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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 September 1999 Issue No. 445 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 September 1999 Issue No. 445
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Hassan El-Geretly:
Playing it up
Profile by Youssef Rakha
To play needs much work. But when we experience the work as play, then it is not work any more...
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Focus Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters "In everyday life, 'if' is a fiction, in the theatre 'if' is an experiment. In everyday life, 'if' is an evasion, in the theatre 'if' is the truth" Peter Brook
In a casual conversation, Hassan El-Geretly can conjure up a whole universe, almost entirely fascinating. Masks are not only quaint, for example; they can liberate spiritual energy, affecting a performer's ability to move, deliver, contact the invisible formless entities he is seeking and be possessed by them, making them visible and giving them form. Not only masks, though: almost anything you bring up is bound to be caught in one or another of El-Geretly's creative force fields; there is no escape. Such far-fetched truths of the heart are perpetually juggled up and down, tossed back and forth, laid on the table momentarily, to be snatched away in a split second. Balanced on an always tentative, always hypothetical string, El-Geretly walks a continuous tightrope, biding his time in what turns out to be an all-engrossing one-man-show, a ceaseless performance. It is an effortless act, this; but, like all acts worth attention, it is not without ostentation. One suspects that its interest lies, not in what the actor reveals to his audience, but in what he purposely keeps hidden. And, engaging though it might be, El-Geretly's act is not always pleasant.
In impersonal conversations about work, he can, through the exact same discourse, be bitterly cynical and ruthlessly dismissive. Those who have worked with him complain about an overbearing, even unfeeling perfectionism. They also speak of manipulative charm, an aesthetic despotism swathed in the garb of democracy. It is inevitable: the work can only come first and it doesn't matter what it takes to do it right. It has to be organised well, even if this means spending as much time on administrative issues as you normally do on rehearsals. Founding and maintaining, over more than a decade, an alternative theatrical community in Cairo -- can that be any simpler? With a son -- now in his early teens -- in Paris, an aging mother in Maadi, two sisters in Cairo and several friends scattered throughout the world, even his precious little free time is spent fulfilling obligations. "But I don't feel victimised. I don't feel as if I've sacrificed anything. This is what I love and where I find myself most useful." The difficulties of a recklessly demanding career, and the relative obscurity associated with the alternative and the experimental are both acceptable, he insists, "because it is a choice." People want stability, security; he favours the theatre over life because of the sense of adventure, of uncertainty: to be floating along with little or no idea where you are going next, to live in a place where "it is always possible to start again," as Peter Brook says. "In life this is a myth; we ourselves can never go back on anything. New leaves never turn, clocks never go back, we can never have a second chance. In the theatre, the slate is wiped clean all the time."
On the surface, then, "casual" and "impersonal" are two necessary epithets; deeper down, their power to illuminate proves insufficient. El-Geretly's nonchalance, for one thing, conceals an impassioned artistic objective: to distill experience; to tell your story effectively, however much you need to depart from its factual basis; to create an image or essence of your subject, something incomparable and immediately accessible, exactly right. "The theory of photography can be learned in an hour," wrote the French caricaturist, writer and bohemian Felix Nadar (1820-1910), known for his widely acclaimed photographic portraits of 19th-century celebrities; "the first principles of its practice, in a day. What cannot be learned so quickly is your feeling for the light... the effects it produces from one day to the next and over several days combined... What is even less quickly learned is the moral intelligence of your subject, the touch that puts you in contact with your model, enabling you to discern, leading you immediately to his habits, his ideas, his character, thus allowing you to provide -- not a banal and chance reproduction, accessible to every last worker in the laboratory -- but the most familiar and the most favourable resemblance, the intimate resemblance."
To effect this touch, this contact, is the purpose of true art; no wonder El-Geretly often talks about his work in the terminology of a love-relation. Make no mistake about it, though: theatre is not all art, and art is not just theatre. "Someone told me that we're not really theatre people but rather artists at heart," he once confided, "and maybe it's true." Insofar as art involves human beings sharing their experience, therefore, nobody could be more sympathetic than El-Geretly: he may not be personal with people, but when it comes to the creative process he's very personal about them. Now it is true that Nadar's words cannot be applied directly to theatre. But watch El-Geretly's best shows, sense the perfect communion between actors and audience, and you will know exactly what he means. That the intimate resemblance is inevitably a subjective vision, never an objective interpretation, should not make it any less valid as an experience of truth. Or should it? "Serious theatre," wrote Antonin Artaud, another of El-Geretly's influences, "upsets all our preconceptions."
THEATRICAL DISINFECTANT: He was accused of handling indigenous artistic traditions "with his gloves on". As the man who sought to purify the milieu of all commercial and bureaucratic debris, he has been known to call himself "the Dettol of Egyptian theatre". Another of his self-chosen titles is "the chief of a tribe", an extraordinarily "polyphonic" tribe where teenagers from Upper Egypt perform side by side with graduates of the American University in Cairo, university professors discuss the folk psyche with illiterate story-tellers, and cabaret artistes are brought face to face with pillars of the student movement. Conventional practitioners may well dismiss him as a marginal experimentalist, but his multinational presence, the intellectually sophisticated aura with which he surrounds himself and the many performers who benefit from his aesthetic counsel all testify to the abiding impact of his work. In fact the mere existence of Al-Warsha (The Workshop), the first (and only) fully-fledged independent theatre troupe in the country, is reason enough to think of Hassan El-Geretly as an exceptional force in Egyptian cultural life Repertoire
1987-88
Waking Up, by Dario Fo and Franca Rame
My Foot My Tutor, by Peter Handke
The Lover, by Harold Pinter
The Dumbwaiter, by Harold Pinter
In the Penal Colony, based on a short story by Franz Kafka1989-92
Dayer Maydour, by Naguib and Khaled Guweili, based on Alfred Jarry's Ubu cycle (the action is transported to Mameluke Egypt and the show incorporates traditional shadow puppet theatre, on the basis of work with the late shadow puppeteer Ahmed El-Komi)
Dayren Dayer, by Naguib and Khaled Guweili, based on Alfred Jarry's Ubu cycle (the play into which Dayer Maydour eventually evolved)
Layali Al-Warsha (Nights of Al-Warsha), story-telling performances, work in progress1993-97
Ghazir Al-Leil (Tides of Night), drawing on the popular love story of Hassan and Na'ima
The Birth-Feast of Holy Aisha, a documentary film about one of Cairo's mawalid (1994)
Li'bet Al-Timsah (The Crocodile), popular shadow puppet play
Layali Al-Warsha, incorporating story-telling and singing from the Hilaliya epic, on the basis of work with its greatest living master, Sayed El-Douwi
Min Al-Sira Al-Hilaliya (From the Hilaliya epic), a theatrical experiment1998-99
Ghazl Al-A'mar (Spinning Lives), an attempt to dramatise the Hilaliya epicBrook and Nadar notwithstanding, how best to approach such a man? Probably without preconceptions, not even the ones gleaned from his discourse. His world, even his theatrical world, is not a slate periodically wiped clean: his working process involves ceaseless training, drawing on skills already acquired, the gradual and painstaking accumulation of knowledge. Nor does his work reflect specific realities in such a way that they definitively yield their essence. Most of the time, in fact, he sets out with nothing clear-cut in mind, except the vaguest sensation, the slightest interest in a resource or method, a mere flicker of distant light; thereupon he gropes his way towards a destination which remains forever provisional. "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour," wrote R L Stevenson, and in this sense El-Geretly is the perfect traveller, always on the road to temporary resting places, but never a permanent residence. And since his return from France in 1982 (he received his BA in drama from Bristol University, working as artistic director of Les Trétaux de la Terre et du Vent, an experimental regional division of the French National Dramatic Centre, from 1975-80, and later earning a diploma in audiovisual media from the Sorbonne), his journey, more spiritual than physical, has clearly been a homeward one.
***
By 1987, an official position in the state-sponsored Tali'a Theatre (1983-85) and a stint with Youssef Chahine (1985-88) had revealed, not only his desire to stay here, but the countenance of his struggle. A series of meetings with potential collaborators -- actress Abla Kamel, critic Menha El-Batrawi, set designer Amr El-Rakshi and, later, writers Khaled and Naguib Guweili, to mention but a few -- provided the nucleus of a long-term working group. Now Al-Warsha (The Worksop) -- El-Geretly's conception of an independent working method, a troupe that was neither bureaucratically regulated nor subject to the trappings of commercialism -- had finally come into being. Already he was at the centre of a community, a team, an inclusive working space offering "a system, a rhythm, an ongoing mutual interaction", without purporting to be any kind of utopia. "I never believed in utopias, but I always loved being part of a group. That is different." He had been collaborating with filmmaker Youssri Nasrallah, as actor and assistant director, in Nasrallah's debut, Sariqat Sayfiya (Summer Thefts) when he finally decided to leave Chahine. "It postponed my leaving a little. It was wonderful working with Youssri, but by the time we finished I had started longing for a group. There was a team spirit in the office, but that's not the same thing. I wanted the daily contact, the sense of being stuck together and having to do things that way, which only the theatre can give."
For years Chahine's office had been the main outlet for his vitality. As assistant director, he worked on two of Chahine's best-known films, Adieu Bonaparte and The Sixth Day, discovering the cinema (a medium he'd had little experience of in France), forging relationships and gradually, imperceptibly creating a niche. "I learned a lot about the cinema. I worked on different things, on the dialogue as well. It is so interesting to work with Chahine at the stage when things are still being prepared, this open, stimulating atmosphere. But as soon as he starts writing things down it gets a bit exclusive, becomes his own thing. I felt that his sources had little to do with me. I think it's natural to want to break out and do your own thing." But most importantly, El-Geretly realised, someone had developed his own alternative; it was possible, even necessary, to do the same. "In the end you make your bed and you sleep in it. If you let yourself be dependent on people you don't trust artistically, it doesn't work, it's too risky, it can ultimately destroy your vision." His experience of state-sponsored theatre, on the other hand, had not been pleasant. "There was no way you could function under the logic of bureaucracy. The bureaucratic way of doing things makes it impossible to reach any kind of change. And then, of course, there is power. But this is not just about bureaucracy..."
Power, for El-Geretly, is a way of seeing things, an attitude, not necessarily a concrete position. "And what's more, of the many kinds of power the one most prevalent among us is the power of the victim, the power that becomes available to you when you begin to say, I am at a disadvantage, I have suffered. Negative power. It really is a huge struggle trying to promote positive power, power that comes from a true strength, from something productive..." His own power, it would seem, is of the latter kind. Years of apprenticeship in the West and a privileged family background (his father was the economist Ali El-Geretly, an erudite researcher and bank manager and, briefly, minister of the economy) did not prevent him from upholding the vision of a creative space that derived its inspiration from Egyptian realities (El-Geretly insists on the plural) and drew in people from all walks of life. "The forms of our popular culture -- music, shadow plays, saints' carnivals, story-telling -- are now, at last, warmly familiar to me, like long lost friends," he wrote in 1991. It is not enough for "this culture to provide the subjects of the stories; it has to become the object of our work. This turns out to be impossible to achieve if we are using European techniques which have been developed for centuries to express an outlook so different from our own." Al-Warsha, by then, had become both a way of life and an intellectual statement. As a socio-political force, popular culture could release the theatre from the tyranny of the Western model, just as a "free troupe" could release it from the tyranny of bureaucratic (state-supported) and commercial models of production.
Yet he is half-Scottish, he is unconventional, his work has remained semi-clandestine. He has dared to approach the folk arts, moreover -- Westernised intellectual that he is -- presenting them to European and American audiences in avant-garde festivals worldwide. When El-Geretly grew up, it was the newly reinvigorated search for national identity that shaped much of what was going on in culture and the arts. Yet the theatre, as he points out, remained confined to an imported and ultimately stifling framework, incapable of accommodating Egyptianness or drawing on the power, the astonishing diversity of Egyptian folk performance. He left the country in 1967, frustrated with the formality and narrow-mindedness he had encountered at the Maadi Secondary School and Cairo University. "I was myself defeated when I left," he once declared.
But he made something of that defeat, whatever your final verdict on his achievement. After experimenting with European texts in colloquial Arabic translation, there was the encounter with shadow puppet theatre. Dayren Dayer -- in an aesthetically compelling visual framework, with stylised, hilarious acting and original music by Georges Kazazian -- told the story of a simple puppeteer, Ibrahim, who gets embroiled in the gorily bloody power intrigues of Mameluke Egypt, coming within reach of the throne, only to renounce power and go back to his art. The play set Al-Warsha's subsequent pattern: a long drawn out project involving intense training and several performances of work in progress, which finally yield a play. After shadow puppet theatre, there were the folk stories, which finally led to the Upper Egyptian mawwal (an extended song telling a professedly true story with a moral) with Tides of Night offering an unexpected, equally sophisticated version of the traditional love story of Hassan and Na'ima. And after the mawwal came Al-Sira Al-Hilaliya (the chronicles of ancient Arab heroes, sung by Upper Egyptian bards to the accompaniment of the rababa), an oceanic saga of wars and loves, journeys and destinations, rivalries and friendships, which has proved well nigh impossible to dramatise. This, along with the astonishing expansion of Al-Warsha and its increasing involvement in the NGO scene both in the Arab world and beyond, tackling such issues as art management and social development, has occupied El-Geretly for the last six years. This has, of course, transported his oratory panache from the rehearsal space to the conference hall, and given his performance a professional, coolly VIP edge. Is he frustrated with all the administrative work?
"It is like walking a tightrope," he shrugs. "Experience has proved that you cannot work in a vacuum, be the exception that proves the rule. We have to fight against that, we have to help other people with whom we feel affiliated, and let them help us. Working on creating the climate, the milieu, in which our work has meaning is equally, if not more important. We don't want to be the tree that hides the absence of the forest... So, balancing all these struggles with artistic endeavour is not always easy. We have expanded immensely and that in itself creates problems. But so long as things are in the balance it's OK. Sometimes, of course, the balance tips over, it's a daily sort of equilibrium and is bound to be disturbed every now and again. But on the whole, I think, it's maintained."
During last year's round of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre Al-Warsha's incomplete adaptation of the Hilaliya epic found its way to Beit Al-Harrawi, despite all of El-Geretly's busyness. Though widely acclaimed, it did not glean the prize for best Egyptian show. Since then work on the Sira has been supplemented by a new experiment involving stories from life, autobiographical scenes, an exercise that began nearly three years ago. "This has helped many actors talk about difficult experience, it brought out so much. And it really is such rich material, so full of dramatic interest." After nearly eight years of long drawn out projects based on improvisation and popular sources, El-Geretly is longing for plays, he says. "It's as if the cycle has come full circle. We're returning to where we first started, but with the benefit of experience, of course. The story-telling has fed into the acting, which we are beginning to lose touch with." But with the administrative work still taking up so much energy and time, how long will it take to produce another fully-fledged show, finally? El-Geretly shrugs, smiling equivocally. It is the process that counts, not the end result. Who cares?...
Well, the audience does. And with preparations for this year's CIFET underway, it really will make a difference whether Al-Warsha perform a new play, or yet another version of Spinning Lives.
(photos:Randa Shaath )
