El-Warsha’s Progress
1987 - ‏2003
El-Warsha started its activities in September 1987 with two plays, Peter Handke’s The Ward Wishes to Become a Guardian and Waking Up by Dario Fo and Franca Rame. These were performed again in early 1988 and then at the first Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre later that year. In March 1988, El-Warsha produced two plays by Pinter: The Lover and The Dumb Waiter, then produced its own adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Penal Colony at the Second Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre in 1989.
El-Warsha represents a group of people who have come together through a shared attitude and sensibility. Its members, whether amateurs, professionals or aspiring professionals, work together united by a quest for new horizons of wonder.
While Waking Up was to us an exploration of the roots of folk performance and of a socially relevant theatre free of slogans, in The Ward Wishes to Become a Guardian, we attempted, through this silent show, to highlight the discrepancy between the messages transmitted by movement, rhythm and scenography and the messages of the spoken word, and to show that a text is alive in as much as it leaves space for all the other components of performance.
In performing Pinter in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, we aspired to a succinct language that would generate dramatic tension through verbal economy, and which would imply the depth and violence of the feelings the characters hide behind the mask of everyday mundane behaviour. Then came The Penal Colony, a rich and painful parable related to our reality where institutions prefer to die of stagnation than to live the adventure of growth and development.
When, in 1989, we egyptianized Alfred Jarry’s Ubu-plays into Dayer Maydour more freely than in any previous attempt, we were not unlike people building their own temple in others’ holy land. The show contained much material from popular culture, which made for intimacy with the audience and which was in keeping with Jarry’s rebellious spirit. It also marked the beginning of our association with the traditional shadow-players; the play was later reworked to reflect the spirit of the shadow-play, making use of its aesthetics, and in this form Dayeren Dayer was performed at the Cairo Opera House, and at theatre festivals in Zurich, Carthage and Cairo and Amman.
The changes that Dayeren Dayer underwent, during two years of performance, showed us that linear logic, whether common or 'absurd', limits the scope of imagination in the structuring of plays to reflect alternative perceptions of the world. So the fragments of Ghasir el-Leil (Tides of Night), first performed in 1993, started emerging after a long period of practice in storytelling, with its multiple perspectives and its interaction with the audience. The revealing of encounter points in the popular material, with its different voices and rhythms and the freedom inherent in the logic of fantasy, led to the reshaping of the space shared between performance and spectators, and to the birth of a theatrical form that could embrace the rhythm of human emotions.
Ghasir el-Leil was first performed in a Theatre and subsequently in a tent that can be remodeled according to the needs of each new production and allows us to tour. We also presented the play in Zurich, Rabat, Casablanca, Beirut, Amman, Menya, Paris, Gothenburg, London and Washington.
We simultaneously continued to perform Layaly El-Warsha - that had started in 1992 with popular stories - in Cairo, then in Alexandria, Menya, Sharmoukh and Bayadeyya villages (Menya), Port-Saïd, Beirut, Amman, Maadaba (Jordan) Paris, London, and Washington. These evenings now contain shadow plays, glove puppet sketches, stick duels and popular music, which are the arts that our actors are learning from the popular masters.
In 1994, we finished a documentary film: Mouled El Sayyeda Aisha (The Birth-Feast of Holy Aisha) in collaboration with the people of the Sayyeda Aisha neighbourhood, who organise a carnival-like procession different from those of other Saints' feasts in that it parades carts with satirical tableaux of everyday life.
In the same year, we started to collect the oral tradition of Al-Sira Al-Hilaliyya, the epic of the tribe Beni Hillal, from its last great bards. We trained to recite and sing it and presented extracts during Layaly El-Warsha in anticipation of a play that opened in Cairo in January 1998: Ghazl el-Amaar (Spinning Lives), and which represented Egypt in the 1998 Cairo Experimental Festival, where it received a Special Mention of the Jury. It was also presented at the Cairo International Book Fair, Amman and Aqaba (Jordan), and at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, as well as in Aleppo and at the Institute for Theatre Arts in Damascus (Syria), and at the Fagr Festival in Teheran, and at the Arts Summit Festival in Jakarta (Indonesia). It was also performed in Alexandria, Om Doma village in Tema (Sohag), Mallaawy (Menya), Radiseyya village (Edfu), and Belbeis (Sharkeyya).
With the development of El-Warsha, we started taking part in international meetings to discuss artistic issues that preoccupy us and that we air in our bulletin El-Warsha's Papers.
We go on seeking our potential partners, and this has already taken us to Mallawi, Menya, Port-Saïd, Bangladesh, Cyprus, Sweden, England, U.S.A. and South Africa. In 1995, we established a partnership with El-Fawanees Theatre Company in Amman. Since then, we have collaborated with them to organise the Amman Theatre Days, the International Encounter of Independent Theater Companies.
In addition to establishing a centre in Cairo to train young people in the popular arts and in the techniques we have developed for the theatre we are seeking, a number of collaborations have started in the provinces. This has allowed the traditional masters to teach young artists in the very areas that nurtured these arts. The Stick Arts (dueling, dancing) and Music School in Mallawi was the first to be launched of these initiatives. In 1996, we created a Theatre Centre for Children working on improvisation, shadow puppetry and video-cartoon techniques. A project is also under way with a Childrens’ Choir of the Association of Upper Egypt for Education and Developement, establishing training centres whose curriculum includes an apprenticeship in the different musical traditions that we have been exploring.
The company has now turned towards another kind of tradition – the spirit of daily life-as it is played out in the village and the city, and as we have encountered it, both collectively and individually, in graffiti, in inscriptions on automobiles, in memories, dreams, jokes and films, in the songs performed on the microbuses, and in our own experience of living and working together in many different contexts. We have started presenting this material in Nights that we have entitled “The Longer you Live..” as part of our efforts to uncover new forms of theater in the shared spaces between us and our audiences.
There has been a major transition in our artistic work: our preoccupation since the end of 1997 is with acting as a process of bringing living human beings from our lives and our imagination onto the stage. Visiting the wide expanses of storytelling for the previous five years had freed us from the preconceptions of realistic acting and our heritage of 19th century declamatory and drawing room comedy techniques.
At the end of January 2003, our latest production Bullet in the Heart opened in Alexandria and was subsequently performed in Cairo and Menya.
Bullet in the Heart, is a masterpiece in colloquial Arabic. Reminiscent of the plays of Marivaux and Musset, this play was written in 1931 by Tawfiq El Hakim whose life parallels the history of 20th century theatre in Egypt.
November 2003