Pirouette

The 6th Festival for Dance Theatre springs a nasty surprise on Nehad Selaiha

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When I referred in my article last Thursday to Walid Aouni's brave attempts to expand the concept of dance theatre in the minds of Egyptian audiences and his willingness to take risks in that direction by hosting in his annual festival untraditional forms of dance, I little thought such artistic daring could raise more than a few frustrated murmurs, some loud, angry comments, perhaps, or, at worst, a critical charge of élitism and opacity. One had expected, of course, the usual attacks on the art of dance per se from the extreme conservative right which greet the festival every year and hoped for once to be disappointed. They were there, however, pat on time, trotting out the same old, hackneyed arguments and howling for the festival to be cancelled on the specious plea that it was against "our customs and traditions" and flagrantly flouted them. Nothing new so far and, indeed, such attacks (like the annual vociferous onslaughts on the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre) have become something of a tradition which, one feels, the festival would not be the same without. In fact, one can argue they are a healthy sign, a testimony that the festival -- conceived as a liberating force, a challenge to ossified mental habits and attitudes and a way to rehabilitate the body and reintegrate it into a flesh-despising, flesh-consuming dominant culture -- was producing an effect and hurling a big, disturbing stone into many a stagnant pool.

But to controvert dance theatre in general and the concept of the festival on the grounds of 'cultural specificity' (however narrow and severely limited the implications of this term may be) in a creditable newspaper with a long history, like Al-Wafd, for instance, is one thing, and to target certain artists by name in the yellow press and subject them to a rabid smear-campaign is quite another and a shocking, sickening new development. On a dismal morning last week, three sensation-seeking, scandal-mongering, upstart yellow publications decided, as if by prior agreement, to venomously discredit both the festival and its director, using a young artist, Mohamed Shawqi, as a handy scapegoat. Charges of immorality, obscenity and sacrilege, touching both the Muslim and Christian faiths, were wantonly thrown in the face of Shawqi on account of a show performed about a month ago at the AUC black box theatre and scheduled for a repeat on the last day of the festival.

Scenes from Mohamed Shawqi's Yalli bitis'al 'an al-haya

I had seen Shawqi's Yalli bitis'al 'an al-haya (You who ask about life -- a phrase from a popular 1950s' song by Saad Abdel-Wahab titled "Life is but a feather floating in the air") when it was first performed. I did not review it at the time because I felt it was more like a work-in-progress demonstration than a finished production and also because, with this kind of show, you need to see it more than once to be able to really gauge its potential and current stage of realisation and I only caught it on the last evening of a three-day run. You Who Ask about Life struck me as profoundly anguished and profoundly muddled. Perhaps the two have to go together. Who could afford mental and emotional lucidity in the grip of blind rage and despair? The disconcertingly over-cluttered, claustrophobic set was something of a telling emblem; it divided the performance space into five figurative locations: four occupied by solitary, hounded, deeply frustrated and often delirious young people -- two men and two women -- while the fifth, occupying central stage, was dominated by a grotesque, clownish impresario, with a young hopeful in tow, in some imaginary talent-hunt television show. One was strongly reminded of Ahmed El-Attar's Life is Sweet (the refrain of yet another 1950s' popular song, this time by Farid Al-Atrash) and his subsequent virulently farcical, media-oriented Mother, I Want to be a Millionaire. In You Who Ask, everywhere you looked, there were bits of soiled, tattered clothing hung on nails fixed to the walls while palm-frond empty baskets filled the area underneath the jagged stage platform and spilled over on top. A mirror in the right back corner of the stage reflected at once the figure of a huddled young man in shorts, in a blue funk, having been obviously hounded and harassed by the state security forces for some mysterious offence and driven out of his wits with the fear of what awaits him once he is caught, and paradoxical reflections of a young woman on the left (Heba Fayed) who alternately takes on the look of a rigidly pious, veiled Muslim female and a voluptuous belly dancer, a kind of Harem slave-girl, in a shiny, titillating red gown. Her plight is shared by the Copt girl who faces her across the stage, Naglaa Younes. Brought up to be diligent and hardworking, and to believe that extra-marital sex was a deadly sin, and finding, despite a lucrative administrative job, that eligible spouses are not forthcoming and the hope of marriage is speedily receding, she strives to dissipate her natural longings in a hectic work syndrome. The young man who approaches her company for a job and whom she interviews (they meet centre stage, each advancing from their dreary, lonely corners right and left) is likewise sad and frustrated and palpably with no remnants of religious faith to fall back onto for succor in time of need. The mutual attraction they feel and pent-up cravings they share erupt in a daring but far from vulgar and really physically discreet self-fondling scene. They simply feel their bodies, shyly, sheepishly, as their separate, dreamy monologues constantly intersect and interact in the minds of the audience.

Framing the overlapping monologues, the brief dialogic encounters and inane, soul-shriveling, blithely spouted off verbal avalanche of the media man are Khaled Hamdi's vivid and deliberately brash sound effects and, more poignantly, excerpts from Salah Jahin's Quartets, visually scribbled on the black walls in white chalk, in the form of graffiti, or recited in a voice-over by a number of voices, including that of Mahmoud El-Lozy. I remembered how, some years ago, El-Lozy's Bay the Moon, a play about a young Egyptian intellectual caught in the six- day war in 1967 and his agonising attempts to make sense of his situation, was nipped in the bud on account of some malicious reports from an unidentified party to the censor's office. The recollection was to prove ominous and the initial sense of foreboding was justified by last week's events. As I watched the crummy environment created by Hala Imam's set and costumes and Hani Afifi's lighting, Jahin's pithy lines, with their earthy wisdom, struck me as reminders of better, more liberal times and as an ardent defense of the basic needs of humans and even animals for love and mating.

Yes, once in the 1960s Jahin could celebrate in colloquial verse primitive passions, the chance, amorous coupling of a lizard and scarab at dusk and revel in the spontaneity of the act without incurring the wrath of any pious, God-fearing pen-wielders. Apart from the discreet self-fondling scene, which could, on revision, be easily and quite safely re-phrased in oblique theatrical terms, one feels quite at a loss to find a tangible element to justify the ferocious onslaught on the show by the enraged guardians of public morality in the yellow papers. What really irked them, I think, was nothing crudely offensive on the verbal or visual levels; rather, it was the eloquent, undercurrent irony embedded in the whole show, particularly the alternate transformation of the Muslim girl into holy nun and odalisque by turns, and the agonised, frank confessions of the Coptic girl to her invisible priest and her passionate prayer to be rid of her tainted, albeit quite natural and legitimate, earthy desires. There was enough painful, disturbing truth in both images to jolt anyone out of their decorous, mechanical equanimity and comfortable moral sedateness. Not that You Who Ask couldn't have done with some refining in terms of theatrical language and more complex reflection in terms of content. But then, it was the first venture of a young director trying to find his own voice and vocabulary and burdened with all the resentments, frustrations, fears and sense of loss and oppression experienced by his generation. I remember leaving You Who Ask with many artistic reservations, but with a lot of admiration for its uncompromising honesty, unrelenting audacity and its perceptive pinpointing of the roots of the malaise in the combination of rigid religious dogma, repressive traditional values, political dictatorship and commercial, consumer-oriented media.

You Who Ask was enthusiastically received and favourably reviewed in many Arabic publications, including Al-Ahram Al-Arabi. And though you could not distantly hope to locate it within the widest conceptual frame of modern dance, it was nevertheless primarily physical in orientation and expressive modes, both on the level of form and content. It strove to inhabit that limnetic zone between acting and dancing, trying to merge the two and explore through movement and visual composition those telling gaps which constitute the unsaid and unsayable in every culture. And since modern dance or, rather, post-modern dance theatre consistently makes a virtue of violating its traditionally prescriptive boundaries and progressively encroaches upon areas hitherto defined as belonging to dramatic theatre or opera, Walid Aouni was willing to incorporate You Who Ask into his festival as a one-night performance on the last day.

You Who Ask was aired a month ago; the reason it has suddenly cropped up in the yellow press, or rather been dragged out and paraded as a scandalous object even before it was performed in any of the festival's officially nominated venues is obvious: why else except to put a spanner in the works and undermine the validity and worth of the festival? Lending an ear to every Tom, Dick and Harry, or giving in to blatant blackmailing has never been the policy of Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni. Think of all the acrid defamation campaigns he has weathered in his term of office. In this instance, however, probably because the whole regime feels a bit shaky and jittery these days, he has decided to bow down to vulgar pressure and issued (transmitted?) orders from high above to cancel the show, or, at best, include it in the festival provided it performs in a non-governmental space. Hopefully, You Who Ask will be hosted in the Townhouse Gallery Garage instead of at Al-Gomhouriya Theatre, as it was originally slotted. But whether this happens or not, and though I have seen some really noteworthy Egyptian contributions so far, particularly Mad Song and Transformation by the richly gifted and quite mesmeric Adham Hafez, this ugly business about Shawqi's piece seems to have soured the whole festival for me.