On Thursday, the 6th edition of the Breaking Walls Festival, which is dedicated to contemporary dance. The US Embassy in Cairo continued its support of the festival as part of its role in supporting talented and skilled artists. SEE News participated in a talk with Hazem Header, the director of the festival, and two international artists who will participate in the festival Makoto Hirano, and Dylane Smythe.
About the concept of the festival, Header said that the main concept of the festival is creating a free space and platform for local artists and dancers to express themselves and reveal their talents, in addition to bringing the concept of street arts to more places.
He also added that the festival brings several social and cultural trends from the society to the stage. He explained that in 2022, the festival adopted climate change issues.
The Egyptian artist said: "We call it the art in the age of climate change. So, we made like three or four performances based on the climate change crisis. And at the same time, we did like two or three talks about the issue. We brought specialists that they're working on that."
He continued: "There's a lot of trees have been cut and a lot of green areas have been demolished."
Regarding this year's edition, he said: "It's not specifically about anything but people meeting together and trying to provide more. We're able to provide more opportunities for more people to perform and to work. So, it's more about the community, the dancers, and the performers."
About the concept of dance, and expressing the self, Dylane Smythe said: "It is about being comfortable, being uncomfortable, being okay with things. Accepting that this is part of the human experience, especially when you're pushing boundaries or breaking walls. I just believe that we, humans, are always holding so much and experiencing so many different things. I believe in the truth of dualities. Like, I can be deeply sad and also experience immense joy and positivity at the same time. Because these things all exist on different levels of our being or consciousness or however you want to say."
Smythe continued: For me, at least personally, I'm not usually so good with words. And it has always been the best and most efficient way for me to not only tap into those experiences that sometimes I'm trying not to think about or not to touch on but also to express them, which I think is the healthiest way to deal with life, is to move through things and to not run away from.
On his performance which expresses the similarities between the childhood games in Egypt and the US, he said that the performance is his collaborator, Lily Kind. She's the one who started the process. So, she did the auditions. She chose the ensemble. And she kind of laid the foundations for the work that we're making, which is a 35 or 40-minute long improvised, entirely improvised piece.
These connections, these cultural connections across cultures, across the world of childhood games. And also of, like, basic rhythmic patterns like, this thing is very similar to so many things that we have in the U.S. And elsewhere. These games are things that touch all of our inner child.
Makoto Hirano also talked about his show that features various 9-Cairo-based performers. Hirano highlighted that the performance targets to allow the performers to express themselves, their experiences, culture, and attitudes, his main criteria for selecting the performers is being true, and honest.
Next, Hirano talked about his experience in participating in the workshops in Egypt, especially the one in Minya, Upper Egypt.
He described that the feedback was unbelievable, adding: "The participants were lovely lovely kind, and eager just to be in the space together and we played a lot of games around a personal presence and again just allowing each other to see each other and then started to create things out of that and we started creating tiny tiny performances out of that in the studio.
"Of course everyone had fun we laughed and we had a great time after the workshop, everybody just wanted to stay and talk and share with me their experience immediately. That was fantastic but then I received an incredibly long message from a person who was expressing how the experience was. This was new to them and he felt like it was an important thing."
About the collaboration between the festival and the US Embassy, Header said that this year, they are involved in the Cairo Design Week activities, so there are neighborhood-based thing things. He also added that there are several artists from the US.
Header concluded that there are 75 Egyptian performers with a paid salary, and there are more than 100 participants in the workshops.
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