If this is September it must be CIFET
Nehad Selaiha gears up for another experimental whirlwind
The countdown for CIFET 2003 has started. At the festival headquarters, on the eighth floor of the educational units centre at the Academy of Arts, faces wear a harassed look as people frantically dash around holding a fluttering sheet or straining under the weight of a load of files to the constant buzzing of telephones. Occasionally, you could hear Fawzi Fahmi's stentorian voice in the distance, bawling instructions at full volume. In the evening the commotion subsides but the work still goes on. This is the time when Fahmi, as chairman of the festival, has to sit with a couple of his closest assistants to vet the videotapes of foreign shows for any offensive material. It's a ticklish, unwelcome task, he admits, but very necessary. However liberal one's personal views may be one has always to take society and the current mood and tenor of the culture into account. Above all, the festival has to be guarded against any devastating assaults from the conservative camp.
What if he likes a performance artistically but judges that it would raise a big hue and cry? When this happens, which is not often he is glad to say, he usually contacts the makers of the show and tries to negotiate a compromise. In most cases artists show a great deal of sympathetic understanding, he gratefully admits.
This year, a Dutch Othello was one such show. "It is magnificent," he says; "but how many people can stomach an Othello parading himself on stage in the nude?" There was also some heavy love-play which needed a bit of toning down and Bianca's costume was far too flimsy. Such concessions are painful to suggest or make, but the alternative, he thinks, is having the festival banned altogether, and that would be a great loss. Some would favour a policy of shock and unwavering confrontation; Fahmi, however, thinks it is more effective to work on people's sensibilities slowly, imperceptibly, to secure a smooth transition to more progressive mental attitudes. For him the question is always: how far can you go without losing your audience? A thorny issue you must admit, and quite problematic when you think that people who are brought up in the same culture can vastly differ in their assessment of what is permissible in society at a certain historical juncture.
Right now the international scene displays a marked tendency towards intellectual conservatism and the prevalent mood, particularly in the Arab world, is a mixture of apprehension, anxiety, anger and despondency. Many of the guest performances we are going to see, I am told, will reflect this mood one way or another. On the other hand the central seminar, which hosts a panoply of international theatre artists and scholars, will not only examine the theatrical fall-out of 11 September, the Iraqi war and the world-wide economic decline, but will also go back in time to compare the response of theatre, at different points in history, in different parts of the world, to moments of upheaval, crises and conflict. Whether all the Egyptian works taking part in the festival this year will reflect a similar sense of crisis remains to be seen. But judging by the two I have seen so far (the only ones that were ready at the time of writing this piece), I expect that many will carry a distinct sombre note and display a marked shift from the pursuit of technical exuberance towards more socially and politically responsible attitudes.
At Al-Hanager the sight of Iraqi director Qasim Mohamed, now living in the United Arab Emirates and pining to go home, was a poignant reminder of the war on Iraq, the horrors that led to it and the sorrows it has left in its wake. Like last year's Risalat At-Teyr, which he adapted from the famous allegorical poem, Manteq At-Teyr (The Conference of Birds) by the 12th Century Persian mystical poet and thinker Farid Eddin Attar, his current Stories from the Alleyways of the Third World is also an adaptation and the fruit of a workshop with young actors organised by Al-Hanager. This time, however, Mohamed went to Latin America for inspiration and picked two of three short plays published by Argentinean writer Osvaldo Dragun in 1957 under the title Three Tales to be Told (Historias para se contadas). Dragun's the Man who Became a Dog and The Story of our Friend Bangitto Gonzales who Felt Responsible for an Outbreak of Bubonic Plague in South Africa were knocked together, so to speak, slightly altered, and then rebuilt into one text with two parallel plots, alternating scenes and points of intersection. One plot shows a man taking on the job of a watch-dog at a factory when he fails to find any other work and ending up behaving exactly like a dog and living in a kennel. In the second another poor man, also jobless, but with the added burden of half a dozen kids to feed, is lured by a fat salary to cooperate with a multi-national company to market rotten rat meat in the poor Third World. The company makes fat profits and he thrives for a while. But when the company's products cause an outbreak of bubonic plague in South Africa he becomes the natural scapegoat and is solely held responsible. While the company escapes unscathed he ends up back on the streets, but this time shamed and disgraced and feeling dreadfully guilty, with neither home nor family.
In Qasim Mohamed's adaptation the two stories share the same setting -- an alleyway in a slum in a poor, Third World country -- and offer two alternating variations on the theme of the gradual erosion of people's humanity under the pressure of poverty, greed and rabid exploitation. Adopting a style of performance inspired by both Brecht's epic theatre in Germany and Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed in Brazil, Mohamed kept the stage austerely bare, divided it into two separate platforms, with a long catwalk in the middle jutting out well into the auditorium. On each platform four actors, three men and a woman, alternately used narration, impersonation and comment to unfold the story assigned to them. There were no sets, only boxes to serve as seats, a desk which, when turned round became a kennel, while a poem by Brecht, painted in big, black letters on a large, white screen served as a backdrop. There was no music either, and of props and accessories there was the bare minimum -- a stick, a cardboard cutout tree and moon, some glasses and a few coats and scarves to mark changes in character. Everything depended on the performers' ability to quickly slip in and out of parts and moods and to tell their stories neutrally, comment on them detachedly, as well as act them out to the most intimate depths. With such a stark text and no visual frills it's a wonder how this show manages to touch people so profoundly, address them so intimately, moving them at once to laughter and to tears.
From the slums of the Third World I was catapulted by director Mohamed El-Kholi, at the Puppet Theatre, onto the battlefield and horrors of war. Here, Irwin Shaw's one-act drama fantasy Bury the Dead (1936) -- a haunting denunciation of war in which the fallen soldiers of all nations refuse to be buried despite the pleading of their loved ones -- is given a slightly altered name (The Revolt of the Dead), injected with songs and some heavy-handed clowning and slapstick farce and let loose on the unsuspecting audience. But technically brash and naïve as it was, with some really sloppy, sentimental songs and patches of atrocious acting, especially from the women, the text miraculously survived and even managed to touch a responsive chord. With so many young people dying all over this part of the world, so close to us, how can one fail to be touched by the dead soldiers' argument that they were cheated, robbed of life by empty slogans and that, at the end of the day, when all the dust has settled down, it is the big generals and those who fund them that are the real victors.
