‘Les Miserables’ links revolutionary France, Egypt
BY DALIA BASIOUNY Cairo – Few performances can move their audience emotionally, while engaging them artistically and intellectually. But some very lucky Cairenes had the opportunity this week, watching highlights from the renowned musical “Les Miserable” at The American University in Cairo (AUC). The remarkable performance was presented in Arabic for the first time late last week at the Malak Gabr theater. The successful Broadway musical “Les Miserable” by Claude-Michel Schoenberg and Alain Boublil is based on Victor Hugo’s powerful novel about poverty, injustice and the struggle against oppression, set during the 1932 student revolt against the French monarchy. The…
‘Alice’ but no wonderland
BY DALIA BASIOUNY Cairo – In its second edition, the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) which closed on April 28, presented a mixed fare of theater performances with a focus on works never seen in Egypt before. The world premiere of Lebanese performance “Alice”, created by Sawsan Bou Khaled in collaboration with Hussein Baydoun, is a case in point. This one-woman show was directed, authored and performed by Bou Khaled, a theater veteran who made her directorial debut in 2006. The exceptionally talented Hussein Baydoun, is an architect by training, but is known in the Arab world and beyond as…
Theater techies find the ‘Alternative Solution’
BY DALIA BASIOUNY Cairo Stunned by news that Rawabet Theater, the only affordable independent performance space in downtown Cairo was shut down, two theatre technicians decided to take matters into their own hands. As technicians Saber El Sayed and Mido Sadeq knew how to turn empty, unequipped spaces into full-fledged performance venues. Rawabet’s abrupt closure in February for lack of funding triggered the ingenious idea to transform The Factory, a space run by the TownHouse Gallery, and debut an arts festival they dubbed “Alternative Solution”. Click here to open the gallery. Converting this huge empty white-walled hall into an equipped…
Khan’s ‘Ambition’ captures crisis of connection
BY WAFAA WALI Cairo Imagine the oddity of watching on screen Cairo’s visually noisy streets without the actual noise. The phrase “eerie vacuum” comes to mind, but that’s precisely what director Hassan Khan has done in his latest offering “Blind Ambition”. Khan’s work, which was commissioned for the prestigious dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, premiered in Cairo Sunday as part of the downtown D-Caf festival. The 46-minute film split into nine different episodes taking place around Cairo shows diverse groups of people engaged in conversation which do not all revolve around a specific issue. With no clear aim and not reaching…
Zero Dark Dirty
BY ALI HAZZAH “When you lie to me, I hurt you.” This catch phrase, spoken in an ominously matter-of-fact tone by Dan (Jason Clarke), a veteran CIA agent, is heard early on in Kathryn Bigelow’s latest, “Zero Dark Thirty”. From an Arab or Muslim perspective, this highly controversial film is among the most grotesque, bigoted, history-rewriting Hollywood excreta to darken the silver screen since Otto Preminger’s Exodus. It is difficult, in fact, to assess what is most offensively repellent about this venal, tunnel-visioned film. Certainly Bigelow’s context-free historical interpretation of the killing of Osama bin Laden is as unconvincing as…
Shaymaa Kamel bares her soul in “Roh”
BY YASMINE ALLAM Last February Shaymaa Kamel showed a series of large canvases populated by rows of fictional animals dressed in suits. To her, these creatures symbolized the tyranny of successive political leaderships in Egypt, out of touch with their own humanity and their people. The undisguised political nature of this message was a departure from Kamel’s previous work, which had been dominated by far more private and visceral portrayals of her own ongoing quest for identity and introspection. For the first time, Kamel’s current solo exhibition “Roh” (Soul) at Tache Art Gallery, brings under one roof, paintings shown in…
Debut novel breaks new ground
BY YASMINE MOTAWY Ten years of studying comparative literature have turned me into a very critical reader. So when my friend Maha Ayoub gave me her self-published debut novel to read, I cringed. It spent Ramadan, Eid and a good part of September on my shelf collecting dust until the strangest series of events unfolded all in one week. I met people at a private garden where I spend my Friday mornings, friends at a funeral, and an acquaintance I rarely see, who all happened to tell me they had read “Magaret Elnour” (Galaxy of Light) and loved it. This did…
TransDance pushes the boundaries
BY RACHEL ADAMS As the Islamist-dominated constituent assembly drafts the country’s new constitution, Egyptian artists are taking advantage of the hiatus by pushing the boundaries of what may become controversial in the future. TransDance is a festival not “of” dance, but “for” dance, and as director Adham Hafez explains, aims to push the boundaries in as many ways as it can. “This is the largest edition [of the festival] and so has the most experiments. My role was [to allow] for the artists to push beyond familiar ground.” Encompassing workshops, debates and performance, the festival takes place in venues as…
Reality bites in ‘Of Rust and Bone’
BY WAFAA WALI Ali (Matthias Shoenaerts) is a single father in his twenties who moves to Antibe with his son to live with his sister and her husband. During a night shift as a bouncer in a club, he meets Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), a whale trainer, and takes her home after he helps her out of a fight. A few months later Stephanie loses her legs when a whale crashes into the stage during a public performance. Alone and depressed, she reaches out to Ali, who nonchalantly helps her restore some form of normality in her life. As both of…
Arab in NYC: Thomas Friedman spoofed
BY ALI HAZZAH I was on my way from Tahrir Square — where I was searching for the Egyptian Nelson Mandela — to catch the next flight to JFK, when I suddenly realized I’d left my new iPhone5 behind in my luxury suite at the Nile Hotel. Normally, this would not have disturbed me in the least, since the NY Times buys me these iPhones like they’re going out of style, not to mention the sleek American Express Black Card I use to pay for my outrageous international roaming charges. But this particular iPhone was a special one given to…
