While some may argue that theatre is a passe artistic medium, one that has been supplanted by television, film and social media content, a budding theatre company in Egypt is endeavouring to adapt it for the modern day’s reduced attention span.
Headed by prolific playwright and director Moustafa Khalil, Kenoma, an ancient Greek phrase which means cosmological void, is aiming to become a hub where artists working in different disciplines of theatre can hone their craft, share expertise and collaborate on productions.
The company presented its latest theatrical tour at the 3031 Arts Festival, which runs until Saturday at Old Cairo’s Darb 1718 cultural centre.
Titled A Cycle of Attention, the tour guides the audience to four different locations on the premises, one after another. At each location, a short scene is performed.
The tour guides are actors in the performances, each playing a distinctly different character, from the effervescent young man from Upper Egypt to the half-asleep hippy-dippy girl chanting loudly about love.
“I think I took it personally that theatre is kind of a dead medium in Egypt, which is why I started working on a format that Egyptian audiences might not have seen before, in the hopes that I could make the medium stand out,” Khalil tells The National, “What we wanted to do was show that theatre could evolve and find a place in today’s world.”
Though the four short scenes, which are written and performed in Arabic, are highly entertaining for different reasons — each presenting a unique subject matter that ranges from the precariousness of a love triangle to how the monetary value of an artwork is determined in today’s world — what truly sets them apart is the style in which they are presented.
The first of four scenes, titled For Her, is an absurdist comedy that delves into how primitive two men can act when competing for one woman’s attention, while the third scene, called Al Makhzan (or warehouse in Arabic), presents a revenge narrative that utilises a Tarantino-esque brand of bloody violence that made many in the audience look away in shock.
The name of the tour is a recognition that in today’s world, people’s attentions are fleeting and therefore need to be held in place by constant changes in the media they’re consuming.
Aside from how short the presented scenes are, the tour keeps the audience's attention engaged with the pastiche, over-the-top performances of the tour guides as they lead from one scene to the next.
“It’s definitely the age of short-form content. Just look at how popular TikTok is for instance,” says Myra Massoud, one of Khalil’s partners in Kenoma. “What we wanted to do was find a place for theatre in this new era. That being said, short form theatre isn’t an entirely new idea, theatricians as far back as Shakespeare’s era put on short scenes in marketplaces which were meant to be a form of quick entertainment that people could enjoy while out running their errands.”
A different scene
Kenoma’s productions are in stark contrast with the kinds of plays that Egyptians can catch at most local theatres.
Khalil explains that today only two kinds of plays succeed — the first being big budget musicals that lean heavily on ostentatious costumes and highly entertaining musical numbers, while the other kind are plays with a celebrity cast, which rely on their star power to sell tickets.
“In both of these cases, the writing and the art of the play suffers greatly,” he says.
Khalil, whose criticalness reminds one of an Annie Hall-era Woody Allen, is also an avid reader of some of theatre’s most prominent theorists, including Samuel Beckett, whose famed absurdism is only too apparent in For Her, which is presented as a dream scene.
While many of our earlier productions were in English, we quickly realised that that had to change
Myra Massoud,
partner at Kenoma Theatre Company
“Beckett taught me that drama resides in the clash of two opposing forces,” explains Khalil. “After directing his magnum opus Waiting for Godot in 2016, I visited France and did the Beckett tour to understand where he lived and how he wrote. I even went to his grave at some point because of how obsessed I became with him.”
He says that the strong physicality present in some of the scenes is something he learnt from another of his favorite directors, Russian theatre legend Vsevolod Meyerhold, whose philosophy proposes that if the actor’s body is in the right place on the stage, their emotional state will follow suit.
Old inspirations, new format
One of Khalil’s main objectives was to ensure that his old inspirations found a place in the new format presented in the tour.
Having spent the past decade in the Egyptian theatre scene, Khalil explains that he was always quite reluctant to do what many other Egyptian theatre veterans around him had done, namely to tailor their material entirely to the audience and forget about the quality of what they are presenting.
“The audience is an important aspect of any performance art, but when it becomes the driving force of the work, then expression suffers, art suffers and we end up making the same play 100 times over with minor variations every time,” he says.
With that in mind, Khalil and his theatre company knew they had to change something to appeal to a larger audience, which would in turn help them accomplish their goal of keeping the theatrical arts alive.
“While many of our earlier productions were in English, we quickly realised that that had to change,” says Massoud. “It was easier for them to be in English because that was the language of the ideas we were trying to introduce into the scene here. But that made our productions a bit niche.”
She explains that using Arabic enabled Kenoma’s members to reach a wider audience and effectively address some of their grievances with the Cairo theatre scene, namely its lack of originality.
This was particularly true for Al Makhzan, which is an adaptation of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. “Egyptian cinema certainly utilises a lot of violence at times, so it was interesting to see how appealing the scene became to an Egyptian audience just by converting it from English to Arabic," Massoud says.
This month is a particularly important one for Kenoma, marking the launch of their March of Theatre event, which, aside from the ongoing tour, includes three other coming performances.
One is a play written and directed by Mary Aravanis called W Ba’dein or "What Now?" in Arabic, another is the full-length Arabic adaptation of Reservoir Dogs, from which the Al Makhzan scene was excerpted. Finally, Khalil plans to put on an Arabic-language adaptation of Waiting for Godot titled Fi Intizar Gadallah.
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In numbers: China in Dubai
The number of Chinese people living in Dubai: An estimated 200,000
Number of Chinese people in International City: Almost 50,000
Daily visitors to Dragon Mart in 2018/19: 120,000
Daily visitors to Dragon Mart in 2010: 20,000
Percentage increase in visitors in eight years: 500 per cent
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MATCH INFO
Uefa Champions League semi-final, first leg
Bayern Munich v Real Madrid
When: April 25, 10.45pm kick-off (UAE)
Where: Allianz Arena, Munich
Live: BeIN Sports HD
Second leg: May 1, Santiago Bernabeu, Madrid
One in nine do not have enough to eat
Created in 1961, the World Food Programme is pledged to fight hunger worldwide as well as providing emergency food assistance in a crisis.
One of the organisation’s goals is the Zero Hunger Pledge, adopted by the international community in 2015 as one of the 17 Sustainable Goals for Sustainable Development, to end world hunger by 2030.
The WFP, a branch of the United Nations, is funded by voluntary donations from governments, businesses and private donations.
Almost two thirds of its operations currently take place in conflict zones, where it is calculated that people are more than three times likely to suffer from malnutrition than in peaceful countries.
It is currently estimated that one in nine people globally do not have enough to eat.
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Three ways to limit your social media use
Clinical psychologist, Dr Saliha Afridi at The Lighthouse Arabia suggests three easy things you can do every day to cut back on the time you spend online.
1. Put the social media app in a folder on the second or third screen of your phone so it has to remain a conscious decision to open, rather than something your fingers gravitate towards without consideration.
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Some of Darwish's last words
"They see their tomorrows slipping out of their reach. And though it seems to them that everything outside this reality is heaven, yet they do not want to go to that heaven. They stay, because they are afflicted with hope." - Mahmoud Darwish, to attendees of the Palestine Festival of Literature, 2008
His life in brief: Born in a village near Galilee, he lived in exile for most of his life and started writing poetry after high school. He was arrested several times by Israel for what were deemed to be inciteful poems. Most of his work focused on the love and yearning for his homeland, and he was regarded the Palestinian poet of resistance. Over the course of his life, he published more than 30 poetry collections and books of prose, with his work translated into more than 20 languages. Many of his poems were set to music by Arab composers, most significantly Marcel Khalife. Darwish died on August 9, 2008 after undergoing heart surgery in the United States. He was later buried in Ramallah where a shrine was erected in his honour.
Henrik Stenson's finishes at Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship:
2006 - 2
2007 - 8
2008 - 2
2009 - MC
2010 - 21
2011 - 42
2012 - MC
2013 - 23
2014 - MC
2015 - MC
2016 - 3
2017 - 8
KILLING OF QASSEM SULEIMANI
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City's slump
L - Juventus, 2-0
D - C Palace, 2-2
W - N Forest, 3-0
L - Liverpool, 2-0
D - Feyenoord, 3-3
L - Tottenham, 4-0
L - Brighton, 2-1
L - Sporting, 4-1
L - Bournemouth, 2-1
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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Al Mrzab Restaurant
For the shrimp murabian and Kuwaiti options including Kuwaiti machboos with kebab and spicy sauce.
Al Derwaza
For the fish hubul, regag bread, biryani and special seafood soup.
Sustainable Development Goals
1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere
2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all
8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation
10. Reduce inequality within and among countries
11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its effects
14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
RESULTS
6pm: Mazrat Al Ruwayah – Group 2 (PA) $40,000 (Dirt) 1,600m
Winner: AF Alajaj, Tadhg O’Shea (jockey), Ernst Oertel (trainer)
6.35pm: Race of Future – Handicap (TB) $80,000 (Turf) 2,410m
Winner: Global Storm, William Buick, Charlie Appleby
7.10pm: UAE 2000 Guineas – Group 3 (TB) $150,000 (D) 1,600m
Winner: Azure Coast, Antonio Fresu, Pavel Vashchenko
7.45pm: Business Bay Challenge – Listed (TB) $100,000 (T) 1,400m
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20.20pm: Curlin Stakes – Listed (TB) $100,000 (D) 2,000m
Winner: Appreciated, Fernando Jara, Doug O’Neill
8.55pm: Singspiel Stakes – Group 2 (TB) $180,000 (T) 1,800m
Winner: Lord Glitters, Daniel Tudhope, David O'Meara
9.30pm: Al Shindagha Sprint – Group 3 (TB) $150,000 (D) 1,200m
Winner: Meraas, Antonio Fresu, Musabah Al Muhairi
Results
2.30pm: Dubai Creek Tower – Handicap (PA) Dh40,000 (Dirt) 1,200m; Winner: Marmara Xm, Gary Sanchez (jockey), Abdelkhir Adam (trainer)
3pm: Al Yasmeen – Maiden (PA) Dh40,000 (D) 1,700m; Winner: AS Hajez, Jesus Rosales, Khalifa Al Neyadi
3.30pm: Al Ferdous – Maiden (PA) Dh40,000 (D) 1,700m; Winner: Soukainah, Sebastien Martino, Jean-Claude Pecout
4pm: The Crown Prince Of Sharjah – Prestige (PA) Dh200,000 (D) 1,200m; Winner: AF Thayer, Ray Dawson, Ernst Oertel
4.30pm: Sheikh Ahmed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Cup – Handicap (TB) Dh200,000 (D) 2,000m; Winner: George Villiers, Antonio Fresu, Bhupat Seemar
5pm: Palma Spring – Handicap (PA) Dh40,000 (D) 2,000m; Winner: Es Abu Mousa, Antonio Fresu, Abubakar Daud
