Al-Ahram Weekly 26 Aug. - 1 Sep. 1999 Issue No. 444
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Time for reflection

By Nehad Selaiha

British critic John Elsom has already been here for weeks, stowed safely away somewhere, out of the reach of avid journalists hunting for festival news. This is the 4th year Elsom takes on the prickly and thankless job of sifting through dozens of video-taped performances from all over the world to select likely candidates for the international competition of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET). Last year he came in for a lot of barbed criticism over some of his choices; and his rejection of some Arab shows on the plea that they were sub-standard earned him a measure of notoriety. Nasty remarks of the kind what do you expect from the British? (which play on Arab memories of British occupation) flew around, and American playwright Karen Malpede was bitterly castigating about the composition of the three-man selection committee he heads. They are all male, white and European, she screamed at me; and middle-aged, I mused silently. We should do something about it, she urged exasperatedly, winding up with "its unbelievable!"

It may be unbelievable but Fawzi Fahmi, the chairman of CIFET, has infinite trust in the integrity, rectitude, impartiality and artistic judgment of his three chosen adjudicators and confidently reassures critics that their comprehensive knowledge of world theatre makes them capable of appreciating and fairly evaluating diverse cultural modes of theatrical expression. That is as it may be; but shouldn't the composition of the selection committee vary from year to year (to guard against ossification, if nothing else), and occasionally include a woman, a person from the Third World, or someone under 50? Last year, some of the entries in the competition were trashy, pretentious fabrications that fooled nobody and cost the festival some of its credibility with the audience. Hopefully, it won't happen this year but I cannot help thinking that with the second millennium drawing to a close it is time for CIFET to rethink its structure, review its policies and management and find radical solutions to its chronic problems and perennial shortcomings. As a first step, the CIFET board should carefully peruse the reports, submitted by various members of the international jury, over many years, which contain several valuable suggestions to improve the festival and build up its prestige.

But choosing, for the moment, to ignore all blemishes and give myself over to the sense of excitement and thrilled anticipation which invariably accompanies the approach of CIFET, I made my way to the kitchen (meaning Fahmi's office at the Academy of Arts) to find out what is cooking. There was the usual symphony of buzzing telephones, whirring fax machines, clinking doors, clicking computers and a dozen cackling voices, jabbering all at once. It was reassuring and, as on similar previous visits, I found myself pitching in without being asked, answering calls, asking people to wait, relaying information, searching for fugitive documents amid piles of paper and being rewarded with a fleeting warm smile or nod of gratitude from the overworked, underfed and frantically busy Fahmi.

Another reward was a fat ream of paper scribbled with descriptions of all the items on the festival menu this year. One thing I did not, and never hoped to get, was the festival's programme which is never finalised until the eve of the opening. It will be printed in the next issue; meanwhile, here are some of the promised treats and delicacies.

Top to bottom: Italy's Fly Butterfly; Syria's Hello, Chekov; Bulgaria's The Unfinished Dance

Judging by its recipe, you can certainly look forward to the multi-national, multi-lingual One -- (the other) from the British Perpetual Motion Theatre. The fruit of an international performance project, it features actors from Iran, London, Switzerland, China and Brazil and a text in Farsi, Spanish, French, Czech, Russian and English. In view of such an obfuscating text, and as aids to comprehension, the performance includes mime, dance, movement and video projections. A "One man's odyssey through the big city on the eve of the 21st century", as it is described, it predictably explores the themes of alienation, displacement, and urban isolation. Using the model of Peter Brook's international theatre group in Paris, the actors, we are told, were not required to understand the texts they worked with; only to respond to the sound and rhythms of the different languages.

Blurbed as a poignant, high energy ode to the mavericks of life, the British One -- (the other) links up with the Joe Goode Group's Maverick Strain from the United States. Composed and directed by Joe Goode, the performance uses cinema, dance, music, the classic American country song, and language in a deconstructive vein to explore the phenomenon of the maverick icon in Western culture, its obsession with individualism, and the concomitant sense of alienation.

But while Maverick Strain opens with cinematic close-ups of its main characters, Len and Dottie, and references to Hollywood incarnations of the maverick (such as John Wayne) to impress upon us the need to care for one another in times of trouble, the French C'est Pour Toi Que Je Fais ‚a (from Le Cirque Désaccordé, written by Martine Cendre and directed by Guy Alloucherie) blends verbal monologues and dialogue with dance and circus acrobatics to relay a similar message. The setting is a derelict, deserted house in which 11 people are brought together against their will and air their resentment and frustration in the form of abusive wrangling and violent invective. The situation is strongly reminiscent of Sartre's Huis Clos, except that here the group are brought together through sharing their hopes and fears, tales of personal tragedies, and stories of life, love and death. Finally, the ability to laugh together at their sorrows establishes between them bonds of human sympathy and understanding.

Alienation and its cluster of related themes crop up in several other shows, in a variety of theatrical forms, harnessing diverse artistic traditions. Particularly intriguing in this group is Hungary's X.Y.Z. (from the Ildiko Mandy-Geza M. Toth company, jointly written and directed by Mandy and Toth). Mixing mime, acting and film, it shows three people trapped in three perpendicular planes where their shadows and projections also appear to intensify their total isolation from each other and their sense of unreality. Loneliness is also the focus of Hungary's other contributions to the festival -- Quite As It Is, from the Central Europe Dance Theatre, created by Csaba Horvath and directed by Csaba Szogi. Here, however, it takes an extreme form, and is projected surrealistically, through dance, as complete withdrawal from the world in death. While the characters in X.Y.Z. can still cross over from their separate planes and connect the different dimensions of their physical living space, the dead, in Quite As It Is, are irredeemably transported to a different temporal plane and condemned to external loneliness.

On the same theme is the Moscow Musical Theatre of Plastic Arts's Man and Women, or Concerto for Viola and Orchestra, which combines music, ballet and acting to portray the encounter of a soul-weary, disillusioned couple who regain the ability to love and trust through mutual dreaming; Greece's Limnothalassa which blends dance theatre, puppetry, mime, symbols and visual effects to portray a woman's introspective journey into her past to discover why she cannot relate to others; and the Ukraine's Call Ra, a surrealistic tale of a man transported into a bizarre world where he is offered up as a sacrifice and falls into a coma during which he experiences his body as a desk with drawers, and its feelings and sensations as files on a computer. Luckily, however, he returns, having discovered that the human body is at once a machine and a web of memories. Equally optimistic is The Last Pastoral from Belarus in which a man and a woman survive a nuclear holocaust and fight through their amnesia, with the help of dance, music and elementary dialogue, to rediscover faith and love and create a new world.

In the Polish The Gateway, however, the apocalyptic sense of doom deepens beyond any hope of redemption, making the title a bitter irony. Like their earlier Humidity, which they brought to the 2nd CIFET in 89, Scena Plastyczna's Gateway (created and directed by Leszek Madzik) pictures the world as a dark void inhabited by dismembered bodies and tortured souls. What makes such an oppressively grim, and almost nihilistic, view of the human condition tolerable as theatre is the visual beauty of the works, their intricate symbolic composition and moving iconic imagery. Nearer plastic art than performance, The Gateway, like Humidity and all the works of Scena Plastyczna, stretches the concept of theatre beyond the limits acceptable to many, and its complete banishment of the human performer may once more raise the question whether such works qualify as theatre at all.

Other types of human suffering -- of the socially, politically, or historically imposed variety -- provide the subject for a number of shows: Moldovia's Voices in a Dazzling Light shows terrified characters trying to escape the violence and cruelty which prevail in many countries under totalitarian regimes; Uzbekistan's The Voice of Mother Naiman, or A Day Lasts More Than A Century is a naturalistic portrayal of the dehumanising treatment of slaves in Kazakhstan in the middle ages; and both Pakistan's Daughter of Eve and Guinea's Femmes D'Afrique take a feminist angle and passionately condemn women's oppression in Third World countries.

If by this time you are sick and tired of humans and their suffering, ineluctable or otherwise and would welcome, for a change, any other species, you can take refuge in the Teatro del Buratto's delightful, whimsical, and visually thrilling Fly Butterfly. Here, the life-cycle of the butterfly is projected as a fanciful fairy story, full of magic and wonder, and used at the same time as a stirring metaphor for the slow and arduous development of artistic talent and its sudden glorious blossoming. Judging by the company's depiction of underwater life in 1997, which won them CIFET's best scenography award that year, Fly Butterfly is not to be missed. But if your boredom extends to all living things, including butterflies, you will be thrilled to learn that the Projecto Teatral company from Portugal have chosen for their lead character an inanimate object. Table focuses on the table as both idea and object, giving it the upper hand in any relationship with its user. Maybe we will appreciate our tables more, or get to view them differently after this show.

For the inveterate aesthetes who go for pure form and regard any content as a bothersome nuisance, the festival provides a number of spectacles with no narrative line or ideational content. The Netherlands's Immanent, conceived and directed by Barbara Gene, is the most representative of this group. Described as post-modern dance theatre of pure movement without music or sound, it is bound to baffle many. Less extreme, perhaps, is Germany's Fluss (from the MEL-Young Surrealistic Theatre in Berlin) which, according to the group, portrays a sequence of scenes and images which can never be summarised as a story but which follow a certain emotional curve. Slightly more accessible may be Austria's Suite 2 from the Tanz Hotel company which scooped the best performance award in the 1996 CIFET. Exploring body language to discover a new vocabulary in a world of noise and technology, it is self-admittedly fragmentary and alternates modern or, rather, post-modern dance with improvisation.

But if your taste is for experimentation on the classics, you will wonder why Shakespeare, apart from an Egyptian production of Heiner Muller's The Hamlet Machine, is so prominently absent this year. By way of compensation, the festival is hosting a new treatment of the Faust legend from the Russian Luna Theatre, adapted from Goethe, Marlowe and Thomas Mann, and projected in the form of a play-within-a-play, as well as Intisar Abdel-Fattah's Drums for Faust. There are also a number of modern classics, including Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author from Armenia; Slavomir Mrozek's Striptease from Latvia; Nazem Hekmat's Sword of Damocles from Palestine and, for the first time in the festival, an experimental production of an opera. The Czech Republic's Studio Ypsilon Prague company are bringing Smetana's The Bartered Bride, adapted and directed by Jan Schmid (with Miroslav Korinek co-directing), and acted with a touch of sympathetic parody to suit the mood of the 90s. Equally exciting is Al-Sultan, a Greek production by the Drama Group of Chios of Tawfik El-Hakim's modern Egyptian classic "The Sultan's Dilemma", adapted by Tina Papadopoulou from a translation by Hassan Badawi and directed by her.

The festival menu also lists: Margarita and the Master, and The Unfinished Dance from Bulgaria; a kind of from life to the stage performance, based on improvisations by amateurs, from the Italian Compagnia Pippo Delbono, called Barboni; a French production by the Theatre du Voile Déchiré of Malika Khaldi's Le Couloir des Anges; Ethiopia's Singing Leaves; as well as nine shows from different Arab countries, not to mention the Egyptian imput which numbers at the moment eight, but which may well swell to 14 by the beginning of the festival. Of the Arab shows, I highly recommend Syria's Hello, Chekov; Tunisia's Love in Autumn and What Can and Cannot be Said, and Algeria's The Mad House. Some of the Egyptian entries I have already reviewed last week and the rest are still simmering; but the smell coming out of Al-Talia's kitchen, where People of the River is cooking, is quite mouth-watering.

Too much to digest? Wait. I have not yet mentioned the aperitif or hors d'oeuvre: a one-day round table dedicated to the memory and achievements of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, and a three-day panel on theatre in the Arab world, its beginnings, evolution, current state and prospects in the 3rd millennium. Haven't we covered this ground over and over before? I asked Fawzi Fahmi. He said: "It will be different this time. It is the last CIFET this century, and this creates a need, somehow, to get together and reflect on the past, present and future of our theatre -- to honestly take stock of what we have done, and look where we are going."

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