Egypt, notwithstanding centuries of Arab domination, preserves—or re-creates—in her dancing the style shown in the carvings of the Pharaoh dynasties. In contrast to the softly curving Arab movements, the Egyptian’s definitely incline to straight lines. Gestures change their direction in angles, rather than curves. Poses of perfect symmetry are sought. Even when symmetry is absent, the serpentine, plastic character of Arab movement is pertinently avoided. The sentiment of architecture is cultivated; the head is not turned on the shoulders, nor the torse on the hips, except as such relaxation is required in the interest of pantomime. In movement and position the Egyptian seeks verticals, horizontals and right angles. To the beauty of the work the severely geometrical treatment adds an architectural quality almost startling in its surety and majesty.
Egyptian form “toes out” the artist’s feet, so that they are seen without perspective when the performer is facing the spectator.
Whether the dances of the Valley of the Nile established the conventions of early relief carvings, or whether, on the other hand, the carvings determined the character of the dances, is a question neither possible nor necessary to decide. Both arts certainly were the expression of rigid religious ceremonialism, and likely are twins. To-day the records in granite are the subject of conscious study on the part of dancers. In the past, too, they undoubtedly have been chart and compass to the sculpture of ephemeral flesh and blood, that unguided might have perished in any one of the thousands of generations of its existence.
In type of subject and motive the dances of Egypt resemble those of the Barbary States, as above described. Mourning, homage and incident are narrated in about the same vocabulary, the dissimilarity of technique being comparable to a dialectic difference of pronunciation of a language. On their commercial side the two are identical. In tourist-ridden cafés of Cairo and Port Said, as in those of Tangier and Algiers, girls dance what the tourist expects and wishes. In the Coptic town of Esneh, dwelling in the ruined temples, is a community of people known as Almées. They are literally a tribe of dancers, removed by a khedive in former times from Cairo on grounds of impropriety. Dancing as they do in the temples of five thousand years ago, they form a curious link with antiquity. Their work, however, is said to be shaped to the tourist demand.
Such dances, however, despite the insistence with which they are pushed upon the attention of tourists, are not of the kind with which the name of Egypt deserves to be associated. The mystic still dwells along the shores of the Nile; but its votaries do not commercialise it, nor is it a commodity that lends itself to sale and purchase, even were there a disposition so to degrade it. One of the dances illustrated by Zourna symbolises in terms as delicate as the most ethereal imaginings, the awakening of the soul.
The body’s initial lack of the spiritual spark is represented by the crossed hands, as bodies are carved on sepulchres. An imperceptible glide through a series of poses so subtly distinguished from one another that movement, from one moment to the next, is unseen, creates an atmosphere mysterious and almost chill in its twilight gloom. Gropingly the arms rise to the
