In the final 30 seconds of his speech at the opening ceremony of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET), Minister of Culture Ahmed Hannou announced his intention to “launch a dialogue” about “changing the name of CIFET to the Cairo International Festival for Theatre” or CIFT for short.
To those in the know, this implies something more significant than a formality, and brings up a lively Facebook debate in which theatre-makers and critics opposed to this proposal have argued that a change in name is likely to lead to a change in nature, and therefore an erasure of the nearly 40 years of CIFET, with its experimental and iconoclastic character; in other words, there will be no more CIFET.
In reality the debate over cancelling CIFET has gone on since 2011. The pro-cancelling CIFET camp include Academy of Arts scholar Sameh Mahran, set designer Hazem Shebl, and editor of Masrahna magazine Mohamed Al-Rouby; those opposed to cancelling it include many theatre directors — Tarek Deweri, Abeer Ali, Effat Yehia and others — as well as theatre critics Maysa Zaki and Rasha Abdel-Moneim, who is also the director of Eazees International Women’s Theatre Festival, and the present author.
The drive to do away started with the fall of the Mubarak regime. The festival was originally founded in 1989 by Mubarak-era minister of Culture Farouk Hosny, organised and championed by then director of Hanager theatre Hoda Wasfi, back when the internet was the province of computer geeks and programmers, smartphones were nothing more than a gleam in a software developer’s eye and computers still used five-inch floppy disks. Back then, the odd copied videotape of some foreign performance was the only access any of us had to theatre abroad, unless you were lucky enough to be able to travel, requiring not only deep pockets but the privilege of a visa. Those of us who saw CIFET from its inception witnessed firsthand the explosion of creativity among young and amateur theatre-makers whose awareness expanded in response to the unprecedented flood of foreign performances they could only dream of accessing otherwise. It gave rise to the now-defunct Free Theatre Festival, and without any exaggeration may be said to have shaped an entire generation of theatre-makers.
It was therefore a shock to many of us when, at the first theatre committee assembled by the post 2011 Revolution government in 2012, whose members included Mahran, a document was presented to committee members requiring them to sign off on cancelling CIFET. Critic Maysa Zaki, a committee member, promptly handed in her resignation in protest, and her discontent and others’ caused the cancellation of CIFET to be put, at least temporarily, on hold.
In 2014, when the late literary critic Gaber Asfour was minister of culture, the government-appointed committee convened again, including representatives of the CIFET-cancelling camp. Added to the regulations of the committee at the time was a new one stating that the committee could bring in “outside experts” to give their opinion. Those included theatre director Tarek Deweri and Zaki, who put out a statement entitled “No to Cancelling CIFET” and presented it to Asfour, who was attending the meeting in his capacity as minister of culture. The committee included such luminaries as theatre critic Sanaa Shafea, theatre director Galal Al-Sharqawi, the late great Samiha Ayoub, independent theatre director and social activist Abeer Ali, and theatre director Nasser Abdel-Moneim. Deweri and Zaki read out their statement and founded a Facebook page which is still up, “No to Cancelling CIFET.” As a compromise, from 2014 on it was called the “Cairo International Festival for Experimental and Contemporary theatre”, or CIFEACT.
Under that title, Mahran himself ironically became director of CIFET for the standard tenure of two years. His time as director was generally positive, with a well-chosen selection committee and a number of performances which, while a far cry from the dozens of offerings characterising the festival’s pre-2011 heyday, were nevertheless high-quality and well-received. After Mahran’s tenure, the festival was taken over by the late Alaa Abdel-Aziz, who dispensed with the “and contemporary” addition and reinstated the title of CIFET to general approval.
This year at a press conference held before the festival, Mahran announced the ministry was considering turning CIFET into the “Cairo International Festival for Theatre.” In the ensuing discussion he reverted to his opinion that the festival was no longer strong enough to make it worth the ministry’s time and money to maintain it. This was followed by the minister’s statements during the opening ceremony as well as Hazem Shebl posting on Facebook, “While the festival has given us a lot of things, it has also withheld a lot of things.” Zaki responded to him asking what exactly the festival had withheld, and the discussion is still ongoing...
All of this raises specific questions about a number of issues: the nature of the festival, its longevity, and the state of theatre in Egypt today. Behind the desire to change the name of CIFET is to change its identity – from a showcase for different and new styles of theatre to a space for conventional theatre, including traditional plays. This would amount to denying the festival’s importance to theatrical history across the Arab world. For close on 40 years, renowned Arab theatre makers such as Nidal Al-Ashqar of Lebanon, Jawad Al-Asadi of Iraq, and many others have asked me, for one, “What’s going to be at CIFET this year?” It is an event that puts Egypt on the Arab cultural map increasingly shifting over into the Gulf.
The main argument of the CIFET-cancelling camp is that it has become “weak”, but the question remains: even if that is the case, (a) what are the reasons for it, and (b) is there a way to remedy it rather than replacing the whole event? We need to work out how to run post-2011 CIFETs with the energy of those before it. Before 2011, CIFET had come to host 70 shows from 60 countries, which was exhausting and perhaps unsustainable, but one thing the previous CIFET was was well-funded. Now we have a smaller number of shows, but are we learning from the mechanisms that veteran theatre manager Hoda Wasfi and her team worked with? “It’s not enough to just issue a call online,” Wasfi always said. “You have to communicate with cultural centres, have people on the ground in various countries watching shows, re-invite theatre companies that have a track record with CIFET.”
Statements such as “the festival is ineffective” also ignore the massive sea change Egypt has seen on the theatre front, losing venues and budgets left and right: the demolition of the Floating Theatre, currently ongoing, not to mention a hastily-rescinded announcement that the Cultural Palaces Authority was going to be closed down. CIFET’s critics seem to be confusing the dearth of production resources and money, and the administrative, budgetary and official blocking of many seasons of independent and youth theatre, with a blanket statement that the festival is “ineffective”.
The source of the problems cited about CIFET – the “weak” quality of the shows and the “ineffective” nature of the event’s impact on theatre makers – is twofold. Firstly, the management of the festival is handed to committees who either lack enthusiasm, resources and a sufficient budget, or are hindered by red tape, resulting in issues with the guest productions. In any case, “let’s make it into another festival” does not seem like an inspired cure. Secondly, the “ineffective” epithet is grossly unfair to the entire wave of theatre-makers affected by CIFET. As a veteran of the scene, I can state with confidence that CIFET as a whole has made a huge difference to Egyptian theatre and we are so used to this luxury nearly 40 years on that we really do sometimes forget its significance. There is a difference between watching videos of performances online and watching them live – a real, felt difference, as well as a technical learning process and appreciation of aspects that simply will not translate to even the best-quality video – and this can be seen by audiences breaking down doors and fighting to get in. Besides, how can CIFET be effective when there are fewer resources, whether financial and artistic, for theatre than ever before. Theatre-makers are fighting to survive, and instead of throwing them a lifeline, cancelling CIFET would be like sinking one of the few remaining lifeboats.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 18 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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