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Kamal Boullata
Born in Jerusalem, Kamal Boullata is a painter and writer living in southern France. His art is found in public collections in Britain, France, Jordan, Qatar, Spain and the USA. He is the author of two books on Palestinian art and his writings on Islamic and contemporary Arab art have appeared in numerous periodicals.
Awni Karoumi
born 1945 in Mosul Ninive / Irak, lives in Berlin. After his Graduation iat the Thatre Faculty at Humbildt University Berlin he was Professor in Theatre Scienes an a freelance director. He put some 70 plays by authors like Albert Camus, Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller und Samuel Beckett on stage and recieved numerous awards.
Amjad Nasser
is a poet and travel writer, born in 1955 in at-Tarra in Jordan, now living in London. Originally, in 1977, he went to Lebanon to study Arabic literature in Beirut and worked for a time as a cultural affairs editor for the Palestinian press. In 1982, when the Israelis entered the country, he was forced to leave and moved to Cyprus, working for a number of years as a journalist. Finally, in 1987, he went to London, co-founding the internationally respected Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi in 1989. He still continues his relationship with the paper as arts section editor. Amjad Nasser has published a total of six volumes of poetry and two travel books. His work takes the central theme of wandering eternally through a constantly changing world.
Jack Persekian
was born and lives in Jerusalem. He
founded and directs Anadiel Gallery and Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art. Persekian curated several exhibitions locally and internationally and directed and produced the Millennium 2000 events in Bethlehem.
Nehad Selaiha
is professor of drama and criticism and dean of the Arts Criticism Postgraduate Studies Institute at The Academy of Arts, Cairo. She is a leading theatre critic/
writer/translator in Cairo and the author of many books on theatre and criticism in both Arabic and English.
Jalal Toufic
is the author of five books, including Forthcoming (Atelos, 2000) and Undying Love, or Love Dies (Post-Apollo, 2002). His video and installation works have been presented in galleries and museums in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Toronto, Marseille, Athens, Cairo and Beirut. He is a member of the Arab Image Foundation (www.fai.org.lb) and has taught—amongst others—at the University of California at Berkeley and California Institute of the Arts.
Akram Zaatari
is a video artist and curator who lives and works in Beirut. He is author of more than 30 videos, among them: 2001 How I love You (29 min), Her + Him Van Leo (32 min). 1997, Crazy of You (27 min) and All is Well on the Border (43 min). 1996 The Candidate (10min), and the two video installations: Another Resolution, and Monument # 5: The Scandal. He is also co-founder of the Fondation Arabe pour l’Image, Beirut, through which he developed his recent research-based work on the photographic history of the Middle East, which resulted in a series of exhibitions, among which are/2001: The Vehicle: picturing moments of transition in a modernizing society, Portraits du Caire: Van Leo, Arman, Alban,/2002: Mapping Sitting, on portraiture and photography with Walid Raad. He edited or co-edited three publications with the same titles. His writing has been published in critical and scholarly journals such as: Parachute, Framework, Transition, Bomb, Al-Adaab, Al-Nahar, and Zawaya.
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by Nehad Selaiha
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Though theatrical phenomena related to rituals and various forms of popular entertainment are known to have existed in Egypt and the Arab world at different stages in history, text-based theatre on the Western model is a relatively new comer and was the result of intensive cultural contact with Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. In this respect, Syria and Lebanon are traditionally credited with having taken the lead with adaptations from the European (mainly French and English) dramatic heritage. In Egypt, a taste for this type of ‘literary’, ‘respectable’ theatre was already developing among the upper and educated classes under the influence of visiting foreign troupes and a few Syrian émigrés.
By the beginning of the 20th century, this class-based bias for the European theatrical model had become largely established at the expense of indigenous, popular theatrical forms. In their efforts to gain social, moral and artistic respectability in a predominantly Islamic culture deeply suspicious of all representational art, the leading companies in the 1920’s—such as those of George Abyad, Yusef Wahbi and Fatma Rushdi—moved more and more in the direction of the so-called European ‘classical’ dramatic tradition, adopting its theatrical conventions as they understood them at the time, including a declamatory, heavily melodramatic, vocal mode of acting, and highlighting the ‘moral’, didactic function of theatre against its liberating, anarchic, carnivalesque physicality.
As theatre became more word-based and original plays, such as Ahmad Shawqi’s verse drama, The Death of Cleopatra in which he sought to oppose Shakepeare’s portrayal of that Egyptian queen—a quasi-classical Egyptian dramatic tradition developed and gained momentum when the government stepped in and established the first ever national theatre company in 1935. Though it helped many performers survive during the lean years of the economic depression which hit all the ‘respectable’, ‘serious’ private companies, forcing them to close down, one cannot ignore the damage to theatre it caused. When it chose for its first production Tawfiq El-Hakim’s Ahl El-Kahf (Cave Dwellers), it was a clear sign of the future direction of the Egyptian theatre.
The play was in classical Arabic, based on a story from the Quran—the holiest of texts for many Arabs—and written by an author who intensely feared the physical aspect of theatre and was almost brainwashed by his social background into despising performers after an early fascination. For the next generation of dramatists, El-Hakim became a venerated figure and continues to be honoured with the title “father of Egyptian drama”. With the advent of El-Hakim on the scene in his guise as “theatre”, producing “respectable” literary drama according to the hallowed Aristotelian, classical rules, the move from performance to text, from the visual to the verbal and from spectacle to literature seemed accomplished. It would take a long time afterwards to heal this rupture and recover for the Egyptian theatre its physical vitality.
The crop of plays produced in the 1950’s and ’60’s, in response to the socio-political upheaval which followed the 1952 coup d’etat, were mostly written by left-wing men of letters who had little truck with theatre as performance and tended to use it as a political forum to debate hot, topical or ideological issues. Though they are generally regarded as making up the body of the golden age of Egyptian drama, many of them seem so out of date nowadays and fail to address any genuinely crucial issues in the area of patriarchal family relationships, freedom of thought and belief, or the traditional position of women in Arab societies—this despite the high-pitched revolutionary tone, the technical innovations (mostly Brechtian), the attempt to forge a more authentically ‘national’ alternative to the European dramatic/theatrical model and the adoption of the more popular, egalitarian, colloquial, Egyptian, instead of classical Arabic.
With the 1967 defeat, the collapse of Nasser’s “national project”, the socio-economic upheaval caused by Sadat’s “open-door” economic policy and the concomitant rise of religious fundamentalism among the middle classes, the so-called “golden days” of the Egyptian theatre of the 1960’s came to an end. The new regime was not interested in theatre either as a propaganda organ or a false democracy façade. Though outwardly liberal, the new regime, nevertheless, held on to the policy of rigid control of theatre and the media. It kept on the state theatre organization—the bureaucratic body set up by the former regime on the Russian model to run, finance and control theatre—as well as the system of censorship, making it virtually impossible for theatre artists of integrity to get any form of support or opportunity to work unless they toed the official ideological line.
For a decade or so, theatre seemed to lose direction and almost the only way to survive as a professional performer or theatre-maker in Egypt was to turn crassly commercial and pander to the tastes of oil-rich Arab tourists. The number of state-theatre productions fell sharply; and, ironically, they began to copy the commercial theatre in the hope of bigger returns at the box-office. Though outwardly different in direction and orientation, and continuing to pay lip-service to “serious drama” and bemoan the golden sixties, most of the state-run companies had no qualms about using the bodies of female performers as cheap commodities and an easy way to draw the much-coveted, rich, Arab audiences. In this respect, at least, the privately-funded commercial theatre was better than the state companies in terms of honesty. For one thing, it had fewer moral and ideological pretensions and offered straightforward light entertainment without disguise.
In those distant years, the collapse of the role of the playwright as preacher, ideologue and political mouthpiece resulted in the body of the performer, particularly the female performer—indeed the whole art of performance—becoming once more the site of that schizophrenic, ambivalent, emotional mixture of fascination and revulsion.
Trapped between a conservative, left-wing, older generation of writers, critics and artists who staunchly believed that the only way forward was back to the 1960’s, a younger, rebellious generation striving to explore their creative identity and define their artistic sensibility amid serious historical and cultural upheavals, a rising, religious rightwing which viewed theatre as the work of the devil and would eventually lead many actresses to condemn the profession, repent and take the veil, extreme financial hardship, unrelenting censorship and other ossified forms of government control, the future of the Egyptian theatre then seemed very bleak indeed. Nevertheless, the art of performance in Egypt found a way out—a “third way”, to use Eugenio Barba’s famous phrase: and that road lay through an arduous struggle for Freedom.
When Hassan El-Gretly came back to Egypt in the early 1980’s, after completing his artistic training in Europe, he soon discovered that to work in either the state or commercial theatre he would have to barter his freedom and make serious concessions which would eventually either stifle his artistic talent or force him to betray it. He left the state-theatre company—The Avant-garde—where he was appointed director, and set off on his own, forming Al-Warsha independent theatre troupe. It was the first spark which triggered off, within a few years, precisely in the autumn of 1990, a whole new theatrical movement for which he set the model: The Free Theatre Movement. It was a risky, lonely course, riddled with traps and dangers; but he pursued it with passion, determination and courage—not as an ideological fighter (like his predecessors in the 1960’s), but as an ardent, ceaseless explorer who believes that genuine theatre has to be daring, unsettling, even disruptive in its quest for beauty. The outcome of the quest cannot be guaranteed; but as El-Gretly is fond of repeating: “it is the direction that matters, not the destination.” In the course of its work, Regardless of which of its productions you prefer, it has always sought the communal liberation of both performers and audience, the reconciliation of opposites, whether cultural or sexual, past or present—in other words, for that elusive, magical moment when the dancer becomes the dance, the performer the performance, and human flesh is miraculously transformed into pure energy. It is the search for such moments, when the miracle of ‘the word made flesh’ can be truly experienced as a physical/mystical reality, that has guided the steps of El-Warsha and most of the independent groups who have followed its arduous, perilous, new path.
Of those many groups, Ahmad El-Attar’s El-Ma’bad (The Temple), which he founded in 1996, stands out with a few others. As writer/director of his productions, however, he differs in artistic style, temperament, and sources of inspiration from El-Gretly. Both share a fervour for artistic experimentation, on the level of form, language, and design, as well as for untraditional spaces; both expend great effort and meticulous care over rhythm and visual detail, and both display a marked keenness on the active involvement of the audience. The work of each, however, has a distinct feel and existential orientation. Over the years, El-Gretly has veered in the direction of popular culture and the folk tradition, subjecting it to close scrutiny, salvaging its brightest aspects, and foregrounding its abiding vitality while all the time dismantling many of its moral and religious biases. El-Attar’s plays, on the other hand, tend to concentrate on contemporary reality as experienced by his generation, to test many of its inherited fundamental tenets and assumptions, questioning the validity of some while exposing the absurdity of others. His productions, therefore, however artistically polished and sophisticated, invariably carry a pungent flavour and never fail to communicate an immediate sense of urgency. Life is Beautiful or Waiting for my Uncle from America (in my view, his best work so far) clearly evidences the artistic and intellectual features of his theatre work I have noted. In a series of vivid, startling theatrical images, it provides a new, unsettling perspective on the reality of family relationships in a middle class family in Egypt today, ruthlessly deconstructing the inherited, prevalent, sentimental picture heavily transmitted by the media on a daily basis. Though hilariously funny, visually innovative, and almost technically immaculate, its final impact in the case of ordinary Egyptian audiences is violently shocking and dangerously liberating.
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