Performance Review

IX Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre

Figures

Few international capitals are more theatrical than Cairo, with its mixture of modern people, ancient landmarks, bustling markets, and daredevil traffic woven around the silvery ribbon of the Nile. The IX Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre skillfully integrated city, theatrical venues, and sixty-six presentations from thirty-eight countries and five continents to create an electrifying atmosphere. On a given night, a guest of the festival might journey from the Khan el Khalili bazaar area, where productions from Bulgaria and Egypt were mounted in a partially restored medieval merchants' hostel, to more centrally located stages to see performances from Kuwait or Britain at the National Theatre, then on to the Puppet Theatre to squirm in its child-size bucket seats during a play from Cameroon or a coproduction from Spain and Venezuela, then across the Nile to see Australians or Egyptians on the main stage of the sumptuous modern Opera House, and finally to the Sound and Light Theatre at Giza for productions from Greece and Japan. The program consisted of thirty-four official shows as well as a large number of fringe entries. Added to these were two days of symposia on this year's Festival theme of Feminist Theatre, with one day devoted to Experimentation on Dramatic forms in Women's/Feminist Writing and the next to Experimental Trends in Performance and Systems of Work in Women's/Feminist Theatre Troupes. Yet amid all the ebulliance, some sour notes intruded: a third day of panels on the heritage and future of Arabic theatre featured only male speakers, and not one play in the entire Festival was written or directed by a woman. In a supposed tribute to feminist theatre, women artists and scholars were still sent the age-old message to be glad that they were recognized at all, but to let men get on with the real work and reap the rewards.

The Festival opened at the Opera House with The Descent, an exemplary experimental performance by Australia's Chapel of Change. Without dialogue, the scenario was created, directed, and performed by Rainsford, in collaboration with actress/dancer Mary Salem. Her long dark ringlets falling onto the spangled bodice of a belly-dance-like costume, Salem played with liquid grace a young widow crazed with grief, slowly renewing her commitment to life through a series of rituals led by the priestly character of Rainsford. Image by image, a sense of sanctity was built in a setting covered with fine salt and hung with gauzy white drapes: Rainsford sculpted by light in a pose suggesting Christ in the Pietà; Salem inside a cocoon as Rainsford meticulously swept the white salt into clouds and circles suggesting anything from the dust of eternity to making a clean sweep of life's inessentials; Salem gradually shedding her colorful costume for the white robes of an acolyte; and finally a sequence where the actors played with a golden ball before finally laying down with it symbolically between them. In the hypnotic score, silences were alternated with musical sounds ranging from Middle Eastern dance to religious chant, gabbling human voices, and sounds from the Australian outback. Fusing the eighty-five minutes of The Descent was the intensity of Rainsford, his face emanating the sadness of a sage and his movements a precise and inviolable strength, winning him the Festival's Best Actor award.

While feminism was only a cursory theme of the Cairo Festival, a motif that strongly emerged from the entries was a contemplation of movement in time. The Descent progressed from the widow bound by grief to her discovery of redemption. Britain's Improbable Theatre Company worked backward [End Page 387] and forward as actor/author Phelim McDermott recounted his life story in 70 Hill Lane. The address referred to the Manchester house in which he was born. Beginning with a fairy story version of his birth, McDermott wove tales that included the havoc wrought by a poltergeist's visitations during his adolescence and the metamorphoses he and the house underwent as he grew up. Wide bands of scotch tape and four metal poles were all that McDermott and actor/directors Lee Simpson and Julian Crouch used to conjure the house and its furnishings. As McDermott told his tale, accompanied by the jazzy live music of Ben Park, the actors stretched tape around and across the poles to make walls and windows, and bend them forward to form a bay, to put together stairs, furniture, and even a deep freeze with lid. When the building was razed at the end, they scrunched all the tape together and out of that emerged a puppet, the poltergeist made manifest in a fragile creature tenderly manipulated by the trio of performers, as if out of rubble could come a magical being. The text's wit, irony, and quality, combined with the originality of its performance, won 70 Hill Lane the Festival's Best Performance Award.

Of the Egyptian offerings, both the Rebellious Theater's A Journey and the Avant-Garde Theatre's A Hymn took audiences on birth-to-death journeys. A Journey, adapted and directedby Hany Ghanem, was based very loosely on Brecht's Seven Deadly Sins. Staged in the beautiful stone shell of an aged house in Old Muslim Cairo, the wordless production took the audience on an actual trek up and down stairs to artfully garbage-strewn rooms that stood in for Brecht's seven cities. Guided by a rag-clad actor bearing a halogen lamp, lit by candles and a three-quarter moon shining into the roofless space, the audience beheld such scenes as a woman giving agonizing birth through a rusty oil barrel while hooked up to a maze of garish plastic tubes; a young man fondling a blond Barbie doll after vainly trying to reach a young woman who is masturbating with a small wooden wheel; young men's hands being hacked off and women mourning their dead husbands and sons in warfare. Accompanied by a sound track that ranged from metallic music to horror film strains to a distorted version of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," A Journey emphasized images of ineffectual men writhing, falling, and being pushed on the ground while all [End Page 388] around them women washed, cooked, and cleaned house, toiling in an endless effort to sustain life. From this viewpoint, A Journey may have been the only entry in the Festival with a feminist perspective.

A grandmother figure, clad in the black head-to-toe covering traditional in Egyptian villages, dominated the setting and action of A Hymn, Intisar Abdel-Fattah's interpretation of a folkloric tale. The grandmother suggested an omnipresent maternal figure observing the life cycle as she sat serenely atop a pyramid shaped by the company, with villagers dressed in both traditional black and in vibrant colors on the tier beneath, and a white-shrouded young man lying on the stage floor, flanked on each side of the stage by two singer-musicians. To the sound of percussion instruments that included Indian bells, wood blocks, African drums, Japanese gongs, and cymbals, the chorus undulated, chanted, and sang as the young man was born from beneath the shroud, danced out his life, and was laid to rest. Intisar Abdel-Fattah, a composer turned director, has traveled the world listening to music and combining sounds from many cultures to create one hauntingly his own, combining his appreciative ear with a piercing eye for stage composition and movement, so that the thirty-five minutes of A Hymn felt both too few and completely satisfying.

A Hymn was a close second, but it was the Greeks who provided the most memorable entry in the Festival. For Athens's Spring Theater production of Atrides, K. H. Myris combined ancient and modern Greek compressing Euripides's Iphigenia in Aulis, Aeschylus's Agamemnon, and Sophocles's Electra into two hours, achieving an economy of narrative while allowing ample space for a percussive score, choral chanting and singing, and the interpolation of folk laments sung by Clytemnestra after Agamemnon's murder and Electra over Orestes's supposed ashes. Winning the Festival's Best Actress Award, Chrisanthi Douzi played both Clytemnestra and Electra, her wraith-like appearance belied by a formidable voice and impassioned presence that made the tragic women of the House of Atreus rage down through the ages. Director Yiannis Margaritis sculpted movement so that the production was almost danced, like a liturgical procession with not one graceless gesture. Made up in gray, white, and black, as if they were ghosts, the actors wore muted robes enlivened by touches of red and yellow. The red drape which hung over Clytemnestra's shoulders and down her back in Iphigenia was cunningly employed when she slowly unwound and spread it out to make Agamemnon's red carpet. This Atrides stands alongside Mnouchkine's cycle and Andrei Serban's Greek tragedies at LaMama; it would have been splendid in a rehearsal hall, but what made it truly exceptional here was its Festival setting in the outdoor Sound and Light theatre at the Sphinx. As the plays unfolded in the sand, with the spotlit Sphinx to the right and the pyramids in the background, and the midnight sky above, the scene evoked several periods at once: ancient Egypt; archaic Greece when the legends were born; fifth-century Greece when they were dramatized; and the night of the production.

Holly Hill
John Jay College of CUNY

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