The Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) will host the French play "Face à la Mère," directed by Belgian director Guy Cassiers, in its Arab premiere on Friday and Saturday, October 25 and 26, at 8:00 PM at the Falaki Theater. The performance is supported by Région île-de-France, the French Embassy, Institut français Cairo, and Institut français Paris.
Written by Jean-René Lemoine, the play is about a mother who dies tragically, in a far-off country beset by violence and madness. Several years later, her son decides to set a meeting with her, beyond death, to confess to her all that he never dared to tell her or never knew how. Over the course of this love song, the son retraces the tumult of a forty-year relationship.
After studying visual arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Guy Cassiers focused on creating a dramatic language with a strong visual and sensorial identity. Adapting and directing non-dramatic texts allowed him to grapple with a language that is often politically-charged within an ever-shifting world that may seem at first incomprehensible. He was the director of the Toneelhuis in Antwerp. Cassiers' theatre explores the history of Europe and its sociopolitical forces that vie for dominance–always centering the human dimension.
While Jean-René Lemoine trained in three renowned institutions: the Conservatory of Dramatic Art in Paris, the Mudra School Maurice Béjart in Brussels, and the Institute of Theater Studies Censier in Paris. He first began a career as an actor with the company of Lindsay Kemp then worked as an assistant to the Union of Theaters of Europe, the Odeon Theater of Europe and regularly collaborated with the Experimental Academy of Theaters. He also taught drama at Cours Florent from 1998 to 2000. He began writing in 1985 and staged his first play Les Folies Bergère at the Porta Romana Theater in Milan. He is currently devoting himself to writing and directing.
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