Mahmoud Aboudoma, the man behind one of the country's most vital creative gatherings, doesn't have a very high opinion of the government's cultural mandate. "I don't believe in the official culture ministry, he tells The Daily Star Egypt. "They play with these words to control people. They make a shirt and they give it to us and we have to wear it. Aboudoma is the director of the Creative Forum for Independent Theater Groups, an annual gathering that attracts artists, playwrights, actors and directors from around the world for 10 days of discussions, performances and workshops. (For a full schedule visit www.bibalex.org) In its fourth year, the forum has attracted 150 participants and 12 independent theater companies from Europe and the Middle East and runs from Feb. 1 until Feb. 10. The forum also includes performances, roundtable discussions and will oversee the translation of three modern German plays into Arabic. And since the forum is funded by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which is a semi-independent entity, they do it all without a piaster from the state's coffers. This allows for greater artistic autonomy, says Aboudoma. "On the contrary, the government is against us because we're an NGO, he says, standing amongst a bustling crowd of actors and playwrights in a small room in the bowels of the Bibliotheca's space-age planetarium. "We have an anti-festival concept. We don't have prizes and we don't have contests. We don't have the government [here] or any other political people. It's just the artists and the space. We want to make it a 100 percent cultural event, says Aboudoma, who also runs an NGO called I-act, which does performance-based outreach in poor communities. The forum runs on a budget of LE 360,000. "The poor people in this country, which is 80 or 90 percent, don't have an opportunity to dream, because their lives are occupied by butter and bread. We're trying to reach them with these performances, he says. "It's a bridge between the society and enlightenment. One of the most talked about performances is the Swedish-Egyptian production "Solar Plexus, which explores themes of intolerance and racism. Another highlight is the hallucinatory "Return to Sender: Letters from Tentland, which features six female German-Iranian actresses and discusses the isolation faced by immigrants in Europe. Another important part of the program is "The Immigration Theatre, which will oversee the publication of five plays penned by Arab immigrants living in Europe. One of these so-called "immigrant writers is Magid Al Khatib, whose work "Scotophilia (love of the dark) deals with the gap between exiled Iraqi intellectuals and their brethren who stayed behind in Baghdad and Basra, only to be corralled into the state mechanism. "We had a chance to leave Iraq, but the people who stayed started writing beautifully about war and death . we couldn't understand why, Al Khatib tells The Daily Star Egypt. "In my play, I deal with this problem. It's about a boy who writes beautiful poems to the great dictator, Saddam Hussein, says Al Khatib in a mixed Iraqi-German accent. "When Saddam started his campaign of totalitarianism, those who didn't agree with him had to either stay in Iraq and write for him or leave. Al Khatib chose to flee Iraq in 1979 and relocate to Beirut, before moving to Damascus, Budapest and finally Germany in 1986, where he now works as a writer and freelance journalist in Cologne. Ironically, the Alexandrian forum is a way for Al Khatib to reconnect with the Arab world after 20 years living in exile. But, he says that some Arabs view him as a traitor for leaving his homeland. "It's not easy. We try to transfer our experience and explain why we left. People here are simple . and take a pan-Arab approach. They think that Saddam is the best Arab leader [ever] who could wage wars against the US and Israel and they forget his crimes. Feeling a longing to return home, two years ago, Al Khatib visited Iraq and saw "that what connected us with our home was destroyed. All that was beautiful about our lives then was gone. We were shocked. The Fourth Annual Creative Forum for Independent Theatre Groups runs at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina until Feb. 10
