Under the auspices of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, Wednesday, 16 April, marked the launch of Cairo's first International Forum for Storytelling at Egypt's National Theatre. The forum dedicated its first edition to renowned director Hassan El-Geretly, a pioneer and the reviver of the art of storytelling in Egypt.
The forum's idea is the brainchild of Mohamed Abdel-Fattah, storyteller and founding director of the Hala theatre troupe and Beit El Hawadeet (The Home of Stories). This six-day event showcases storytelling performances from multiple governorates of Egypt, the Emirates, France, and Switzerland.
"I have had the idea of the forum since 2007, but life got in the way until it happened. Today, we have four storytelling workshops for children and women. We have five films on Storytelling Cinema and are honouring four cultural projects focused on storytelling. These projects include "The Storyteller" by Haitham Shokry, "Noah's Ark" by Tamer Mahmoud from Alexandria, "The Story Wagon" by Haitham Abd Rabou from Sharkia governorate, and "The Rock Library" by Shnouda Adel from Menya governorate," explained Abdel-Fattah to Ahram Online, adding that according to research conducted in Home of Stories, the storytelling research centre he founded, he realised that Egypt is the oldest country to tell stories and that a scrip had been found that revealed that King Khufu used to tell stories to his two children.
Furthermore, Abdel-Fattah noted that even though women are the best storytellers, many people, including teachers, doctors, psychologists, and parents, join his storytelling workshops to communicate better with children and patients.
"The magic word here is Hassan El-Geretly, whom I perceive as the master of storytelling, who inspires us all. Therefore, our first edition had to be dedicated to him," he noted.
Hassan El-Geretly is the Founding Director of El-Warsha Theatre Troupe, Egypt's first independent theatre troupe, in 1987. Through El-Warsha, he highlighted different forms of authentic Egyptian heritage, revived them, be it storytelling, sira, folk songs, or musicals, and reintroduced them to modern audiences. "Tell the story and live" is El-Warsha's motto that reflects El-Warsha's aim to preserve and revive the country's oral history. In the early 1990s, coming across the treasure trove of the Stories of Dakahlia, a compilation of folk stories, El-Warsha took a first step into storytelling by republishing the book and telling the stories on stage.
In 2007, in collaboration with the Goethe Institute and the French Cultural Centre in Alexandria, they put together 13 stories from the oral history of the Siwa Oasis and published them under the title Desert Stories. El-Warsha also teamed up with the late iconic Said al-Dawi, a master storyteller and the only sira (epic) poet to memorise thousands of verses from the country's long tradition of oral storytelling, and showcased an enchanting dialogue between modern and traditional storytellers in 2012.
The company's Gaza Monologues was a form of solidarity with the people of Gaza and their resistance to Israeli aggression through storytelling. The monologues were gathered by the Ashtar Palestinian Theatre Group in 2010 and read by 33 artists and storytellers gathered by El-Warsha to commemorate the deaths of 1,380 Palestinians, including 431 children, during the Israeli wars in Gaza from 2008 to 2025.
"I am here in my suit because I am being celebrated, for they devoted this first edition of the forum to my name because we sort of brought storytelling to the fore and we introduced storytelling as an essential part of the theatre because we think that it is the origin of the theatre," Director Hassan El-Geretly told Ahram Online. "Despite what everybody says about theatre being the father of all performing arts, we ask, then who is the father of the theatre? It's storytelling. Of course, some theories state that theatre started through the story of Isis and Osiris in Ancient Egypt, before the Greeks, and also in China, where storytelling is very powerful."
"Brecht, who everybody refers to as the father of modern theatre, was very much inspired by the Chinese storytellers. So, I am here to celebrate the bringing of storytelling to the fore of theatre and to get the award, and so this is my story," he laughed.
Despite modernity, storytelling remains intact in Egyptian culture, especially outside Cairo. In 2014, the Doum Culture Association founded the first local storytelling festival that roamed Upper Egypt and was a great success.
"Storytelling is essential to survival. It's our way of turning our unpalatable lives into palatable matter for exchange, and, of course, communication and exchange are the essence of survival. We are sort of modern-day Shahrizads trying not to die because we continue telling our stories," El-Geretly concluded.
To learn more about the schedule of the forum events, click here.
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