ARCHIVES 2014 / Haeeshek…

The latest version of The Nights of El Warsha, Haeeshek... is a music hall production born of the accounts of the 18 days that, in 2011, led to the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and to the events that continue to shake Egypt today. Working from a recent creation, Zawaya: Testimonies from the Revolution, young writer Shady Atef gathered various accounts of those pivotal days and turned them into five monologues he gave to so many different characters: a thug bought and paid for by the authorities, an officer of the army, the mother of a young man killed in Tahrir Square, a football supporter, and a human rights activist. For director Hassan El Gertly, this is the opportunity to think about those testimonies: “the idealism of those 18 days remains a reference, but things are more ambiguous; this isn't a celebration (...), you get different points of view, and the stories are those we tend not to hear, not to tell.” But it is also an opportunity to hear a large repertoire of songs performed by the actors, storytellers, singers, and musicians of the El Warsha company. Moral quatrains of the ancient Banu Hilal saga, music hall from Cairo, revolutionary songs from Suez, workers' songs from Nubia, protest songs written by Sheikh Imam and Ahmed Fouad Negm, the joke songs of Mahmoud Choukoukou, etc. Haeeshek... is a uniquely Egyptian way of answering rage and injustice with sarcasm, of tending to one's pain and loss by celebrating the coming day.

After graduating from drama, literature, and multimedia schools in the UK and in France, Hassan El Geretly worked first as an actor, then as a director. After collaborating with film director Youssef Chahine on two different projects, he founded the company El Warsha in Cairo in 1987. The company adapted texts by Peter Handke, Dario Fo, and Harold Pinter, and tried to “Egyptianise” the plays of Alfred Jarry. After two shows, Dayer Maydour and Dayeren Dayer, for which the company worked with shadow puppeteers, a major change occurred, with El Warsha now finding its inspiration in the streets of Cairo, in the endangered popular culture of Egypt. The company then began a long process of initiation to storytelling, an ancestral and widespread tradition in Egypt, and turned to other traditional forms of art, alternating periods of research and of training in various fields: medieval Banu Hilal saga with Sayyed Al Dowwy, one of its last practitioners; ancient stick dance, whose only school in Egypt was founded and funded by El Warsha; shadow play; puppet theatre, etc. Over the past twenty years, the company has also developed a large repertoire of songs, tales, and sketches from all over Egyptian culture. Taking the form of a music hall production, The Nights of El Warsha gave birth to new artistic forms such as the play Zawaya (Angles), based on testimonies from the 2011 revolution.

Mustapha Laribi, April 2014