Thursday March 28th, 2024
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Switch to D-CAF

Calm down, you’re caffeine fix isn’t going anywhere. In fact, you might need some extra caffeine come April when D-CAF, Egypt’s biggest international, multi-disciplinary arts festival (we need a coffee just to be able to say that!), takes over Cairo.

Staff Writer

Switch to D-CAF

If you haven’t heard about D-CAF before, we’re going to go ahead an assume you’re an uncultured fool, and give you a little background to help you save face when everyone’s talking about it and you’re still thinking of lattes.

Basically, D-CAF stands for Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival. Got that? OK. The first festival took place last year and was a massive success, led by a group of Egypt’s most celebrated artists, curators and cultural operators, in conjunction with the wealth of quirky and cool performance and exhibition spaces that inhabit our beloved downtown area. Keeping up? Good. This year, D-CAF spans three whole weeks (April 4th – 28th) and will take you on a trip in and around downtown Cairo’s landmarks. From old favourites that’d get your parents all nostalgic like Radio Theatre and Shahrazad Night Club to the Goethe Institute and AUC’s Falaki Theatre and Greek Campus, not only will you get a much-needed dose of culture, you’ll get to act like the rucksack-wielding, picture taking white people that know wust el balad far better than we do. Better yet, there’ll be a few select performances, shows and exhibitions in unorthodox spots across downtown. That means you can catch anything from street dancing outside the Stock Exchange to comedy at the Kodak Building.

 

Are you with us so far? OK. Now here comes the good part. D-CAF is all about putting Egypt on the international arts scene. That means there’ll be three weeks of unadulterated artsy action from not Egypt’s, not the Middle East’s but the WORLD’S finest talents. And we don’t just mean there’ll be screenings of foreign films (though there will be plenty of that to go around). We mean that artists, musicians, performers and more are flying in especially for occasion. In fact, the whole festival is kicked off by one international act we can’t wait to see – French contemporary dance company Man Drake at the Falaki Theatre on 4th April. Once that’s over, we’ll be heading down to the Shahrazad to catch some electro-clash with the wacky Wetrobots
 
And that’s just scratching surface. April 11th sees funky Philadelphian Khadafi Dub break out his Dub/Trip/Electronica beats while visual art installation Augmented Airspace let’s us experience Cairo from the sky, live, and pimped out with augmented reality technology (venue TBC).

With 9 international award-winning films being screened throughout the three-week culture orgy, as well as plenty of plays, workshops and exhibitions, you certainly should switch to D-CAF. Not decaf, though. That’s a travesty to coffee.

Find out more about D-CAF and download the schedule from d-caf.org. Keep-in-touch with the D-CAF crew on their Facebook page here and follow @DCAFFestival on Twitter