Breaking Out of the Cage: Tarot Cards Steal the Scene

By: Yasmeen Shaheen
@YasmeenShaheenn

With no staged script, predetermined storyboard or practiced rehearsal, a performance at the Falaki Theater downtown broke conventional boundaries on what it means to be a performer.

By using tarot cards to create both musical and theatrical scenes, a duet performance by Pascal Viglino and Wael Sami Elkholy in collaboration with the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetica introduced a new mode of performance art.

As part of their workshop on multidisciplinary musical theater, Out of the Cage is a 70-minute production that is the latest in an experimental brand of theater.

Out of the Cage first debuted in Switzerland in September and was performed on 21 October in Cairo.

Instead of acting out a fixed narrative, this production allows the audience to become more than just spectators to the event.

It is in fact more like a fortune-telling game, in which the audience plays the role of a visitor who is interested in having their fates read and where the performers are wizards interpreting the cards.

“You will choose the cards yourself and we will analyze it [either] musically or theatrically or maybe both,” Viglino and Elkholy told The Caravan.

The cards have diverse meanings and each represent a certain trait, scenario or concept that, when chosen in sequence, create a narrative that is exhibited in one of two ways: either through playing a music track or enacting a particular scene.

Based on the cards drawn by the audience, the performers would enact scenes that are tailored to each audience.

This means that no two shows are alike.

“We sought to make the audience feel excited and avoid the traditional boredom and monotony of traditional performances,” Viglino said.

One of the audience members was surprised by the performance since she did not expect that she herself would be participating.

“People choose from the 11 tarot cards of Maát-Ra – the goddess of justice and the balance of universe for ancient Egyptians,” said Maryam Abdel-Hameed, a theater student at Cairo University.

The performance drew a great number of spectators in spite of its experimental nature.

“We did not expect that our experimentation with this new genre would attract such a large number of people and achieve such a degree of success,” added Elkholy.

This new style of experimentation represents a new trend in Egypt in which the principle of coincidence plays a vital role in the composition of musical and theatrical performances.

The performance drew from the work of American author John Cage, one of the most important pioneers of nonconventional music and indeterminacy in music.

“We followed John Cage whose performances were inspirational to us as far as improvisation is concerned,” said Viglino.

Although the performance did indeed draw in a large crowd and required an adept cast, there were some in the audience who did not enjoy the experience.

“It is a fragmentary performance that relies upon coincidence and improvisation; I did not like that,” said Ahmed El-Gaiyar, a graduating Department of English senior at Cairo University.

Despite the lack of an organic flow of events, the performance demonstrates a new direction in the style of performance.