'Cairo KitKat Club'
Performance Studies Ph.D. Candidate Adham Hafez's film 'Cairo Kitkat Club' (International co-production, digital Cabaret, and installation) will have its' world premiere opening at La Mama Theatre and Goethe Institut New York on December 11-14, 2020.
Living at a time when we are made to stay distant from one another because of a global pandemic, where intimacy means infection, and public conviviality causes contagion, this project looks back at assemblies of pleasure and politics that took place between Cairo, Berlin, and New York embodied in the history of the infamous nightclub, The KitKat. Built almost 100 years before Berlin’s KitKat Club of the 1990’s, Cairo’s KitKat was a radical cabaret by the Nile that saw constellations of artists, politicians, spies, and societal figures at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Stories at the KitKat were shaped by major world events, from the Spanish Flu pandemic, the shutting down of theatres, to WWI and WWII.
The digital performances will take place online on Zoom, as well as screened on the windows of Goethe-Institut New York. It weaves stories from the Isherwood’s American imagination of Germany, and Hollywood's depiction of Weimar cabarets in the 1972 film Cabaret (also taking place at a ‘KitKat Club’), going all the way back to the belly dancing, microtonal singing and glamorous houseboats in Cairo. Anita Berber, Josephine Baker, Hekmat Fahmy, Adolf Hitler, Hans Eppler, Anwar Sadat, Laszlo Almasy, Samia Gamal, Cecile B. DeMille, and Amina Mohammed are some characters that stride reality and fiction in ways akin to the performances of nationhood perpetuated by governments at times of cultural wars. The project is based on research conducted in Berlin, Cairo, London and New York, with MI5 files that have been recently declassified by the British Intelligence, oral histories from the KitKat neighborhood in Cairo, and chronicles of intergenerational clubbing within Cairo, New York and Berlin’s nightlife as we continue to live through a world of no theatres, cabarets or clubs today.
Cairo Kitkat Club is an episodic and modular project, staged in different constellations each time it is presented.
Project of HaRaKa Platform, in partnership with and supported by Goethe-Institut New York, and Co-presented by La Mama Theatre, and further supported by the Hilal Foundation The project is developed through Cairo Critical Cabaret , a performance lab initiated by HaRaKa Platform, experimenting with the form and history of cabaret, staging multiple artistic objects, processes and interventions.
Performance, research, composition by: Mona Gamil, Lamia Gouda, Ohoude Khadr, Cindy Sibilsky, Adam Kucharski, Adham Hafez and special guests
Urban history research: Adam Kucharski
Senior experts: Ashraf Gharib, Raph Cormack
Technical director and production management: Mido Sadek
Initial script dramaturgy: Leyla Rabih
Initial research: Sara Soumaya Abed
Conceived and directed by: Adham Hafez
Guest stars: Amie Sultan, Nicky Paraiso, Ohoude Khadr, Fadi Khouri
Final cut and post-production: Waad Taai
Project Supported by Sundance Institute, Kuchar&Co, Hilal Foundation, Yashmask