Networks of exchange

Dutch theatre professor Mieke Kolk has organised a variety of workshops in Cairo over the past few years. She spoke to Sonali Pahwa on the dynamics of intercultural collaboration

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Mieke Kolk has creatively adapted the familiar story of the visitor who comes to Cairo for two weeks and ends up staying two years. The Dutch theatre professor who first served on the jury of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET) in 2001 has since come back at regular intervals to arrange workshops that send a periodical buzz through Cairo's independent theatre community. She has become a travelling institution in Egypt.

Mieke Kolk narrates her rather accidental encounter with the country that has become a second home. "I met the Egyptian critic Nehad Selaiha at a feminist theatre conference in Germany three years ago, we liked each other, and she invited me to come to CIFET as a jury member. It was a wonderful, easygoing introduction to Cairo. Near the end of the festival, however, we felt the sadness of what had happened on 11 September. My colleagues there were disheartened; they said the Arab world would be made to pay. The idea took hold in my mind and I began to think it was time for us to talk to each other more. Moreover, the Netherlands has a big Muslim population, including people from Turkey, the Maghreb countries and Surinam. It was time we were interested in each others' cultures in another way."

"I came back to Cairo for the festival the following year, and this is when I got to know the people at the Dutch embassy who had been doing a fine job of supporting independent theatre artists. I proposed a series of master classes for distinguished Dutch dramatists to work with young directors here. I also wanted to help introduce these young directors to the large network of alternative theatre festivals, which was all ready and waiting for them to step into. The Dutch embassy was very cooperative. It later contributed to the project for an independent rehearsal space, due to open in September, organised by Ahmed El-Attar. Now that an available working space is anticipated, the embassy has proposed that I develop an intercultural exchange program. I have just started to formulate this over meetings with young directors in Cairo."

It is the similarities rather than the differences in making theatre in the Netherlands and Egypt that matter to Kolk. "It is natural for me to recognise, from a European drama tradition, what I see Egyptian dramatists trying to do," she shrugs, when asked about her sustained commitment to a theatre whose language is foreign to her. "Now I want to be of use in the development of their own forces. There are passionate people here who are very committed to what they do. At the same time it is important that they don't have to keep reinventing the wheel. The plays of Heiner Muller, for example, were written in the German Democratic Republic when the situation was closed politically and reading the texts might stimulate dramatists here. Ginka Tscholakova, who was the president of the CIFET jury last year, is a member of the Heiner Muller foundation and is excited about translating his texts into Arabic soon."

"The new movement in dramatic texts and theatre, in which techniques are moving on and becoming more interdisciplinary, has developed during the last 30 years in Europe. There is a lot of energy in this movement internationally and Egyptian dramatists should be part of it too. The new forms of theatre are much more open to communication through different means. And so they are more reflective of the situation in which they are created. They may draw in new audiences for theatre as well."

Kolk's own history in the theatre is also criss- crossed with experimental leaps. A professor of theatre studies at the University of Amsterdam, she trained in the history and theory of theatre, worked as a critic and edited a theatre journal for several years. And then in the 1980s, she helped form a feminist theatre group.

"At a certain point we realised that theatre had a very traditional interpretation of women that just didn't fit us any more," she explains. "Other women theatre artists and I got together, asked for funding from the government and received it. If people think a form of art is worthwhile as a representation of different opinions in the country, the Dutch government supports it. We do have a bourgeois theatre, but youth and women's theatre have been very much stimulated as well. Nowadays there is theatre for immigrant groups -- it is important that every social group gets a place to speak from. From the '90s onwards more immigrants have been going to theatre schools and writing plays. They are mostly well integrated with other Dutch people, but when they want to be separate in their art they can be. They attract audiences because of the particularity of their theatre. The important thing is that many new groups are entering our cultural institutions."

Kolk is drawing on a range of academic and artistic resources to advance the Dutch commitment to cultural exchange. After successive workshops on arts management and acting methods in Cairo in 2003, she recently organised a workshop by the Dutch musician Paul Koek at the Townhouse gallery. "He is a musician who came into theatre, and he describes what he does as a musicalisation of theatre. This means that rather than bringing in separate elements of music, he works on rhythm and sounds in the bodies of the actors. It was incredibly beautiful to see how the actors developed their own shapes and sounds in the show at the end of the short workshop in Cairo."

"But all of this needs time, of course. I am very aware that in workshops and master classes we hardly have the time to digest things in a more philosophical or political sense. We need long- term projects as well. I asked some of the independent directors in Cairo what would be useful for them. They had ideas for playwriting projects with Dutch dramatists, a research program on Coptic music, studying at Dutch acting schools and so on. I am also keen on getting Dutch artists and students over here to assist in productions or to work on projects of their own. Two of my students are writing theses on Arab drama. It would make me very happy to see this young generation working together. The crossover from theatre theory to practice shouldn't be too difficult."

And then there are plans for further academic collaboration on the topic of Arab theatre. Kolk mentions a recent conference in Belgium on the adaptation of Greek tragedy in Arabic and Western cultures that included scholars from Egypt, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, US and Morocco. She recently met with Professor Mahmoud Abu Doma of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to arrange for a similar conference in Alexandria next year on the subject of comedy. "We will make a book when the second conference is done," she says. "It will be interesting to have complementary perspectives on tragedy and comedy and on cultural differences in each genre."

Kolk admits in very down-to-earth tones that she has no idea how all of these plans will turn out. "Language will be a problem, of course, for many students from here. Perhaps some really talented people could be selected for language study at an early stage of their studies. I hope that the opportunities for learning theatre will inspire the desire to learn a second language. The best thing about the project so far is that I have come to know people and they know me and we can make a start of it. I hope my students will come here soon, and then they will tell their own tales. Paul Koek is going to work with the poet Girgis Shoukri on a production in the Netherlands. It is good that we now have examples of collaboration, and our participants are happy with what they have achieved so far."