Issue No. 610
Culture
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31 Oct. - 6 Nov. 2002 Issue No. 610 Culture |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Hand in hand
The Jadayel International Independent Arts Festival has more than meets the eye, writes Nehad Selaiha
For once, Egyptian artists have had the chance to experience the existence of the European Union as a concrete reality. On the initiative of an ambitious and highly motivated young theatre artist, writer, actress and director Nora Amin, four foreign culture bodies in Cairo -- the Prohelvetia Arts Council of Switzerland, the Royal Netherlands Cultural Fund, the British Council and the Goethe Institute -- were persuaded to work hand in hand with independent artists and theatre groups in Egypt to build a solid bridge of cultural interaction and collaboration. It is a bridge that no war planes can bomb and no army can blow up, as Odin theatre actress Julia Varley is fond of saying. As Nora describes it in the elegant brochure, this first international independent arts festival "is the fruit of the collaboration between these partners ... and many other organisations and venues (including the Town House and Mashrabeyya Galleries, the Roberto Cimetta Fund for the mobility of artists around the Mediterranean, the Egyptian Cultural Development Fund, and the AUC Performance and Visual Arts Department) which still -- in these difficult times -- believe in independent art, in dialogue and exchange and in promoting change, not only in a local context but in an international networking context as well, attempting to create a complex tie of differences and similarities and of mutual explorations, investigations and development. Hence the title Jadayel, meaning braids."
The idea of Jadayel, as well as the title of its first session, "Sheharazade Now", were both inspired by yet another intercultural project, also sponsored by Prohelvetia. It all started when Swiss director Peter Braschler -- who has worked for years with Palestinian theatre artists and writers and whose Misk Al-Ghazal (Deer Musk), a stage-version of Hanan El-Sheik's famous novel of the same name, with an all-female Palestinian cast, visited Cairo while on tour a few years ago -- began with his Maralam Theatre troupe to explore human relationships between individuals from different cultures. Love, being the most intimate of these, soon became the focus and frame-story of The Arabian Nights, with its love, betrayal and murder themes and fascinating characters, familiar in both the East and West, provided a ready locus.
Maysoon Mahfouz, programme manager of the Prohelvetia liaison office in Cairo, takes up the story. Braschler and his team, including German writer Melanie Sandra Rose who, except for the Arabic portions, did the final script, "worked for six months in Cairo and Switzerland investigating the art of storytelling and what Sheharazade represents for the two cultures until the plot of Sheharazade Now was built up. When the production was ready, the director wanted to play it in a suitable context. He "suggested organising other events related to Sheharazade and focusing on the daily attempts of women to survive. We started to look for who, where and how," Maysoon continues; it was then that Nora Amin appeared on the scene, saw the opportunity and immediately seized it. At once, she "initiated the idea of establishing a whole festival under the supervision of Prohelvetia and around the theme of Sheharazade... We decided to involve other partners and Nora coordinated all the events in the festival."
It was a stupendous task and a big responsibility which needed experience, previous training in arts management, a degree of emotional detachment, a cool, calculating mind and, most of all, dependable trained assistants -- none of which Nora had. But, despite the recent nightmarish experience she shared with other independent theatre groups early this year when (with modest financial help from Prohelvetia and some private donors) they staged a mini independent theatre festival (their fourth in 12 years) at the Russian Cultural Centre (which charged an enormous rent) and the many horrendous obstacles which nearly gave its organiser, Hani El-Mettenawi of the Shrapnel group, a nervous breakdown, Nora was not daunted; she embraced the task bravely, indeed, jubilantly, like an impossible dream come true.
For her, Jadayel did not only mean the continuity and development of the free theatre movement she has been an active part of since its launching in 1990, it was also a vindication of the very idea of freedom, of the cause of independent art she so fervently champions. That is why she cast her net wide, hoping to rope in as many independent artists as possible -- musicians, dancers, painters and writers as well as theatre people; and she managed to net a decent catch and would have done much better if the whole thing hadn't happened at such a short notice.
Independence was also the reason behind her long, obstinate resistance to the idea of asking the government for anything. At last, however, she was forced by financial and artistic considerations to swallow her pride and apply to the Cultural Development Fund for the use of Beit Al-Harrawi and Zeinab Khatoun. She got them, but with no sound or lighting systems. These, and other technical requirements, were provided by The Royal Netherlands Cultural Fund and The Temple independent theatre company by courtesy of its founder Ahmad El-Attar. Except for one Egyptian show, Full Stop, End of Line, staged at the new Garage Space of the Town House Gallery, all the live performances in the festival, including its central production, the Swiss Sheharazade Now were hosted at these two beautiful historical houses. But lovely as they are, it was often jokingly said that they were the only 'un- independent' smear on the otherwise thoroughly shampooed and well-groomed independent 'jadayel' of the festival.
Of the 15 or so independent groups which form the hard core of the free theatre movement in Egypt, eight took part, not counting in Manal Ibrahim's Al-Taweza (The Amulet) which, though listed in the catalogue, withdrew its Gamila at the last minute. Effat Yehia's The Caravan group contributed a double bill which opened at the French Cultural Centre last year and was reviewed on this page at the time. The Diary of Fatma , a hilarious, quasi-realistic comedy with some sombre, reflective moments, features a day in the life of a harassed school teacher of slender means, with a bunch of demanding kids and a thoroughly uncooperative husband, who is near her wits' end trying to cope with no help from anybody. By contrast, the woman in Memory of Rhythms, which dramatises the power-struggle between men and women as a symbolic ritual, is much more forceful and comes out on top at the end.
Azza El-Husseini's Al-Ghagar (The Gypsies), a new-comer to the movement (it was founded less than two years ago), opts for a different age group in An Ordinary Girl and portrays the longings and frustrations of a single, young Egyptian working woman. Seen with Fatma's Diary, it forms a very bleak image indeed of the lives of Egyptian women, both in youth and middle age and whether celibate or married. And as if that was not enough, director Saleh Saad's Al-Soradek, one of the earliest independent theatre groups, dating back to the late 1980s, relinquished on this occasion its typical style of broad, uproarious folk-comedy in favour of a depressing one-woman show featuring another long-suffering Fatma.
In The Monologue of Fatma, the Egyptian, the heroine is an actress who when saddled with the role of the Egyptian Fatma can find no better correlative for it than the image of the patient, faithful Penelope of Greek mythology. Like her, the actress sits on the shore, weaving and endlessly reciting the dull routine of Fatma's inane life while she waits for the absent male and fends off the advances of unwelcome suitors. Gradually, however, the actress's own personal thoughts and memories of her repeated frustrations -- as a woman, a lover, an actress and a former hunted political activist -- begin to intrude into the fictional character's monologue, forming a parallel, ironical variation. But was that the end of Fatma? By no means. The Theatre Atelier's Batta and the Capricorn sprang yet another upon us. Batta (the usual pet name for Fatma), who having lost her virginity for a cup of coffee and sacrificed her most cherished dreams to save her pride, finally comes to the conclusion that in certain situations, most men have the hearts of chicken or rabbit and that, unfortunately, it is always the women who pay for it.
After all those lonely, suffering Fatmas, one is bound to feel grateful for Goha, Spouse and Partners by Abeer Ali's Al-Mesaharaty Workshop. An open, loud and vigorous feminist piece, originally commissioned by The New Woman NGO to tour the provinces, universities and poor urban areas addressing a wide variety of audiences, it uses glove-puppets, the popular comic stereotypes and slapstick routines of traditional puppet shows as well as the character of the legendary sharp- tongued, quick-witted Goha to incite women in the most entertaining way to stand up for their political, social and economic rights.
Though somewhat chillingly restrained, Passages, the contribution to the festival of Karima Mansour's Maat for Contemporary Dance, as well as her "open rehearsal" of improvisations on different moods and situations, struck a more sophisticated and refined note. The same emotional reserve and technical polish characterised Nora Amin's La Musica 2eme, based on Marguerite Duras's play of the same name.
Nora is a passionate admirer of Duras and has been haunted by this play for years. One of the reasons she founded her own troupe three years ago after working with other independent groups (mainly as an actress and less often as writer or director) for many years was perhaps to stage this text. She named her group after the play -- La Musica -- and set about preparing for her long- cherished production. It took her three years and six other productions before she was able to finally stage it. "During that time," she says, "the characters have grown, my interpretation changed. The Durassien text is now a 'pretext' to show my own interpretation of the crisis and fantasy of that desperate couple." In her present production, she confesses, "the language, the succession of scenes, the going back and forth in time, the spoken and the unspoken, and the whole structure changed." Ironically, it is this intense personal involvement with the text which at once accounts for the strength of the production and its weaknesses. It seems to me that Nora has become so wrapped up in the text, so imprisoned in it that she cannot reach out to the audience to communicate the experience. She needs the eye of a director to make sure that what she needs to communicate reaches the audience in a language they can read and understand.
Compared to La Musica 2eme, Full Stop, End of Line by The Obliged People Theatre Group (have you ever heard a more off-putting name) seemed painfully formless, unfocused, banal and self- indulgent. Most of the actors had real talent, good body control and plenty of zest and there were fleeting moments when one seemed to glimpse a good potential for comic invention and wit; but the show seemed to have been hastily thought up and carelessly put together specifically for the festival -- which might ironically explain the Group's odd choice of name. Most of the group originally belonged to Mohamed Shafiq's dance troupe which won the CIFET award for best performance two years ago with a modern movement and dance piece called Where Things Happen. With Shafiq away in Sweden to cultivate his prodigious talent as gifted dancer and choreographer and the troupe dismantled, one could understand how anxious those young performers were to use the festival as a launching pad for a new group; they felt it was now or never and they had to do it: hence The Obliged.
Foreign performances, other than the slightly disappointing and somewhat facile though visually intriguing Sheharazade Now, included The Window, a work in progress also directed by Braschler and acted by Tahani Salim about an expatriate Palestinian woman who goes back to Ramallah to find it under siege and relives the Palestinian long history of suffering and persecution as she watches through the shutters of her window Israeli soldiers rampaging through her city. Stitches on the Concrete, by Serbian artist Ana Vilenica, was another solo performance which tells the story of a mother without a husband, forced to work in a big factory with hundreds of other women in similar desperate situations and fighting for survival in the face of loneliness, penury and the callous indifference of the world.
But apart from live theatre, Jadayel had plenty of events and activities: a mini film-festival of work by some of the most talented young filmmakers in Egypt today, hosted at the Goethe Institute; two art exhibitions: Alf Leila wa Leila by Hassan Al-Sharq, also at Goethe (see below), and Entr'acte: Sketches from Cairo by Swiss artist Claudia Renne; two delightful evenings of storytelling by members of The Women and Memory Forum at the Garage of the Town House Gallery (a beautiful new versatile space and quite enormous), retelling old folk tales from a feminist perspective under the artistic direction of Caroline Khalil; an exciting lecture on Sheharazade and Resistance Strategies of the Dispossessed, delivered by Ferial Ghazoul, hosted by the AUC Institute For Gender and Women's Studies at the Falaki Academic Centre; a lecture-demonstration by the German director Alexander Stillmark at Mashrabeyya Gallery; an afternoon of storytelling by the German independent actor and storyteller Jorg Boesecke at the Town House Gallery; two Egyptian-Swiss sessions of public reading at the Goethe Institute, featuring plays and other literary works related to the theme of the festival; a four-day movement and voice workshop for young independent actors donated to the festival by the international actress Julia Varley of the Odin theatre and hosted by Frank Bradley at the AUC Performance and Visual Arts Department; a 10-day dance workshop on the physical female images in different cultures, involving three dancers/choreographers: Karima Mansour from Egypt, Ana Vilenica, Serbia and Julietta Figueroa, Chile; and by way of a farewell gift on the last day of the festival ( 31st October, today in fact) a concert by Manal Mohieddin on the harp featuring works by Handel, Back, Debussy and Tournier, among others.
So far, I have only spoken of the performances, functions and activities listed in the festival's catalogue; equally important, however, and perhaps more fruitful are the informal meetings and discussions before, in-between and after them, over tea and coffee in roadside, baladi cafes or drinks in the popular haunts of the downtown crowd. It is usually on such occasions that ideas are born, dreams exchanged, plans drawn, projects outlined and friendships launched. More than anything, it is for creating the occasion and the right atmosphere for such encounters that one is grateful to Nora. To have pulled off a festival of this kind is a credit to her stamina, dedication, perseverance and indefatigable energy. But to make of it the relaxed, joyful, friendly celebration it was needed talent, imagination and, above all, faith -- all of which Nora has in plenty. With more time for preparation beforehand and some attention to quality control, Jadayel could easily become over the years the most popular and rewarding international arts festival in the Arab world.
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