THE GUIDE

Three into one won’t go

Ivan Caracalla look far too calm, composed and cool for the weather. The Sagesse Theater where he is conducting rehearsals for Caracalla’s show at the Baalbeck Festival is too hot for mid-July. Staff sit and drip in the dimly lit cinema bemoaning the electricity shortages that have left them without AC.

But the coolly composed Caracalla Jr. has nothing much to say about the heat. If cool air was his main concern - he’d be laughing. What worries him more about the air strikes was that they almost wrecked the show.

Caracalla (whose father Abdel Halim Caracalla set up the legendary Caracalla Dance Theatre in 1980) says that the bombs gave some his Italian team of set designers a bit of a fright.

The three-man team who design sets for the flamboyant Franco Zeffirelli were in Baalbek when the air raid struck. “They were ready to get on the first planbe home,” says Caracalla. “I persuaded them it was alright.”

It’s easy to imagine Caracalla (who studied in London and LA and with Zeffirelli) in the role of reassuring mentor. He has a serene demeanour, serious bespectacled gaze (and a smile that lights up his face) that belies the frantic schedule that he and the team of 160 are undergoing to get the great Caracalla stage show on the road and ready for the Roman ruins of Baalbek. “It’s a very, very big production,” says Caracalla looking momentarily flustered by the feat he has to accomplish in a very short space of time.

Caracalla says that a production of this scale usually requires about eight months to put together. “We have only three and a half months.”

Time has lost its meaning says Caracalla. “You tend to forget that it’s day or night.”.

But what is more hair-raising about this show is that it represents a departure from the traditional Caracalla by combining singing and dancing into something that more closely resembles a musical than just a dance performance - which is what the troupe is renowned for.

Caracalla Dance Theatre has become something of an institution in the international danse world and sets out to give an identity to Arab art and export the Arab tradition and heritage to the whole world.