The 24th Cairo International Festival for Contemporary and Experimental Theatre (CIFCET) kicked off Sept. 19 with 27 local and international performances by professional theater companies from the United States, Russia, Chile, Iraq, Morocco and Jordan.

The festival, which is sponsored by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture and lasts until Sept. 29, is one of the biggest international theater festivals in Egypt. It is also one of the most controversial, ever since its founding in 1988, as advocates of traditional theater criticize its experimental aspects as elitist and detached from what audiences are interested in watching.

The festival made a comeback in 2016, after a five-year hiatus. Before 2016, its name had been the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre, but it added “contemporary" to the further anger of its critics, who claimed that the festival had become a hodgepodge of different theater styles, all of which were unappealing to Egyptian audiences.

Naser Abdel-Moneim, the festival’s coordinator and the head of the selection committee for foreign plays, disagrees, telling Al-Monitor, "Adding 'contemporary' to the original name of the festival has increased the categories of performance that we choose for the festival."