Alice

"Alice"

a performance by Sawsan Bou Khaled and Hussein Baydoun (Lebanon) at the 2nd Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival - D-CAF

April 2013

Hotel Viennoise, Downtown Cairo, Egypt

In the 2nd Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival, author, theatre director, and performer Sawsan Bou Khaled, along with set designer and artist Hussein Baydoun, debuted Alice at the once abandoned Hotel Viennoise in Downtown Cairo for three nights in a row.

The sixty-minute monologue, which is performed by Bou Khaled, flirts with the ideas of sleep, insomnia, dreams, and nightmares in a smart and humorous way, using a masterfully designed "bed" and cover sheets alongside a video projection as the sole props to create a fascinating world envisioned by the artists. 

In this video, Bou Khaled and Baydoun speak of the process through which they collaborated to produce Alice from the initial, general idea to the continuous development of both script and set design until the last minute, with much inspired by the very Hotel Viennoise, which Bou Khaled describes as "the perfect haunted house, where we could bring out all the fears."

For more information about the performance and its artists visit: d-caf.org/artist/alice