PROGRAMME: 6th Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF)

Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) returns in its 6th edition, featuring local, regional and international artists across weeks from 17 March till 8 April

The multidisciplinary festival presents a line-up of music, visual arts, dance, film and literature, and theater, and this time ventures outside the boundaries of Downtown.

This edition holds a special focus on disability in the arts, with several acts on the theme of mental and physical disabilities.

The programme includes three commissioned performances from Ireland, England and Switzerland’s Theatre Hora, the oldest theater company in Switzerland engaging with disabilities.

The performing arts program brings together several diverse and celebrated performances, including the Arab premiere of French director, Pascal Rambert’s, two-actor drama, “Clôture de l’amour”, which will be performed for the first time in Arabic with local actors, Mohamed Hatem and Hadeel Adel.

The program will also feature a riveting musical theater collaboration by French director Henri Jules Julien and Syrian actress Nanda Mohamed.

The festival continues to shed light on emerging art form of interactive theater, presenting performances such as ‘Lookout’ by UK-artist Andy Field, who works with local child-actors to create an individual performance experience for each audience member.

This year’s music programme is curated once again by local musician and veteran producer, Mahmoud Refat.

One its highlights is ‘Made in Egypt’ concert, which will feature a selection of emerging Egyptian musicians.

As for the Visual Arts section, Curator Berit Schuck is behind the ambitious creation of an art museum, named CAMOCA, that analyzes the role of museums in daily life.

“The question for me is what do we show in a museum and how do we show it,” explained Schuck in the press conference.

This year’s film and literature program is curated by Initiative Film’s Isabelle Fauvel and will feature two highly successful films that were adapted from an original text; Incendies (2010) and Monsieur Lazhar (2011).

Another highlight this year is the urban visions programme - which contemporary dance in public spaces - as it stretches outside downtown and will present performances in the Cairo cemeteries in the area surrounding the Qaytbay mosque

Source: Ahram online