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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 June 2000 Issue No. 485 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 June 2000 Issue No. 485
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Pharaohs don't talk
By David Blake
Swan Lake, Cairo Opera Ballet Company, Cairo Opera Orchestra, conductor Mustafa Nagui, director Abdel-Moneim Kamel, Cairo Opera House Main Hall, 1 June
It was the Swan Queen, Erminia Kamel, arriving on the Arctic flight from Reykjav’k direct to the Opera House.
The Queen, Odette, acquired on her travels a new partner, Evgenia Grashenko, to dance Siegfried. They formed the right picture -- he tall, proportions exactly right, a firm stepper, not a pantomimic mincer, good elevation and, of all things, a grandly supportive partner, strong-backed, secure and easy in the lifts, and with that touch of arrogance a danceur noble must have to grasp and spin his ballerina around the place like a top. You know exactly how many twists he is going to make, and so does she. His mastery helps her security and therefore the conception. It is absolutely necessary he be established as master of the situation.
Together they made a handsome couple. Erminia Kamel gives the impression that the adventure of Swan Lake is a personal affair. She never plays the star. She is cool but never aloof. Her style is noble, she is a member of a team in a big house, and to her that is the important thing. Her view of Odette -- acts two and four -- is circumspect. Never an inopportune movement does she make. The impression is of relaxed, almost laconic ease, but it is not so. Every breath and step she takes is as judged as a well-made timepiece. This permits her to sail unruffled over the dramatic, emotional areas, which she leaves to her partner.
He is troubled and perplexed by the vision of feathers and flesh in the same creature. She achieves her rightful status of birdhood, but it is achieved at a cost -- the entire show, of which she and Siegfried are the centre, lacks the energetic thrust necessary to hold it together.
It is no good, a Snow Queen abdicating. Whatever will the government do without orders?
This situation is somewhat redeemed in the third act, which is the dramatic explosion of the story. Another Swan Queen, Odillia, in a black dress, arrives on the scene at the Prince's court, and under the evil influence of one Robehart proceeds to seduce the Prince.
Her seduction of him provides the most exciting dances of Swan Lake. Romance is dead, this is straight on seduction.
Odillia appears, famously in black -- black heart, black rags, but by Dior. High fashion adorns a brilliant series of divertissements that show off the whole company.
First comes a Spanish type flamenco dance for the dancer Sahr Helmy. She's the real seductress of this act, in her showy, Goyaesque emerald and black dress, with a reptilian train. She has a group of matadors in attendance all dressed to kill -- black, inky muletas and flashy waistcoats.
This dance is so spectacular it rather blocks out the rest of the company, because nothing stops Helmy when she is in full charge, like an express train steaming over the stage. Then come Neapolitan, Hungarian and Polish dances. Everyone is dressed in high-fashion, perfectly finished costumes milling about at the blackbird's party.
She herself is in the most beautiful costume of all, not black but peacock luminous. Brilliant colours shine through the black glitter dust of the skirt. Nilly Atalla shines and fizzes like a missile. The climax of this part of the show used to be when the Prince, in spite of the Queen Mother's violent disapproval, declares his wish to marry the black one from the wrong side of the Swan Lake. Blackie's mother was, after all a common duck, which everyone knows.
At the height of the chaos Blackie is supposed to do her 32 fouettés -- sur place. It is a feat every great classical ballerina once had to perform if she was dancing both Queens.
Nilly Atalla moved into place -- the great Tchaikovsky tune had already started when she did some of the spins. Things became a trifle rough for the Queen Mother, and then the whole thing stopped in a cloud of pink smoke. We were to see Swan Lake end as a nice, blighted romance. A pretty evening, but someone forgot to press the power button.
Repertorium and The Desert of Shadi Abdel-Salam, Egyptian German Festival of Dance Theatre, Gomhouriya Theatre, 2 June
This performance did not arrive from anywhere. It was already here thousands of years ago. Cairo city's history is documented by the Walid Aouni company of 13 dancers -- ten boys and three girls. A bewildering number of years, with suggestions of the tribal times of the Egyptian Pharaonic empire, glued to a time table moving along supporting all the clouds of ever-changing images like a river. Everything is on the move, especially the music. It is water music supporting plank races on its surface.
Dancing swans and glittering Pharaohs
photo: Sherif Sonbol
Repertorium, a personal archive for the Aouni Dance Company, uses its latest works as proof of its search for newer and simpler expositions of the dance. Aouni's dance theatre, in a place where history is dauntingly glued, era upon era, into a hymnal chant called Egyptology, makes fertile use of an almost endless continuum.
The first half of this programme is a resume of selections of his work, stretching back to the tentative beginnings with Icarus -- don't go near the sun -- Piano Piano to music by Thierry de Mey through to The Last Interview, a meditation on visual art but with alarmingly beautiful hints of what was to come later -- the sudden eruption of Alice in Wonderland's White Rabbit into a scene of erotic seduction -- and then Excavation of Agatha, dark, dense and irreverent. Up went the Pharaohs, Anubis in particular, with a revue-like chic which became an interview with Ernst Lubitch and Sunset Boulevard. This brings us to 2000, and last is best.
The last work, Sheherazade, shown in a new corner of the mysterious Citadel of Salaeddin, was quite definitely a once-in-a-lifetime show. Of plot there was nothing. It was an explosion of colour, grandeur and enthralling dance. There were no stars, because every dancer in the company was a star. The energy and variety of the music, provided this time by Rimsky Korsakov and Nassir Shama, as always in Aouni's work, lent a special edge.
Historical time is one of Aouni's targets -- he destroys it. And in the second half of the programme the process goes to ultimate lengths, going through the forests of the mind of Shadi Abdel-Salam in a shattering attempt to make a formal vision on stage. Aouni mostly succeeded. Musically it never rests, everything changes into something else as you listen -- and see. The images tease with their endless complexity. So imaginative is the use of juxtaposition it becomes difficult to see or hear. There is a cloak of nightmare -- a terrifying encounter of things too complex for even dreams to deal with. They are part of you, asleep or awake. Dead is what Aouni is after. Who is dead? You or the quivering Pharaoh, getting ready to be entombed?
There is no answer to this unique ballet except finding some place where you can cross over into the Book of the Dead. But Pharaohs don't talk.
