The Dawar Arts Festival, first launched in June 2022, with its fourth edition held this year from 19 to 25 June in Abdeen, Downtown Cairo, employs arts-based practices to bring communities together and promote lasting social transformation.
For days, Cairo’s streets pulsed with exhibitions, music performances, and theatre events, drawing crowds into immersive experiences. This year’s festival, titled “What’s Beyond,” invited the public to reflect on ideas of regeneration, ambiguity, and the open-ended process of healing, all the while questioning if that journey ever truly ends.
Over time, the Dawar Arts Festival has earned a reputation for tackling pressing social issues, such as mental health, migration, gender, and identity, through participatory theatre and artistic expression. The festival invites audiences to linger with discomfort, embrace silence, and explore alternative ways of connecting, both with others and with their personal narratives.
The festival was founded by Dawar Arts, an independent cultural organization that harnesses the power of art and community-based programs to foster healing and social transformation.
By addressing the psychological and social effects of conflict, displacement, and poverty, Dawar Arts brings together a multidisciplinary team of artists, educators, health workers, and community leaders to lead grassroots initiatives focused on care, creativity, and collective resilience.
Since its founding in 2016, Dawar Arts has been at the forefront of using artistic interventions to start conversations and address trauma both in the city center and across Cairo’s marginalized neighborhoods.
To foster dialogue and social change, Dawar Arts uses theatre and music as therapeutic tools. Its programs bring together specialists who promote individual and community well-being through education and cultural engagement.
Through its educational arm, Dawar Arts provides workshops, courses, and professional training in applied theatre, drama therapy, and art. Its calendar also features a range of cultural programming, such as live music, staged readings, and theatrical performances.
Nowhere is Dawar’s mission more tangible than at Dawar El Ezba, a dynamic cultural center and social enterprise in Ezbet Khairallah, one of Cairo’s largest informal settlements, where 850,000 people live with a single school serving the entire area, making the presence of a cultural center critically important.
Dawar cultivates collective creativity here and provides dignified employment and vocational training for women, migrants, and refugees. Initiatives such as Dawar Kitchen blend culinary arts with social entrepreneurship, providing fair employment and training to Syrian, Egyptian, and refugee women through catering.
At a time when arts funding faces persistent uncertainty, Dawar Arts’ steadfast commitment offers a hopeful blueprint for grassroots-driven cultural renewal.
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