to imitate, Pina Bausch, Anne Teresa de Keersmaekers, etc., to tailor-make something that will stretch their capacities but still fits them." What about the stage set? Niel thinks it "had something during the first fifteen minutes, but when you still want to move all those things (walls) around when you are doing the love- death scenes, the provocation does not even work when you don't know what you want to say with all this, except showing some nice sweaty torsos." About the Arab shows he saw, he writes: "El-Teatro production was ...wonderfully detailed and disciplined and I liked the other Tunisian production (Ragaa bin Ammar's The Love of My Country) for the sympathetic and virtuoso albeit somewhat self-indulgent actress. The stage design was not helpful, unlike in El-Teatro production." He regrets missing Syria's Show Cola "as one of the problems is that there are few people around who can help you out how to find your way. I know the Salam theatre, but not by name, and nobody could tell me where it was...Then the productions from Kuwait and Bahrain were sympathetic, and especially Kuwait had a wonderful discipline onstage, which is often lacking in various productions. Jordan's The Mask was below standard" and "Qatar was...no better and no worse than that. Morocco's Beckett was excellent. Simple, and if you play Beckett simply you can't spoil much, and its dramaturgy sometimes leaves little to add, but the way they used video to highlight the face of the woman during the inner monologue in Rockaby was excellent and she is an excellent actress, including the transformation into an old woman, while the actress as soon as she took the applause turned out to be quite young. And all this by acting, not by make-up." As for the show from Saudi Arabia, it "was not worse than so-so. Intense playing, the main actors are good. But they need a much better director, or at least somebody with a better sense for stage design." Of the performances from Asia, Africa and Europe, he thought "Sri Lanka was weird, not high quality, perhaps sincere, but it does not belong here. Pakistan was just a playback kitschy pantomime, a vulgarised version of a classical India/ Pakistan prince and princess fairy tale play, probably popular in a cheap boulevard theatre, not fit for presentation here." He missed Guinea's The Retreat which won the award for best actress, again for want of a person to tell him "where to find them." He found this very frustrating since "I know my way in Cairo better than many Cairenes." The proof? "I was able to show one of the young translators of the festival around through downtown, including the bookshop where her fiancé works." But he did catch another African show from Mauritius, and it was "the weirdest thing... a mishmash of Oedipus, Hindu mythological play, the court scene from The Merchant of Venice and what have you... Perhaps they were attempting a parody, otherwise unintentionally it became a parody on badly worked out ideas about theatre." Actually, this show was intended as a parody. Nevertheless, Niel thinks it does not serve any purpose to invite the likes of it or of the one that Turkey brought which "was a totally nothing, meaningless amateur comedy, an insult to the audience and the festival." From Eastern Europe, Bulgaria he found funny, but not much more than like an end of the first year presentation of a good drama academy." Montenegro's Fuck Darwin or How I learnt to love Socialism, a joint production by the Montenegrin National theatre and Ahmed El-Attar's the Temple Egyptian independent troupe, was a big let down. "I am disappointed to see that after all these years Ahmed has not come much further than this. For beginners it would be interesting, now it (qualifies as) mannerism. What did he want to say? And I wish he would indeed know more about Darwin. It was quite naïve as well. And what does the actress who starts to sing La Vie en Rose benefit from this?" I myself have yet to see the play and cannot therefore answer Niel's questions. The German Mecca theatre gets an equal bashing from Niel. It "was ill-represented. Perhaps a budget matter for the Goethe Institute, but I might assume that even the actors were amateurs, or perhaps first year acting students and not more, and that they applied by themselves. This serves nobody. And Germany, although it has gone through a difficult period after all the great seventies and eighties theatre, has much to offer again. Marthaler would be too expensive perhaps, but by approaching the Goethe Institute in time who knows what is possible. I have the feeling that the Goethe Institute as well as the Swedish always send second, or even third rate around the world, productions and producers who would hardly survive on the home market." Niel's email was the longest I ever got and I decided to share it, or most of it, with you not because I agree with his artistic assessment of the productions he mentions, indeed I hold quite different views regarding some, but because it raises many valid points about the organisation of the central seminar and the selection process, the quality of the shows sent to us by some countries in the interest of saving money, and the fact that the festival cannot pick and choose and has to accept them since it insists on paying no money and only provides food and accommodation in return for performances -- points that we have been reiterating for years. May be coming from a European, the festival board will finally give them some attention. The CIFET 2007 Awards: Best performance: Show Cola, Syria. Best Direction: Hyoung-Taek Limb, South Korea, for Medea . Best Scenography: Bread and Plays , Serbia. Best Actor: Sayed Ragab in , Montenegro/Egypt. Best Actress: Kiyto Kamara in The Retreat , Guinea. Best Ensemble Performance: Kalam fi Sirri (Thoughts in my Mind), Egypt.
