The last person to write a regular theatre column on these pages for any length of time was Nehad Selaiha. A quirky, irreverent theatre aficionado, she had unparalleled breadth and depth of theatrical knowledge, a penchant for taking off her shoes during performances, a dedication to study, and an insistence on never taking herself too seriously.
Now here I stand, before an empty column, eight years after her passing. I hereby admit that, expected to fill shoes roughly the size of your average rowboat, one can (a) scream and run, (b) throw in the towel, or (c) write what one can in the knowledge that one is never going to fill those shoes. Since you’re now reading this, it should be obvious that I’ve plumped for (c).
It was in Al-Ahram Weekly’s zero numbers that some of the earliest CIFETs were recorded. The Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre was founded in 1988, “due to stagnation and pause of scholarships and educational delegations that send students to different European cities to learn new theatrical methods and techniques,” according to the official portal of the Cairo Governorate. It was the festival that launched, while not quite a thousand ships, at least a dozen theatre companies, giving birth to the Free Theatre Movement.
When the Gulf War struck in 1990, CIFET was cancelled. That year, Nehad Selaiha and Menha El-Batraoui, both theatre critics and aficionados, got together with a group of young theatre-makers who had had their horizons broadened by the first and second CIFET and looked forward to presenting their work at CIFET every year, and organised the staging of their works together in the first Free Theatre Festival. A great many of these artists were embraced by the Hanager Theater. Designed by independent artist Hassan El-Geretly, who left, unable to stomach the constraints of government work, the Hanager was then under the leadership of Huda Wasfi, who, whatever the complaints about her leadership may have been, was not afraid to take risks and provided those directors with a space and limited funds so that their work could see the light. It is no exaggeration to say that, if not for that first CIFET in 1988, the theatrical landscape in Egypt as we know it would be vastly different.
One thing most so called experimental theatre has in common (the moniker “experimental theatre festival” was chosen, the then Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni confessed back in the day, to explain away the uneven quality of the guest performances) is that it belongs to a genre we were still unaware of in the 1980s and 1990s: post-dramatic theatre. The term was coined in the 1970s by the theatrical authority Richard Schechner, who has done much research on the ethnography of theatre in different regions, but the definitive text on the subject by Hans-Thies Lehmann was only translated from German in 2006 . The theory has its critics. Elinor Fuchs writes in TDR that “the inability to freeze time… is a symptom of the general problem of staking out grand theories on the moving ground of contemporary phenomena.” But it lumps together a great many types of performance and even Fuchs admits in the same review that the term “‘postdramatic theatre’ does work that ‘total theatre,’ ‘alternative theatre,’ ‘theatre of images,’ ‘landscape theatre,’ ‘neo-avantgarde,’ and all the ‘posts’—post-narrative, -humanist, and -modern, for instance—have never quite succeeded in accomplishing.”
To this list, Fuchs might have added “dance theatre,” a staple of CIFET since its inception. In any case, “postdramatic theatre” is predicated on the premise of jettisoning the traditional Aristotelian principle of mimesis – that is, imitation – and the equally Aristotelian dramatic structure of beginning, middle, and end, rising action, climax, anticlimax and so on. When there is no longer an effort made to (re)create a fictional world that parallels our own, with Stanislavskian acting (called “Method acting” in the US), backstories, set, costumes, and most importantly a plot arc, “drama” in its traditional sense has largely been eroded in today’s performance, and what takes its place – be it dance theatre, theatre of images, or other forms – is said by the proponents of this school to be “post-dramatic.”
Of course, the risk of such a definition, as Fuchs points out, is to lump every type of performance that does not conform to Aristotelian rules into that. On the other hand, it is to a certain extent true that that first CIFET (I was there to see it) opened up new horizons for a generation (and generations after them), showing theatre makers at the time that there is life after (and other than) drama and conflict. It might not be unfair to say that, all things considered, Aristotelian realism has migrated by and large to the cinema. It is not dead in the theatre by any means, but it seems to me (and I may be wrong) that theatre goers, even those attending naturalistic dramas, come to live performances in search of a certain type of conscious theatricality that cannot be achieved in pre-recorded performance.
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All this and more came to mind when I navigated the crowds of Attaba Square to the National to watch the South African dance-theatre show, Water. Water is a romp – disconnected scenes that aim to build rapport with the audience and entertain, entertain, entertain. “Mobile recording is not permitted in the performance,” the initial announcement intoned; “however, clapping, cheering, screaming and hollering are not only permitted but encouraged.”
That introduction set the tone for a delightful evening. Water doesn’t pretend to be profound. There is a great deal of bum-wiggling, for which the glorious English term “twerking” was actually first used in – wait for it – 1820. There are numerous slides, first of the desert, then of water dripping into pools. There is a contortionist in a shimmery, translucent leotard performing incredible feats as a personification of water. There is a Nature Goddess, played by a gold-clad, wonderfully godlike actress with a gorgeous singing voice whose name, unfortunately, was not included on the new CIFET app (even though it promised to provide us with all such information and spare us the tedious task of running from theatre to theatre in search of performances that had already been cancelled). The dancers show glimpses of kinetic genius and a vocabulary of motion that indicates training with the newer schools of contemporary dance. A great deal of effort has been put into the costumes, which include a water goddess with shimmery wings illuminated with LED lights, and two dancers in matching hand-crocheted costumes and long fringes.
The lack of profundity was more than made up for by the fact that the dancers were clearly having the time of their lives. As the audience cheered, clapped and hollered to their heart’s content, I couldn’t help thinking how wonderful it was to have Egyptians and Sub-Saharan Africans in a rare moment of camaraderie, in view of the rampant racism and xenophobia Egypt, particularly Cairo, has lately been experiencing. This grew obvious not only when the actors took their bows and were greeted with a standing ovation, but in the way the audience clustered around the actors at the stage door, congratulating them. Watching North and South Africans smiling, talking, and coming together in the shared love of theatre was easily the most refreshing thing I’ve seen in Egyptian public in months, and worth so much more than pat phrases about cultural bridges. All I want – the thing I saw that night – was, is, for people to forget to hate. So simple, so out of reach. If CIFET helps achieve it, even for a handful of people, then it’s worth all the trouble. It’s worth everything.
The First CIFET Generation of Theatre Directors
The landscape of CIFET-inspired theatre makers included Effat Yehia, whose company, Caravan, has presented a great deal of avant-garde feminist theatre at various venues over the years, mostly in translation and mostly self-funded; Tarek Said, a promising artist who has since mostly left the theatre; Khalid Galal, who runs the Acting Workshop at the Creativity Centre and holds the position of Head of the Cultural Production Sector; Khalid El-Sawy, now a movie star; Nora Amin, who also reviewed theatre in this space, and this year represented one of the German entries to CIFET and frequently works abroad; Mohamed Aboul-Soud, the enfant terrible of the generation widely acknowledged as a brilliant scenographer and director bursting with creativity, who died young; Hany Metennawy, a wonderful actor and director of visual theatre; Maher Sabry, who wrote and directed the first LGBT Egyptian play; Tarek Deweri, a brilliant director and the son of playwright Raafat Deweri; Karima Mansour, a dance-theatre pioneer; Mansour Mohamed, who achieved notoriety at an early CIFET with his opening performance of a belly-dancer dancing on top of what appeared to be the Holy Kaaba but rotated to reveal a barrel emblazoned with the word “OIL”: it was so savagely lambasted, and he was so viciously accused of apostasy that not long after he died of a heart attack at 30 years of age; Ahmad El-Attar, who has gone on to found Studio Emad Eddin which hosts young theatre makers for rehearsals and workshops; Ibrahim El-Baz, who believed in the Actors’ Theatre and Grotowski and dramatized Yehia Haqqi; Abeer Lotfi, who has her own scenography based on a lot of white sheets and also does Actors’ Theatre; Said Soliman, who presents ritual theatre; Amr Kabil, who presents translated proscenium arch theatre; Mohamed Askar, who presented folk theatre; Saleh Saad, who famously presented folk theatre in a pushcart; and Abeer Ali, who has done a great deal of collective and consciousness-raising theatre in the Egyptian countryside.
Honourable Mentions include Hassan El-Geretly, whose independent El-Warsha has been going strong for years but was operational before the first CIFET; and Mohsen Hilmi, who revived the ancient Arab Mohabazeen (street theatre) tradition but slightly precedes the CIFET generation.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 September, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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