I have attended and declined to review a few performances at this year’s dance theater festival, mainly on the grounds that the work I was seeing felt so much like student work that I didn’t want to discourage young artists with what would inevitably have been negative appraisal.
That said, I went to review Monadel Antar’s “Machines, the final performance of the festival, which concluded last Saturday. I went with a heavy heart. Entering the lobby of the Gomhouria Theater, I was handed two glossy books – the first, an 80-page pamphlet written in Arabic/English translation with photos of the performers and the obtuse paragraphs that have come to symbolize the artists’ statements in the festival literature.
In a problem initiated in Walid Aouni’s misbegotten opening performance, most performance synopsis seemed to be more off-the-cuff-poetry than material capable of providing context, much less basic information for what one is about to see. A typical example, in this case from Mohamed Habib’s performance “April 2030 :
“Is anyone seeing me? Is anyone feeling my presence? By the way … I am a human being.
It would be difficult and also unfair to blame these young amateurs for the lack of structural guidelines provided on the nature of writing paragraphs for press and publicity. With Aouni as their predecessor, they undoubtedly may have been asked for text such as this, which would be even more questionable in festivals of a stronger professional caliber.
Though it may seem strange to dwell upon festival literature in a review, I do so because they are endemic of larger problems: lack of professionalism being a key concern behind the failure of this year’s festival.
Taking my seat, the curtain is raised, revealing a large spaceship placed at the rear center of the stage.
The work is typical of what one would expect of students in Aouni’s pedagogical line (Antar is a dancer in his company, and the dancers are listed as the “Modern Dance School, under Aouni’s directorship): fast, jazzy ensemble dancing, with a nonsense obtuse plot that draws on too many different genres, and blaring lyrical music that overwhelms the dance.
“Machines, however, had a bit more going for it, chiefly the strong personalities of the dancers, who were more physically fit, and have better form than some other performers in the festival.
At the point when dancers started to randomly mumble at the top of the show “What are you doing? I wish I was laughing – paired with non-related gestures – the work looked more like a theater workshop than a real piece designed for a festival.
Through the languid development of the piece – peaking with a confusing romantic duet between a man and a life-sized rag doll – the audiences were treated to two truly noteworthy scenes.
The first consisted of a young man emerging from the “spaceship and performing a fantastically adept break-dance solo. The second was a solo by a female dancer, weighing something in the range of 90 kg, that was so sincere and not at all mocking. Despite all his flaws, at that particular moment I was totally relieved by Antar’s innovation. It was reminiscent of a similar solo I’d seen in the 1990s by American choreographer Bill T. Jones’ company when he was still working with mixed body types.
From what I have seen, strong performances weren’t entirely absent from the festival, yet even the best of the bunch were marred by weak structures.
Diana Kelvo’s performance in Mohamed Rushdi’s “Perfume d’Amour for example was riveting, though the piece itself was better situated in the place of its premiere – the French Cultural Center’s Festival de Jeune Creator.
Adham Hafez’ 15-minute solo performance had no obvious correlation with the “choreographic game … movement/performance study, consisting of “a new cast of performers for every night proposed in the program, though it too had some strong moments.
These mainly consisted of the tension produced by Hafez’s calculated movements and strong stage presence when walking to the rear of the stage with his back to the audience clinging to a sheet wrapped around his shirtless frame. When he reached the back wall, he then proceeded to outline his shadow in charcoal, producing a silhouette of himself when he stepped away.
Overall however, there was a little too much 80s-style face paint, a little too much loud vocal music danced to without much departure from the mood or melodic lines already provided, and bit too little clarity from these young choreographers about what to say or how to say it in the medium of dance theater.
