Male ballet dancers plié in the face of stigma

(12 May 2017) LEADIN:
A small number of Egyptian men are defying social stigmas to work as ballet dancers.
They have to cope with unkind comments on their profession as well as low wages to pursue their artistic calling.
STORYLINE:
It's a full house for tonight's performance of "Zorba the Greek".
The Cairo Ballet Company wows its audience with the tale of friendship between an Englishman and Alexis Zorba, a Greek man with a real lust for life.
The story demands talented male dancers in the lead roles.
But Mohamed Hamed says working in this profession as a man attracts ridicule.
"When people knew that I was a ballet dancer they used to mock me and say comments like "can you stand on your toes" or "can you spin and jump in the air"," he says.
But those cruel comments have not stopped him and the other male dancers in the company from pursuing their art.
And he must truly love ballet because it is not well paid - he claims wages are "low in comparison to other professions in Egypt".
Even the best paid dancers make the equivalent of only a few hundred dollars a month.
The Cairo Ballet company is staging four performances of this show to Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis's memorable music.
The art form is far removed from Egypt's own rich traditions of classical Arabic music and dance.
And there are some in this conservative, Muslim-majority society who consider ballet to be outright "nudity."
But tonight's dancers take their bows to huge applause from their audience.
As lead dancer Ahmed Nabil takes off his stage makeup in a dressing room, he reflects that the positive comments, admiring looks and hand shakes he gets after a performance are "the most important part."
And ballet has also brought him love.
At home, he dances with his Italian wife Alice De Nardi, a ballerina with Cairo Ballet Company.
In the 60-member company, almost all the ballerinas are foreigners, coming from Serbia, Italy, Greece, Japan, Ukraine and Greece, with only a handful of Egyptians. The male dancers, in contrast, are almost all Egyptian.
Nabil says Egyptians "don't see ballet as an art, they don't take us seriously".
And in this struggling economy he can't rely on his company wages to pay the bills.
He also runs ballet schools, with attracts young girls from mainly well-off families. Others dancers also teach ballet or take up day jobs, mostly in the government.
But in spite of the money problems, his wife is glad to be working in Egypt.
She believes there are more opportunities to do the kind of dancing she loves here.
"In Italy there is no a lot of opportunity to find work as a classical ballet dancer except in a big theatre," she explains.
"In Egypt there is still a repertoire of classical ballet. Maybe that's why all foreigners, they come here."
The Cairo Ballet Company was founded in 1958. But the lofty art of classical dancing has increasingly been stunted by a society that has become increasingly less receptive to Western cultural influences over the past 50 years. It's becoming the preserve of a shrinking cultural elite.
And in terms of politics, ballet in Egypt has been immersed from the start.
The national company was founded by the government as a way to strengthen the bond with Egypt's top ally at the time, the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, President Hosni Mubarak's government revived ballet as part of a more capitalist-driven prestige project, building the Opera House complex with Japanese backing.
Ballet was thrust onto a main political stage after the Muslim Brotherhood came to power following the 2011 uprising that ousted Mubarak.

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