The elite Western art form is far from Egypt's own rich traditions of classical Arabic music and dance, let alone the electro-beat sweeping the Arabic pop music scene. Social pressure to conform is overpowering, so the idea of someone dancing on stage in tights strikes many Egyptians as just plain odd. On a recent night at the Opera House, located on an upscale residential island in the Nile River, the Cairo Ballet Company brought a packed house to its feet with a rousing performance of "Zorba," a ballet based on the same novel as the movie "Zorba the Greek." The audience — men mainly in suits, women in evening gowns, many wearing Muslim headscarves — cheered a dazzling finale by the two leads. Ahmed Nabil, tall and slender, leaped in classical routines while Hani Hassan, playing Zorba, mixed in the machismo of traditional Greek dance, slapping his thighs and kicking up his heels. From childhood, the male dancers learned to keep ballet a secret. Once farmland on Cairo's western edges, Omraniyah is now a crowded district of shoddy, cramped concrete-and-brick apartment towers, mostly built up illegally as migrants poured in from southern Egypt looking for jobs and a better life. Narrow streets are jammed with cars, trucks, donkey carts and motorcycle rickshaws, or tuk-tuks, often driven by children. Some of the men sport a "zebiba," a bruise on the forehead from prostrating during Muslim prayers, and head out to pray during rehearsal breaks. Like his Zorba, the 39-year-old Hassan, the son of an army officer, exudes joie-de-vivre, flirting with ballerinas and showing off his fluency in Russian — his ex-wife was a Russian dancer. 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 the political stage after the Muslim Brotherhood came to power following the 2011 uprising that ousted Mubarak. Fears over the fate of ballet and other arts became a rallying point in the popular campaign against the Brotherhood. Foreign ballerinas are back, but now the company — like the rest of Egypt — struggles with austerity measures imposed by the government to repair the damaged economy.
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