6 - 12 September 2001
Issue No.550
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 6 - 12 September 2001 Issue No.550 |
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Shake a leg
David Blake watches them all the way from Ismailia to the open-air space of the Cairo Opera House
Ismailia Folk Festival, Open Air Theatre, Cairo Opera House, 25 and 27 August
Opening night of the five-day season of the Ismailia Folk Dance Festival, 25 August. If you are thinking of breaking into dance as the Ismailia Festival approaches, wait -- take another look as they begin their opening programme, featuring Austria, Italy and Bosnia.
These people have been visiting Cairo for years now. It is to be hoped they keep coming. Some of their shows are too good to be brief, others must be abridged to taste. All, though, are danced well. Taken as a body -- in this instance a mere five nights -- they never coarsen their initial impact which strikes across the often shop-soiled scene of the theatre. It is like being presented with a fresh lettuce, green, crisp and tasty, in the midst of so many cans of mushy peas.
Ronsard, the poet of the passions of youth, found many ways of expressing being young, beautiful, and dancing over the earth without destroying it, and so do the performers of the Ismailia Festival. As each nation presents its showing of the dance, some are naturally better than others, but all have a spirit of service and sincerity which makes everything they do exude a special shine.
Austrian folk dance
photo: Sherif Sonbol
It is all too easy to love them. They have the most beautiful physiques: most are tall to very lofty, and their performances are as beautifully groomed as themselves.
The men are a hefty lot, while the girls make out a strong case for the feminine look. And the legs -- which shake, once they start into the arena, move like a spinning wheel.
This year it's legs always. How beautiful a splendid pair of legs look as the swirl of a dress reveals them. Large or small, the dancers use the lightest of steps. They hardly seem to touch the earth.
When, at the height of a movement, a pair of dancers shoot off from the ensemble out into the open air, it is almost like a pair of dragonflies skirting the surface of water; deftly they return to their position in the ensemble.
The opening piece was "Austria," a disappointing beginning that turned into an exciting finish. The Austrians were a large bodied lot, powerful, and some were given plenty of smack-bottom dance movements. The dresses were a kind of uniform -- black for both sexes, simple, grand and imposing -- white balloon shirts and neat black legs. The girls were in black and a colour of clove.
When the bottom-slapping began and the speeds revved up, the Austrians seemed to have hit upon an effect which they may not have understood or expected. In the background a little band started to play an Austrian popular song, as if from a distance. And as this happened they turned the arena into what happens in the last part of Rosen Kavalier. Suddenly, when he sees his game is up with the really grand people he has tried to impress, the randy baron gives a piercing whistle, and he and his troop of country bumpkins take off into the night. It is a very disturbing moment in opera and for Ismailia, because the troupe here had stumbled upon the disturbing truths upon which the opera is founded. The flowers have all died.
Next was "Italy." The Austrians had been grave and splendid though their colouring was dark. And then came the Italians: sun and south, plenty of smiles. As they bounced into the light of the arena we thought we were in for the Italian spirit. The costumes sang out bravely -- luscious red for boys and girls. Their dresses flared and flounced, we were in a garden of south Italian geraniums. No cloud in the sky, and no cloud would come, because the dances went on and on with the same routines, it seemed, growing redder all the time.
Red is not exhausting, though there was too much of the same tone. It became a mite bright. The boys looked decorative because they were, each and all, wearing the same wide-rimmed floppy hats. The brim shaded their eyes -- the entire face became a pool of deep shadow, with brims and decorative flowers bouncing about out of the red. Beautiful, undoubtedly, but it seemed as if they were going to go on forever. Just as one was thinking this, suddenly they stopped. The charming dancers bowed and fled away.
The last piece of this programme was simply called "Bosnia." Those who decided to leave after "Italy" finished, fearing further onslaughts of repetition, missed the best section of the evening.
Bosnia is what we go to see Ismailia for. There they are, everything about them is questionable. Maybe they'll just stand, maybe they'll turn around a bit or walk off the stage. It has been done at the Ismailia Festival before, but not by these visitors. Four boy players specialised in music that had the Arabic sound but moved into a major key. A tall girl in yellow sang in Arabic and sounded romantic and Balkan.
After she finished the song the gang were ready to take the floor. They were a complete surprise: tall men in ballooning white shirts and long, rather tight black trousers, all wearing the fez. The girls were also tall, in black and white, with flowing skirts. But this troupe never shook a leg or danced in rapidly revolving circles. They were silent, quite reposed as the music played quietly on. They hardly moved their upper bodies. The legs and feet did small aerial steps which barely touched the ground.
These tall, tree-like people, their long pointed feet moving like fluttering leaves, impressed by their sheer impassivity. The audience fell completely under their spell. They projected dignity and a historic sense of formality without so much as a smile, and took the audience to trance land. If there is one thing better than a leg for audience appeal it could well be the fez.
Night of 27 August. This was surprise night. It began with Lithuania, usually conservative as to colour. But this night the large company blazed out into the theatre in purist white, sometimes going to yellow-cream, full-dress white, Great Gatsby-style. Everyone was happy. Festal white brought the right music, played at full force. There is nothing like white: in the theatre it acquires a dazzle like nothing else, and the Lithuanians were in the mood for dazzle.
So there was a really brilliant show: legs everywhere, spinning, thrusting, or just on the turn; top-speed turns, plenty of Russian high- bounce jumps for the men, and old-fashioned cartwheel runs for the women. They had everything and kept it going. It was the brightest thing the Ismailia Festival has ever presented. At one point they introduced white on white, turning the cream to gold, and that did it.
The choreography was inventive, turning everyone and everything into the style of Busby Berkeley's gold-diggers. The audience was ecstatic, and the company had the charming old-fashioned habit of turning their feet out when acknowledging the applause, the gales of whistling approbation.
Hard to follow such a display. It fell to France to offer, as if by chance, the only thing that would keep the audience interested -- a complete about turn. For white we had instead the strange, mysterious, contradictory colour of Burgundy -- deepest, darkest, shadiest tone of the palette. Tinted with sheer black and faded brown the effect was a triumph for the company.
After Golden Broadway came a pause: better choose your own scene, perhaps the awesome cacophony of a Paris dress show. But the French, like the Bosnians, choose gravity. They were positively stern in their desire to show the shadow side of Ismailia. Their display touched on the philosophic. Quietly they presented the most touching thing of the evening. Quiet flows the river of almost blood. Girls and boys, beautiful as any before them, were poised on the ineffable elegance of the flow of a skirt, itself a mystery.
The last show of the night was from Czechoslovakia. The music brought us close to Smetana, Dvorak and Brahms. And the dance, earthy, closed the show. It was bottom clap and tickle again, one of their own national dances, a sort of impolite male belly dance except that it is the bottom that gets all the attention.
So we began with legs and ended with legs, and what legs. Sturdy, bouncy as rubber balls, these strutting young things kept the dance truly elegant, and as much part of their culture as great music. Bottoms up.
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