In its second edition, the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) takes over downtown Cairo during April for a month of events across multiple disciplines.
D-CAF this year brings together 80 artists from all over the world.
“At D-CAF, we’re not presenting a single art form or a single trend. Rather, we’re trying to give Cairo audiences a snapshot of what is available worldwide in contemporary art today,” festival founder and director Ahmed El-Attar says. “We’re trying to make the festival as varied as possible to cater to the widest possible audience.”
El-Attar has been travelling worldwide over the past year to select the participating artists for this year’s event.
He says he considers this year’s event to be the first edition, with last year’s being the “zero edition.”
“We’ve learned a lot from last year’s event,” El-Attar tells Ahram Online, adding that one of the main lessons learned was to expand the duration of the festival from two and a half weeks to a month to allow audiences to integrate the festival into their daily lives.
The festival will include Egyptian, regional and international artists showcasing their work in the fields of performing arts, music, film, visual arts, urban visions (a collection of events in public spaces), and ‘edutainment’ (workshops).
Programme details
The performing arts programme will launch the festival’s events on Thursday 4 April with a contemporary dance performance called Anatomia Publica by Man Drake with choreography by Tomeo Verges (Spain/France).
The programme will continue with other theatre performances including White Rabbit, Red Rabbit by Nassim Soleimanpour (Iran) which is basically a text given to an actor on stage to improvise a monologue. Actors featured will include Khaled Abou El-Naga, Aly Sobhy, Ramsi Lehner, Salwa Mohamed Ali and Sayid Ragab.
The programme will also feature performances of Alice by Sawsan Bou Khaled and Hussein Baydoun (Lebanon) along with Le Prince Sequestre by Compagnie L’enteprise (France) which will include collaboration by local theater troupe El-Warsha, Hassan El-Geretly and Boutrous Raouf Boutrous Ghali.
D-CAF will also take several events to the streets of downtown Cairo. The Urban Visions programme will be performed in several public spaces such as El-Bursa, on the courtyard of 10 Alfy Street, and on the shop front of 11 Mahmoud Bassiouny Street.
The performances include a circus performance by Al-Khayal Al-Shaabi called Traffic, a contemporary dance performance by Tomeo Verges (France) featuring Egyptian dancers, In the Midst of Confusion by 100HANDS (The Netherlands) among several other local and international performances.
This year’s music performances, along with the performing arts, are the only events which require tickets, with the rest offered for free.
The music programme, curated by Mahmoud Refaat, founder of 100copies music space (studio and label), brings street culture from different corners of the world to the stage on Thursday nights throughout the festival. The first event, on the opening night of D-CAF, will feature trash pop by Weterbots
From english.ahram.org.eg