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Egypt’s Hakawy Arts Festival 2019 Offers 8 International Acts

A poster for one of the performances scheduled at the Hakawy International Arts Festival 2019. (AFCA-Arts)
A poster for one of the performances scheduled at the Hakawy International Arts Festival 2019. (AFCA-Arts)
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Egypt’s Hakawy Arts Festival 2019 Offers 8 International Acts

A poster for one of the performances scheduled at the Hakawy International Arts Festival 2019. (AFCA-Arts)
A poster for one of the performances scheduled at the Hakawy International Arts Festival 2019. (AFCA-Arts)

Offering a sweeping variety of exciting art and cultural performances, Egypt’s 2019 Hakawy International Arts Festival for Children succeeded in drawing in large crowds, mainly children, to the coastal city of Alexandria ahead of its opening event on Wednesday.

Running from March 7 to 15, this year’s festival will offer its audience child-friendly performances and talents from around the world. Next to nine slotted Egyptian shows, eight international acts will be performed by artists from each of the Netherlands, Britain, France, the United States, Germany and Denmark.

Performing acts will be hosted by three different theaters in three different provinces with pre-launching shows booked for Alexandria. The official opening spectacle, featuring the re-screening of “The Big Night”, will take place on Cairo’s Hanager Theater and Gallery, while the final show will take place in the Minya governorate south of Cairo.

International acts attracted great interest from anticipating spectators. Hundreds of Alexandria’s children have voiced their excitement for the American ZooZoo act.

Imago Theatre, best known for FROGZ and internationally acclaimed for its special brand of vaudeville, comedy, acrobatics and illusions, proudly announced its latest family hit, ZooZoo, which combines mime, dance, music and special effects. Featured creatures include polar bears, bug eyes, anteaters, frogs, rabbits, hippos and penguins.

One of ZooZoo’s performers, in an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat, elaborated on the Egyptian audience’s great receptiveness, adding that the production employs professional body language as the sole medium for communication able to bridge cultural gaps.

Rasha Eid, deputy director of Bibliotheca Alexandrina - Arts Center, stressed that festival organizers will work harder to further diversify the art and theater shows to be offered to children in 2020 in Alexandria.

“More than 1,000 children have enjoyed the Hakawy Festival for two days,” Eid told Asharq Al-Awsat.

“We (Alexandria) will host the tenth edition next year to allow more children of Alexandria to see the diversity of art and theatrical world,” she added.

“The festival launched its first show after the January 25, 2011 uprising, to teach children values and culture through art,” said Mustafa Mohamed, one of the festival directors, told Asharq Al Awsat.

“Carefully select shows are offered to resonate with youth-- these performances often involve mimes and dynamic shows that are easy for children to enjoy and connect with,” he said.

Mohammed also pointed out that across the festival’s editions, “about 40 Egyptian shows and over 50 international performances, in cooperation with foreign embassies, have been offered to the public across several of Egypt’s provinces.”

He further revealed that the Festival, organized by the AFCA for Arts and Culture’s team, plans to expand into more Egyptian governorates for its future editions.

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Varieties

In Beirut, a Photographer's Frozen Moments Slow Down Time and Allow the Contemplation of Destruction

A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
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In Beirut, a Photographer's Frozen Moments Slow Down Time and Allow the Contemplation of Destruction

A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)

We watch video after video, consuming the world on our handheld devices in bites of two minutes, one minute, 30 seconds, 15. We turn to moving pictures — “film” — because it comes the closest to approximating the world that we see and experience. This is, after all, 2024, and video in our pocket — ours, others', everyone's — has become our birthright.
But sometimes — even in this era of live video always rolling, always recording, always capturing — sometimes the frozen moment can enter the eye like nothing else. And in the process, it can tell a larger story that echoes long after the moment was captured. That's what happened this past week in Beirut, through the camera lens of Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein and the photographs he captured.
When Hussein set up his camera outside an evacuated Beirut apartment building Tuesday after Israel announced it would be targeted as part of military operations against Hezbollah, he had one goal in mind — only one. "All I thought of," he says, “was photographing the missile while it was coming down.”
He found a safe spot. He ensured a good angle. He wasn't stressed, he said; like many photographers who work in such environments, he had been in situations like this one before. He was ready.
When the attack came — a bomb, not a missile in the end — Hussein swung into action. And, unsurprisingly for a professional who has been doing this work for two decades, he did exactly what he set out to do.
Time slowed down
The sequence of images he made bursts with the explosive energy of its subject matter.
In one frame, the bomb hangs there, a weird and obtrusive interloper in the scene. It is not yet noticed by anyone around it, ready to bring its destruction to a building that, in moments, will no longer exist. The building's balconies, a split-second from nonexistence, are devoid of people as the bomb finds its mark.
These are the kind of moments that video, rolling at the speed of life or even in slow motion, cannot capture in the same way. A photo holds us in the scene, stops time, invites a viewer to take the most chaotic of events and break it down, looking around and noticing things in a strangely silent way that actual life could not.
In another frame, one that happened micro moments after the first, the building is in the process of exploding. Let's repeat that for effect, since even as recently as a couple generations ago photographs like this were rare: in the process of exploding.
Pieces of building are shooting out in all directions, in high velocity — in real life. But in the image they are frozen, outward bound, hanging in space awaiting the next seconds of their dissolution — just like the bomb that displaced them was doing milliseconds before. And in that, a contemplation of the destruction — and the people it was visited upon — becomes possible.
Tech gives us new prisms to see the world
The technology to grab so many images in the course of little more than one second — and do it in such clarity and high resolution — is barely a generation old.
So to see these “stills,” as journalists call them, come together to paint a picture of an event is a combination of artistry, intrepidity and technology — an exercise in freezing time, and in giving people the opportunity to contemplate for minutes, even hours, what took place in mere seconds. This holds true for positive things that the camera captures — and for visitations of violence like this one as well.
Photography is random access. We, the viewers of it, choose how to see it, process it, digest it. We go backward and forward in time, at will. We control the pace and the speed at which dizzying images hurtle at us. And in that process, something unusual for this era emerges: a bit of time to think.
That, among many other things, is the enduring power of the still image in a moving-picture world — and the power of what Bilal Hussein captured on that clear, sunny day in Beirut.