Sharm El Sheikh International Theatre Festival for youth

The festival will be held under the auspices of the Minister of Culture Inas Abdel Dayem, and the Governor of South Sinai Khaled Fouda. The festival will run from November 25 until November 30. More than 30 countries (within Romania, France, Germany, Armenia..) will participate in the festival’s 2022 edition.

The festival’s president Mazen el-Gharabawi announced on 17.09: „Today, a dream comes true…we are proudly announcing the first issue of the SiTFY Magazine with the photo of the American stage director Richard Schechner as the iconic international figure honored in the upcoming seventh edition of the festival“.

Richard Schechner is not only an inspiration for Mazen the founder of the festival, but also for many others. He is an expert in Hinduism (Jewish and Hindu by religion, but he describes himself as a religious atheist and says religion is a creation by humanity, he does not believe in super natural powers), a book collector (and this he has in common with my brother Edward). He compares theater to religion. „In theater or in film you invent characters, you play them as they are real, you give your whole live to this imaginary so what's the differance between that and giving your life to an imaginary god, it's a huge theater!“ As a theatre director, Richard Schechner is best-known for his radical stagings of classical material. Richard Schechner, one of the founders of Performance Studies, is a performance theorist, theater director, author, editor of TDR and the Enactments book series, University Professor, and Professor of Performance Studies. Schechner combines his work in performance theory with innovative approaches to the broad spectrum of performance including theatre, play, ritual, dance, music, popular entertainments, sports, politics, performance in everyday life, etc. in order to understand performative behavior not just as an object of study, but also as an active artistic-intellectual practice. He founded The Performance Group and East Coast Artists. His theatre productions include Dionysus in 69, Commune, The Tooth of Crime, Mother Courage and Her Children, Seneca's Oedipus, Faust/gastronome, Three Sisters, Hamlet, The Oresteia, YokastaS, Swimming to Spalding, and Imagining O.His books include Public Domain, Environmental Theater, Performance Theory, The Future of Ritual, Between Theater and Anthropology, Performance Studies: An Introduction, and Performed Imaginaries. As of 2018, his books have been translated into 18 languages. His theatre work has been seen in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. He has directed performance workshops and lectured on every continent except Antarctica. He has been awarded numerous fellowships including Guggenheim, NEH, ACLS, and fellowships at Dartmouth, Cornell, Yale, Princeton, and the Central School of Speech and Drama, London.

He explains the difference between Performaning Arts and Performing Studies. Performing Arts is a subgenre performed by solo artists like Marina Abramovic and it is not theatre, performance studies is an academic discipline and Schechner is one of the pioneers of this, anything can be studied as a performance. He is doing yoga and is starting the training with his actors with yoga. He works with actors but also untrained people. He is interested by antropology and is attracted to various cultures, like India and lately China. He also directed Hamlet in China, in Shanghai and later it was taken to a festival in Romania. He sees Hamlet as a prototipical outsider. He belives in artificial intelligence and speaks about the theory called singularity, when AI will be self conscient and self replicant and says that they will eventualy rule the world by 2050 and the question will be if we humans will be still needed.

The Sharm El-Sheikh International Theater Festival for Youth is honorary headed by the prominent actress Samiha Ayoub. The head of the Supreme Committee is the renowned actor Mohamed Sobhi. The festival is founded by the stage director Mazen el-Gharabawi and managed by Engy el-Bistawy. The upcoming edition 25-30 of November starts this year just a week after the prestigious United Nations Climate Change Conference Climate Change Conference which will take place in Sharm el–Sheikh from 6–18 November 2022.

Alice Kanterian