Going digital

At this year's Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET), opening on 1 September, writes Nehad Selaiha, the accent is on digital

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The organisers of the CIFET seem to derive a weird sort of pleasure out of keeping all news of the festival top secret until the very last minute then letting the minister of culture spring it all upon us in the form of a ritualistic congregational meeting with the press. This meeting is due tomorrow, 28th August; but if I wait till then, this article will not catch this week's issue, and by the following Thursday, the festival would be nearing its end. For years and years, indeed since the festival was launched in 1988, all theatre critics and reporters have been complaining bitterly of this last-minute, wait-and-see policy, but with no results. Though the event has become a fixed item on the cultural calendar, it seems as if once one edition is over, people take it for the last and only realize it is coming back at the beginning of August. it is only four days to the opening of this 19th edition, and would you believe it? The international selection committee have just ended their work today, 27th August, having watched 62 videos over five days to decide which foreign and guest Arab troupes are let into the contest and which are left out to play on the fringe. As for the Egyptian shows, and the candidates for the contest number 20, and they have all been erratically crammed into five days and sifting through them by the Egyptian selection committee will continue will terminate in the early hours of 30th August.

I would have loved to tell you what to expect, and which Egyptian or foreign performances to head for, but performances and performers seem to be the last concern of this festival and are relegated to the back seats in the interest of theory, of scholars who talk about rather than make theatre, and of books about theatre, many of which are translated and published annually by the festival. It seems that the old prejudice against players and in favour of the written word still subsists. One remembers Aristotle saying that you do not need the performance to enjoy a drama; the text suffices. I cannot help thinking that this revulsion against actors, their flesh and blood vibrant existence was behind the choice of this year's topic for the central seminar and the subsequent round table and workshop.

The central 4-session seminar which spreads over two mornings, starting on 2nd September, has for a title "Theatrical Experimentation and Technology", and is to be followed by round table and workshop on digital theatre. Explaining this choice, the chairman of the festival says, in his formal address (which I was asked to translate, and therefore can quote):

"Theatre and its aesthetic values have not escaped the overwhelming impact of... technology, which has triggered new conflicts, such as the one centering on the use of technology in the theatre. In this conflict, one party wagers that the structure of theatre will undergo fundamental transformations under the impact of technology. They argue that since theatre is not a closed, fixed order of established concepts, but rather an active social force, subject to new developments, the same as other social forces, it has to shake off the hold of the past, move forward, open up to new developments and make full use of them. In his International-Theatre- Day message to the world in 2003, German dramatist Tankred Dorst, who represents this trend, has described theatre as an 'impure' art which does not hesitate to exploit anything that comes its way to serve its own interests - an art that will always betray its principles, that derives its images from other media and is definitely not immune to the novelties of the age.

On the other side, there are those who oppose this view and accuse its champions of propagating "Meta Theories" which claim material and epistemological completeness in order to consolidate a coercive, despotic attitude, or of wanting to subject human interactions and exchanges to what is 'variable' and 'accidental' rather than what is permanent and fixed. The trend has also been dismissed as a brand of 'syncretism' or 'eclecticism' which draws on several sources in a shallow way to construct forms and images that lack logical coherence or rational justification. To such charges, the champions of technology respond by stressing the collapse of all barriers and erosion of traditional norms and criteria and defiantly insist on opposing rigid formalism and repetitiveness.

As things stand now, we are faced with what amounts to two widely divergent cultures, representing two different worlds existing simultaneously in one age. Each of these two cultures projects its own views and images and seeks a different horizon which can accommodate its visions and thoughts."

Then Fawzi Fahmi goes on to say:

"The digital revolution has proved another challenging technological development which has drawn a lot of attention; through new means of communication, it has allowed geographically dispersed individuals to connect and interact, eventually brining about what has come to be called 'digital theatre'. Though experiments in this field began in 1966, as Marek Holensky, the Polish researcher, mentions in his book Art and the Computer, it was Charles Deemer who pioneered this kind of theatre when he presented the first digital play ever on the internet in 1985. It was a groundbreaking kind of play that went beyond the traditional concept of theatre, allowing its receivers to become co-authors of the work and introduce their choices and suggestions as to the course of the action and construction of the events. It was also a very special kind of play in that it could only be accessed on the internet."

To the seminar, round table and workshop, the CIFET has invited a number of international specialists in this area. They will be assisted by a select group of young scholars from the Academy of Arts who studied this kind of theatre abroad. Conducting and stage-managing the whole affair would be the Italian Antonio Bitsou whose book, Digital Theatre, was translated into Arabic with his permission for this CIFET session. May be it is time we surrendered to the magic of screens and consigned all our actors and live performances as a whole to the past. Was it Prospero who said: "Those our actors were only spirits and are melted into air, into thin air"?