An active impresario
Sonali Pahwa speaks to Ahmed El-Attar about his latest play and other projects
Sonali Pahwa
photo: Randa Shaath
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A silver and yellow poster with an abstract design that could be either a spaceship or an artist's impression of downtown Cairo has begun to appear around town. The poster announces "Artistic Workshops" in Arabic and French, inviting applications for the study of set design, lighting, electronic music and modern dance. But you have to ask to find out that this ambitious training programme is the brainchild of Ahmed El- Attar. The playwright, director and producer and semi-resident of Cairo is back with a new play which synthesises his multi-media vision of theatre in addition to orchestrating separate projects for exploring arts that feed the theatre and give his own work a distinctively contemporary edge.
"My new play Mother, I want to be a Millionaire is about now -- this generation, its dreams and illusions and realities," says El-Attar, who describes his new project as a play made like a film.
It promises to be as contemporary in its visual techniques as in its themes.
"The visual world we live in has affected the audience of theatre. They are an audience that watches film, television, advertisements, videos. As a director I have to be there with them. Real time is being transformed into cinematic time and space, and I explore its discontinuities in the play."
"The text takes its place among other elements in the play. Arab culture is very text-oriented and as a consequence image and performance have a limited place here. As a writer and director I've always tried to minimise the effect of the text on the performance. My first step towards cutting up a text and putting it back together was in my 1996 play Oedipus the President, which was a collage of ten plays about Oedipus into which I threw Prometheus as well. Later I experimented with different styles of writing, creating words that didn't previously exist, attending to the rhyme and sound of speech rather than its meaning. The current play is less than half text. But you won't feel that. The text is sparse because it is very strong."
To meet the technical challenge of inflecting his theatre with the visual quality of cinema El- Attar is relying on lighting designer Charles Alstrom and set designer Hussein Baydoun. Respectively Swedish and Lebanese, these crew members are part of an eclectic production team that is funded by the Berlin Theatre Festival and assorted European sources. Aside from displaying El-Attar's formidable organisational energy and skill -- bolstered by a masters degree in art and culture management from the Sorbonne -- the diverse talents he draws into the theatre reveal a particular philosophy regarding the artist's social role.
"I believe that artists in the Arab world, and the Third World in general, have a different role to play than that of just an artist. When they can these artists should play a larger social and political role and take positions in the field of art and culture. I have developed connections in Egypt, the neighbouring region and Europe, and this allows me to develop projects, look for funds and put people together across these contexts. It is important that we have constant contact with the West and the East, with our neighbours and ourselves."
El-Attar is wary, however, of certain forms of exchange which, he says, are orchestrated to satisfy Western egos.
"In some workshops a lighting designer might be brought in for two weeks to teach people how to use equipment to which they are unlikely ever again to have access. It would be much more useful to address the reality of the field and its needs. While rehearsing Life is Beautiful in 2000, I organised a workshop directed by two French lighting designers who were working on the show. We taught people how to use locally available as well as imported equipment, so that they would be able to work with both kinds. It was conceived as a practical experience. The participants had to come up with a product at the end. We then sent five of them to Europe to train for a month each. Eventually the workshop toured Alexandria, Amman and Beirut."
The upcoming series of workshops on set design, music and dance were conceived in a similar spirit. Since El- Attar is again producing his play with an international crew the idea is to have them collaborate with Egyptian artists in the sustained format of a workshop. Moreover, professional Egyptian technicians in the relevant fields will participate in the workshop and thus connect with their counterparts from elsewhere. El-Attar emphasises the importance of looking into the professional talents available in Egypt and entailing their participation in training younger artists. For instance the modern dance workshop he projects for January will be directed by Karima Mansour. He hopes that the same group of dancers will pursue another workshop with European choreographers later in the year.
The most outré of El-Attar's projected workshops is one on electronic music. He has used compositions by Hassan Khan in his plays, but does not see a necessary link between this project and the theatre. He is interested in electronic music for its own sake, pointing to the recent surge of its popularity in the Arabic-speaking world. Two of the musicians he is bringing over for the workshop are of Lebanese descent.
"Gerard, aka Haze, has worked in Egypt and is producing a CD which features traditional Egyptian musicians and sounds. Clotaire K is more of a hip-hop artist. He has recently been opening for Natacha Atlas at her concerts. Then we have Yannis Karakadis, a British composer who makes music out of sounds and voices that he collects." The CD El-Attar hopes will emerge from this venture will be distributed in Europe and in Egypt.
As he sees it, El-Attar's pioneering role is not as an impresario of sub-cultural performance genres so much as an independent artist who organises outside of existing institutions. His modus operandi is exemplified by the simple act of putting up posters to spread the word about his workshops.
"You see plenty of posters advertising plays, but when do you see a workshop advertised? Organisers want to limit the circulation of the information. A corrupt hierarchical structure already determines who will have access to workshops. I believe there are a lot of talented people everywhere who never get a chance to express their talent or even to test it."
El-Attar has made a concerted effort to send posters and application forms to cities other than Cairo and hopes that 30 per cent of the participants selected for workshops will come from other cities.
It may well seem that El- Attar has enough projects to keep him busy, if not burdened, for the foreseeable future. But he has kept the best for the last. His "latest, newest, biggest" venture is the opening of a new performance space, to be used solely for rehearsals by independent artists, in September 2004. The opening will coincide with the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre for maximum exposure, but the space will not be used to stage or produce performances.
"Sometimes people want to work without specific aims or pressures or concessions, and that's healthy," he asserts. "You might have an idea, work it out, and decide that it doesn't amount to anything. This is a necessity, not a luxury, but most people do not have this option."
The space, which El-Attar will call The Studio, consists of a downtown apartment equipped with a minimum of furniture and a small library of books and videos on theatre. Rehearsal time will be available on a first come, first served basis. The non-competitive format is intended to create a collegial atmosphere in which artists can meet and collaborate.
