THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT a river that makes people want to build a theater right next to it. This may have nothing at all to do with the poetic notion that the river symbol of the stream of life in all its sadness, sparkle and beauty somehow belongs next to the playhouses that reflect it all.

Take the Minamiza Theatre in Kyoto, Japan, an easy one to explain. For many centuries, the Kamo River would flood unpredictably and violently and roar through the middle of Kyoto. It would sweep away the bamboo and rag huts of the only people who lived right next to the riverbank: the poorest of the poor, who would rebuild as the riverbed dried out. Though modern dams now keep the river tame, the avenue that runs along it is still called Kawaramachi, Dry Riverbed Town.

Rivers also leave behind smooth mud flats that were perfect, as they dried, for street markets, festivals and even dance. The legendary dancer Okuni, who pioneered the vigorous dance style of Kabuki theater, would dance after the flood on the very spot where Minamiza sits now, still housing the great annual Kabuki shows.

Or, take Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Like other playhouses of the Elizabethan Age, it was built so close to the Thames River that from the gallery one could see the river and smell it. The wealthier people in Shakespeare’s audience went from carriage to theater and right back, choosing not to mix with the crowds of urchins and pickpockets, stretcher-chasers, wenches and rum-soaked sailors who reeled and bawled through the riverbank district at all hours of the day and night.

For the theater districts that grew up next to the Thames, the Tiber, the Danube, the left bank of the Seine, and in old New York before Broadway was sanitized, the reality was and is that theaters are usually built on land that nobody wants for anything more stable and profitable.

What does this lightning course in Theater Location 101 have to do with Egypt? Only that Cairo now has its own experimental theater and all-purpose cultural center right next to the Nile, on the west bank of Zamalek at the end of 26th July Street: El-Sawy Cultural Center, which opened in February of last year.

Ashraf Talaat/Egypt Today Mohamed El-Sawy in the spotlight

The site is not just next to the bridge that goes to Mohandiseen, but actually under it, with all that that suggests. “It was a very bad place” before the center was built there, laughs Public Relations Director Mohamed Salah. “It was full of [hookers] and drug dealers,” and so many people brought their garbage there that the city eventually built a wall around the area to stop all the illegal dumping.

Life by the river began to change when Mohamed El-Sawy visited the lot next to the bridge for the first time to scout the best place to install billboards for his Alamia Advertising Agency. When he first glanced at the dark gray wall under the bridge, he thought nothing of it. But when he came back weeks later to check on his crew’s progress, he got curious and asked the caretaker to let him peek inside.

The vision came to him at once, he says. “The first time I looked in, I saw the stage, the lights, the curtains.” Soon after that he went to a local district official to ask the governorate’s permission to clean the area up and use it. It was as if “he were waiting for someone to apply,” El-Sawy recalls. “It was so fast. His assistants asked for plans and details, but he just looked at me and said, ‘Go ahead and start.’”

The next green light was immediate, too: When El-Sawy drew up the rough plans and showed them to Abdel Rahim Shehata, then governor of Cairo and today the minister of state for local development, Shehata simply said, “See how you can turn a terrible spot into something that shines.”

So far, so easy. The project met its first delay when El-Sawy, an architect by training, began to focus on the practical business of what he would need for the building of what he already envisioned as El-Sakia (The Wheel). “At first, I didn’t think of ceilings and air conditioning. I wanted an open-air space. Our first calculations were very stupid. I thought we could build it for under half a million pounds.”

Ashraf Talaat/Egypt Today El-Sakia’s gallery space offers various resources for artistic expression

It was time to talk with his old friend from the German School, Naguib Sawiris, the chairman of regional telecom giant Orascom Telecom, parent company of MobiNil, among others. “He said ‘OK’ without seeing any plans, and just said we were doing something very special,” El-Sawy says.

The trust has continued ever since. Sawiris did not come to see the place he had underwritten until it was open for a year, but he was delighted with what he saw. MobiNil, along with the Arab African International Bank (AAIB), continue to be the Center’s main sponsors. Sawiris clearly shares El-Sawy’s conviction that Cairo very much needs private cultural centers.

Mohamed El-Sawy named his creation the Culture Wheel in honor of his father, the late Abdel Moneim El-Sawy, who is best known to most in Egypt as a former minister of culture, but took his greatest pride in his work as a novelist and journalist. His most ambitious effort, a five-part novel cycle called El-Sakia (The Wheel), was complete except for the last novel at the time of his death.

His son, by giving his cultural center the same title, is symbolically finishing his father’s magnum opus.

Abdel Moneim El-Sawy liked to quote a line that he heard from the people in his village: “There is no poverty in the world. There is only a lack of ideas.” His son remembers being taught in his boyhood to be resourceful enough to find a way out of the tough times in the Nasser era.

Ashraf Talaat/Egypt Today Mohamed El-Sawy, on a mission to abolish people’s ‘fear to enter’ cultural places

The Culture Wheel and the Townhouse Gallery in Downtown are now the only two private cultural centers in Cairo able to support the kinds of new and unknown art projects that public culture centers will not touch.

One major player who shares Sawiris’ faith in the Culture Wheel is Farouk Hosni. The minister of culture came on the night of Naseer Shamma’s performance with his House of Oud group. Compared to the public cultural centers, Hosni said, “You’re doing 10 times as much.”

The numbers bear out the minister’s assertion. The center includes a large Wisdom Hall that can seat up to 600 for music and theater performances, a smaller Word Hall used mainly for art exhibitions, lectures, training sessions and seminars, and a very pleasant green garden for receptions and small outdoor events.

Construction is now underway on El-Nahr, a 400-seat amphitheater between the river promenade and the water. It’s the centerpiece of a river annex project that will also offer a quiet terrace where people can come for breakfast and lunch, and a felucca that can sail from the riverbank with sculpture and music classes and small performances that will happen in motion, in the middle of the Nile.

The Culture Wheel is a busy place. It hosts an average of 42 events a month: plays, concerts that range from solo recitals to medium-sized orchestras, art exhibitions, lectures, panel discussions and free movie screenings.

The center also offers, for LE 30 a month, summer art classes in painting, sculpture, piano and violin for children aged 6­14. The Wheel’s youth program, attracting those who will make the Center a part of their lives for many years to come, is central to Mohamed El-Sawy’s strategy of building a wide audience that includes people who normally don’t visit cultural centers of any kind, public or private.

“We enjoy attracting very sophisticated, cultured people,” he says. “But we are here to add other parts of society to this group. As time passes, people will dare to come. It happens that most people fear to enter a place that says ‘culture.’” So he works at broadening the public’s awareness and understanding of a variety of cultural events. Ticket prices are low, with the top ticket for some events set at LE 15, and other events for much less. Many are open to the public for free.

Outside the center’s perimeter, between the garden fence and the nearby mosque, there’s a pedestrian walk exhibition area that shows reproductions of famous paintings from Egypt and around the world.

The new El-Nahr performance space, which will open this month with special Ramadan performances, is deliberately designed so that people can stop and watch the show as they’re passing by on the river walk. This addition will dissolve the barrier that many people perceive between ‘culture’ and the rest of life.

Such thinking tends to attract eager people, especially young ones, so it’s no surprise that of the center’s regular staff of 42 (12 full-time, 30 part-time), 34 are in their twenties, as are many of the adjunct staff who are on loan from Alamia, in addition to the 15 youth program teachers.

One of the full-timers, Ayman El-Nouby, like the sponsors and government officials who’ve smoothed the way for the Wheel from the beginning, jumped into the job before the project was fully developed. “I felt when I met Mohamed El-Sawy,” he remembers, “that he wanted to do something, so I said to myself that if I can serve this activity, I will.”

Nouby, as everyone calls him, is a rising star, though he’s too modest to think of himself that way. His business card only says “Art Department,” but he really works in the capacity of an executive producer, organizing music concerts and festivals, and coordinating the work of lighting, sound and stage staff.

More focus on technical aspects is needed, for while the lighting in shows at the Wheel is generally smooth, the sound work among the young 25-man staff can be spotty, with mikes and switches popping, booming and going out altogether as music and voices switch without warning from big and amplified to small and inaudible. This is to be expected when young staff are getting the hang of equipment that is not really state-of-the-art. They will get better.

In early September, Nouby was at the Paradiso Theatre in Amsterdam to start a three-week internship in production planning and management, stage lighting and sound design to learn the ropes so he can come back and teach his colleagues.

The enthusiasm at the Culture Wheel is infectious. It feels the way New York’s Off-Broadway theaters did in the 1960s when Sam Shepard (the creator of Hair) and a lot of other people in their 20s, were putting on new plays that had no budgets for anything, but ran on sheer nerve and desire. This is probably why there’s been such a huge response to the annual New Play Competition.

The field opens with 32 short plays or play excerpts, each limited to a running time of under one hour. The judges, professors at the Cairo Academy of Dramatic Arts, select 10 plays that will make it to a second round. Awards are given for Best Play, Script, Director, Actor and Actress and the Best Play gets to return when it’s ready for a three-night run.

I went to see the winner of the previous contest, which was then open to old plays as well as original ones. It was, of all things, Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Having acted in this play twice myself, and having seen dozens of stage and film versions of it in five languages, I made sure to pack all my kindness. I expected that a production in Arabic, directed by a student from Cairo University’s Faculty of Commerce, had no chance to be one of the best Hamlets I’ve seen.

I could have left my kindness at home. Director Amir Shawki and his cast understood the play better than most, and uncorked a production of the most unusual kind, including bits and choices so surprising yet truthful that one wonders why no one else has done the scene that way.

Imagine three actors costumed as the Ghost, vanishing and appearing all over the stage. The King and Queen bursting into laughter from sheer relief at Polonius’ news that love, nothing more, is the cause of Hamlet’s madness. The dumb show in the mousetrap scene played for laughs, as it likely would have been by a troupe of vagabond actors in the 11th century, when the events of the original Hamlet story took place.

This Hamlet would have been impressive anywhere. If it is the kind of play that can be done in Cairo by people who are not even thinking of careers in theater, then there’s no telling what kinds of exciting new stuff will appear at the Wheel, and on other stages here, in the years to come.

Above all, El-Sawy looks for independent minds when he hires new staff. “We let everybody think,” he says. “We don’t just tell them to listen.”

The payoff is a fearlessly, teemingly creative team that orchestrates a whole host of plans: For online ticket purchases. For the Egyptian Dramatic Reading series held last month. For souks to be held inside the Wisdom Hall, and out in the garden after concerts, so the staff of musicians can sell their CD’s and other products. For the Chocolate Festival, which was a hit last December and will come again at the end of this year.

Ayman El-Nouby even dreams about taking the Culture Wheel to other parts of Egypt. “We’re now settled in Zamalek,” he says. “We could move also to the Upper Nile and other cities. If the people there can’t come to concerts, we can go to them. I hope for a lot of Culture Wheels.”

The Culture Wheel plans to open its new El-Nahr annex in the middle of this month, with several special performances that will coincide with the start of Ramadan. Plans are still in flux as permits creep and dust flies, but will be much firmer by the time you read this. General Manager Hanaa Koura, who is at the Wheel Sunday through Thursday, knows the details, as does Public Relations Director Mohamed Salah.