Egypt's El Warsha spins a stunning tale
By Mehru Jaffer
JAKARTA (JP): If broken promises are indeed as much a part of life as promises kept, then it is worth trying to catch the illusive performance of El Warsha's Spinning Lives on Sunday and Monday nights.
Brought all the way from Cairo and directed by Egypt's Hassan El-Geretli for Art Summit Indonesia 2001, the grand rehearsal promised to the press did not materialize on Saturday due to a thousand and one unforeseen reasons, including a delayed flight and unexpected rainfall.
But, just as in life, it is never the end of the world. The show too went on with the 23 actors, dancers and musicians, including Muslims, Coptic Christians, ordinary workers, graduates, teenage talents and seasoned folk artistes, insisting on telling their story.
Spinning Lives is the retelling of the Hilaliyya epic which has been as important to the peasants of Upper Egypt as the source of water or the local mosque itself. The ancient bards memorized the epic, all million lines of it, like the religious heads know the Holy Koran. The tale recounts an Arab tribe's migration into Egypt from the east in the 11th century, and builds up to a confrontation between an outcast prince and his father, with neither of them knowing the true identity of the other.
What Hassan has done is to clip away all the frills added to the tale by folklore, and both for practical and aesthetic reasons he holds performances in translucent tents created by set and costume designer Tarek Aboul Fetouh.
Besides creating an intimate atmosphere for both the performers and the audience by covering a sand strewn floor with woven rugs inside the tent, it also saves El Warsha the trouble of investing in concert halls and dealing with red tape.
El Warsha (The Workshop) is Egypt's oldest independent theater group that was started by Hassan, a drama graduate from Bristol University, England, in the 1980s.
Hassan prefers to embrace tradition rather than bow down to it, and does not believe in treating folk art and theater merely as icons.
So along with all the dervish dancing, stick fighting, religious chanting and the playing of old, traditional instruments like the mizmar, arghoul, the two stringed rabab and the darabukka, El Warsha's energetic performances also include contemporary language and sounds imitated from street life.
The research of Spinning Lives started in 1994 along with the collection of the oral tradition of the Sira from its last living bards, and performed evening after evening at the open rehearsal sessions of the El Warsha Nights.
The result is a concentrated experience of all the fears and fanfare, love and hate and the song and dance that makes the world go round. Spinning Lives is a slice from life that is not to be missed.
El Warsha will perform at Taman Ismail Marzuzi at 8 p.m. on Sunday and Monday.