Cover Story: Sahra Kent

Interview by Nizana El Rassan

Nizana: I had the amazing opportunity of meeting Sahra at this year’s Cairo Shimmy Quake in Glendale, and she is as sweet as they say she is! I have longer admired her work, and am so honored that she agreed to interview for me for Fanoos. She has an academic background that resounds with me as I chaired a college department at one time. That approach, along with her detailed research and personal experience, makes Sahra who she is - an American Belly Dance icon!

The first opportunity I really learned of Sahra was at the International Belly Dance Conferences in Costa Mesa, CA (1997 & 2001- Yes, I went to both, and yes, I still got the t-shirt!) A contingent of us flew down from Washington State as we all recognized the significance of an event that I don’t think has ever been TRULY replicated. I asked Sahra to tell us how it came about, how they managed to do it not just once, but twice, and more, and this is what she shared.

SAHRA: I had returned from dancing in Egypt since 1989. I had over 1,600 one hour shows in Cairo alone. My contract was with a 5-star hotel; a 1 hour show 6 nights a week with a live band and male folklore dancers. I loved my time there, to be able to fully dedicate my time and life to dance in Egypt for an Egyptian audience there was very fulfilling. When I returned to California I felt… how do I say it? I still needed to share the culture back and forth.

Angelica Nemeth was already my good friend. She taught at Orange Coast College, Southern California. I have seen her shows there on that beautiful stage many times.  Angelika and I were already talking about doing an event, and she had also been talking with Shareen El Safy as well.

When I first got to Egypt, Shareen was already dancing in Cairo, too. Anyway, now back in California, we three started talking about a large exceptional event. I'm not normally a producer. I usually travel in to dances or teach, so I'm not usually the person who runs the event, but I felt the full vision was really important. The more we talked, the more important it was.

It was important to all of us, to have professional dancers of origin. Originally, we were going with Mona Said of Egypt, then we also added Imani from Lebanon. We wanted dancers that were famous in their own right and had proven themselves in their own countries. That is what really hooked it for me, because if we were just doing a big show with workshops, I would have told Angelica and Shareen that I would be willing to help and work, but producing is not usually my job.

In addition, I had also run academic proceedings, panels and talks at UCLA and I felt it was important to also include this. We have so many interesting women and men who are dancers and researchers - there is so much information out there. So it was my opinion that it was very important to include dancers and dance researchers to give presentations or sit on panels. I felt that this was the final thing that made it a complete whole.

As I mentioned the first time we had Mona el Said, and there was a few challenges with

her visa. We decided to also add Imani just in case, and then thank God both of their visas came through and to our good luck we had both of them.

‘’We also had live wonderful musicians and so that was great. How can you truly present Egyptian stage without live music?  I felt was very important to include top level live musicians.

On the subject of dancing to live music I need to add this note here; I had worked in the United States for 13 years before I went to Egypt. I was used to working with live musicians as a given: in the USA, in Mexico City, then in Cairo. When I returned back to California I was happy to see musicians, may of them my friends from before. But then I was shocked to see that when it was time for the dancer to do her show, the musicians left the stage! In my say that would have been a serious insult to the dancer. I was told that things had changed and the musician took a break when it was time for the dancer. Therefore she would dance to recorded music. I was shocked and heart broken. That night I basically stopped performing in nightclubs because I'm just like no, I can't do this.

So anyway, I felt it was very important that we include live music in our Conference because we needed to bring that essential aspect back in. Dancers were starting to become afraid of live music! New dancers were starting not to value the moment, the communication with the audience, to encourage the saltinah, to immerse oneself in the music and the moment. They were starting to create movement in a solitary studio, practice remembering and drill steps that were created in a different space. When the saltineh and communication in the moment is gone from the show, Middle Eastern people will feel the loss, audiences will change.

Dancers may feel more comfortable with recorded music and a memorized choreography,” and I agree this is a very important part of our learning a foreign dance. But to me in preparation to become a professional dancer, it's also very important to react to the music in the moment, with the audience of the moment, having this communication.

I was very happy with the 1st International Conference on Middle Eastern Dance. We had worked hard, and I loved the whole show, and academic papers, the whole result!

Then soon after we finished the first one, we had kind of recovered and then Shareen starts asking, well the next one, what year should it be? And at first I was thinking,”no, I'm done now, I’m finished, I have other things to do now.” Honestly, I was surprised I did the second one! But in hind-sight, I'm really happy I did it.

Also after I returned from Cairo I had also produced a tour of the Western States with musicians and a folkloric dance from my Egyptian show. I loved the experience! To dance with them again! To share them with hundreds of American dancers! To have school assemblies and teach school children about Egyptian music and dance. So many different experiences. I do believe it was something I had to do. My Egypt/American experience would not be complete if I had not done it.

To be very honest the most difficult part of this tour was visas and travel. So when Shareen and Angelica started talking about a second Conference, I had 2 needs; no difficult visas and now the panels have to be even bigger.

For the 2nd International Conference I was fully on board when we decided to ask Mahmoud Reda or Farida Fahmy! They were my inspiration and I was so happy to honor them, both were my teachers, they're both my good friends. As a wonderful plus that I knew that they could get into any country they wanted to. I knew that they would deliver something for everybody, and so we all three said okay to that. Shareen also brought in Najwa Fuad, too. The Conference became even bigger, the 1,000 seat auditorium was filled, standing room only, the auditorium was filled for classes. We added another room for continuous academic papers, extra panels… it was wonderful and crazy and like a roller coaster for days!

My dance company did a challenging choreography of Mahmoud Reda’s, one of his favorite, too. It was “Garib Al Dar”, one of the Muwashahat, and my whole dance company “Ya Amar!” spent the whole year on that one piece. It was the difficult choreography that his troupe performed for a special concert for New Years Eve TV show. It wasn't the same choreography that he would teach internationally in a week, or a weekend. It was not easy, but I was so pleased that we were able to do it. I sewed the costumes because I've been in the Reda Troupe costume room so I knew the fabrics and construction. So, I made all, I think we had 13 people, I made all their costumes; Coat, pants, hat and veil.

It was so fulfilling, what was really exciting is that we had behind us the video projection of the actual Reda Troupe. On the stage was my troupe, I staged it so that sometimes we (video & stage) would all be doing the same thing, then then sometimes we would break into small groups. Sometimes, hopefully I explain this right; On the Reda video when Farida was dancing, it was her solo. I felt it was important that on our stage, when Farida was dancing (see I'm going to get emotional now because she's like my idol). But when Farida is dancing nobody else is dancing, you know. We hold a pose and look toward the video projection of Mme.Farida Fahmy, so all of us would watch her on the video, right? I felt that was extremely important, because who am I or anyone to take her place, especially as she was on the video, and (I can still feel the emotions now) she was standing in the wings watching us... That was an important statement and then the final thing; I couldn't even tell my dance company what I had in mind for the ending.

To my troupe, months before in rehearsal, I pantomimed “okay in the end we make this circle, like you know they do on the video…” I had to pantomime because I was crying. My sweet loving dance company was used to me crying, because most of the time I cry over something good. So anyway, I mime that they make the final circle, then Farida comes in and stands in the center of the stage! So in the video we have Farida of the Reda Troupe, and on stage we have the Daughter of Egypt in 2001. Of course on stage we couldn’t look at each other because we were all to emotional about the gravity of the moment.

Nizana: I remember it, it was incredible. Magic. So happy to have witnessed that.

SAHRA: So our troupe practiced the circle and, thank God, Farida went along with it. When we ran through the dance for the stage rehearsal the day before, Mahmoud Reda told me “you know maybe some people don't know Farida”. I'm saying “of course they know Farida”, and he says “yes, but maybe they're new dancers. Maybe they don't know. You should go on stage and introduce her.” I told Mahmoud the truth, “I'm going to be crying, there's no way I can talk.” He said “no, you have to.” And I'm standing there in the circle stunned, and Farida says “if Mahmoud tells you something, you have to do it”, so I agree. During the show I used Farida’s long standing ovation (yes, they knew who she was) to bite my lip and try to get under control. Finally I could “Ladies and Gentlemen, Farida Fahmy.”

Then Farida gave her talk, I sat behind her as she asked me to.After her talk, several of our “Ya Amar!” dancers (still in Ghareeb al Dar costumes) escorted Mahmoud across the stage. Once he reached the podium, I was supposed to read an introduction of Mahmoud Reda. So I read maybe 1/3 of it… we had we had Roxanne, you know Roxxanne?

Nizana: Yes Shelaby, yeah yeah.

SAHRA: Roxxanne Shelaby, yes. She's always the one that helps me with all this different stuff, and so we had her hiding in the curtains over to the side by the podium. She was also in the dance so she had on the costume. She had to be there because I knew I wouldn't be able to get through it all.

I started the introduction and of course I start crying and I grab her from the wings. I pull her the short distance onto stage, and she gets in front of me, and she says “okay what Sahra is trying to say is”… and she read the rest of it.

Anyway, that was so embarrassing, but didn’t surprise me at all.It was what made this segment of my whole dance journey complete because “Gharib al Dar” was the first dance Farida tried to teach me at UCLA. I had been a modern dance major so I should have been able to learn it, but never had learned Reda technique before. It was very different than Belly Dance combinations so I got confused with footwork and direction. I found her suddenly moving backwards and I am still going forward and don’t know how turned to the back. Then I face back and she's quickly moving forward, and I'm going wait! I'm looking around confused. So within a couple combinations to the count of 8, she had decided Reda Technique was too difficult for me. She had been my idol for years! My life had spun around when I realized it was she who was sitting next to me in class! And now I had quickly proven myself incapable.

She had never taught choreography before. She was the soloist, not the choreographer, not the trainer, so anyway she says “okay…let me give you something else…” She gave me her solo from the Assaya dance which was beautiful and I loved it and I could understand it because it made more sense to me. As you can imagine having your idol there and she says let me teach you my favorite dance and she starts, and then she says let's do something easier…It was so embarrassing. So now was my chance to prove myself, for one year I studied Gharib al Dar, I broke down all the steps. “Ya Amar!” worked hard on it, every week, and then we were able to do it. That’s how I got into it, so that I could bring in the academic part of it. In the end what was so very fulfilling was to be able to perform that dance, and somehow with the Reda Troupe too! So absolutely fulfilling and full circle.

I'm so glad it went well, because, like I told my dance company, this dance is very

important because it will happen one time; we're never going to do this dance again. It had to be right. We will be in front of almost a thousand dancers! Farida and Mahmoud are watching, and we're doing this in honor of them. We're only going to do it once. Thank God it was videotaped. We all knew that we had to get it right just that once. It was that important and it was magical.

I'm so glad you guys all understood it, because I'm thinking what if nobody knows what we're doing? My brother was there and he really thought the video projection was a video of us on stage so that people could see it better. (That was a big compliment when he told me that.) Then he realized we started doing two different things and he's understood! At the end when Farida came into the circle and he really understood!

I did have a flash of fear: when Farida entered the circle, there was a moment of quiet and I'm thinking “oh no, it didn't register with people!” Then suddenly they went crazy and then there was a standing ovation. Of course, now I totally break apart, and the whole time we're walking towards the microphone I'm just thinking “get it together, get it together!” I'm much better at dancing than I am talking or trying to explain something unless I'm talking about Journey through Egypt and then it's my favorite subject.

Nizana: That was next on my list!! Journey through Egypt (JTE Series) is your baby and you have invested a lot of work and time in an informative, educational format that captures so many important facets of the many Egyptian dance styles.

SAHRA: I like doing it in person because every group is a little different. A lot of times, different people sponsor me and I go into different studios who will have different things that they studied. I may go to one studio, and they know everything about Saidi, but they never heard of Siwa Oasis. Somebody else will know a whole lot of how to perform things in the stage way, but they really don't know much about how the real people do it in their own places.

I like to go to the actual place of origin when I research, and interact with people because my masters is in dance ethnology. So the way that I like to present folkloric dance is in a dance ethnology way. Dance Ethnology is based on Ethnographic Research, in UCLA our main study was research techniques. The main lesson is to not put your own ideas on top of it, research it to find out how the people see it, what are their categories not my cultural categories. For about 6 years when I lived in Egypt I was performing almost every night so I couldn’t travel outside of Cairo. So I could only research Cairo dance styles, both in homes and on stage.

Once I wasn't performing there anymore, then I started doing research and traveling around and everywhere I went it was obvious that there was one category of people who were not seen as dancers. They're not performers, but they love to dance. It's girls dancing in their own homes. Or men dancing outside for celebrating a wedding or moulid. Here we have homestyle non-professional, too, but here we can go from “oh I like dancing at home and I like to go to a studio for fun” and then here we might add a student recital and then you start getting good so then you can do a solo. This may seem reasonable to us, but making that leap to being a costumed performer maybe too much of a different category that might not be acceptable.

They don't have that flexibility of division between non-professional and professional. It's like in your homes, you know you're not a performer. Then in a different category, you are a performer. It isn't even how good you are or anything, it's like who's your family, and what are they going to allow you to do. So anyway, that was important to me. Their dancing was different. When I went into somebody's home and just danced with the ladies, it was different than how the stage presented them, so that I thought was very important.

So in addition to non-professional, and local professional, another category is  the Saqafa, which is a local stage troupe sponsored by the government. Most governorates have a Saqafa, there are 27 governorates in Egypt. As we have 50 states, they have governorates and basically figured by population. There might be one governorate that is very large in the desert, and then there are many small governorates that include a city or even smaller in Cairo because it's by population. It's interesting that different governorates have their own style.

Each of these governorates, by law are supposed to have their own Saqafa. But if an area is very conservative they might not gave a Saqafa, or possibly only have music, but not dance, although usually the Saqafa includes dance. I have found these groups very interesting because they have their own regional flavor, but they also use the national troupes as a prototype of how they perform dance on stage.

Then there are the 2 National Troupes; the Reda Troupe and the Komeya. If you have tried both you know their technique is different. Maybe the normal person going to see a show on stage doesn't see the difference, but as dancers we can feel the difference, and they come from two different backgrounds. Both are very interesting and I love both of them.

The final category is how these different folklore dances are presented on a Cairo stage by one of the belly dance stars. Different star dancers will dance differently, it possibly doesn't really have a lot to do with the actual dance, or how a government group might do it. They are more interested in entertaining their audience, they are not trying to educate anybody. The star dancer might not be able to dance like that area, and she probably will look more like a Orientale/Belly Dancer, possibly with folkloricly trained young men dancing in a troupe style around her. They just want to be interesting and fun!

How we learned when I started; Unfortunately for the time we were in, we got mostly unmarked videos and we didn't know where they were from. Most were belly dance, but every once in a while, there'd be like a folklore dance.  I wouldn’t know where the dance was from, but suddenly I felt as if I was learning folkloric dance! We kind of started with the last category of “how do belly dance stars present these different regional dances”. Then you might get to meet the famous Saidi singer and something real. We somewhat learned backwards. First, I learned dances from videos and then I learned from Middle Eastern audiences. Then I learned from Kaomeya and then I went to UCLA and learned from Farida. Then I moved to Egypt to do research on the Zeffat al Aroosa for my Master’s Thesis. There I started seeing the Saqafa and real people and the local professionals. It's just like this thing never stops! You can never learn all of it! And knowing that is so fascinating to me.

After I left Egypt, I taught and performed internationally. They always had me teach and perform belly dance, which of course I love. I kept mentioning that “there's so many other interesting Egyptian dances out there!” Sometimes I could get them to let me do a Saidi dance, but for a small group. I'm thinking “but there's all these other ones!” but no they're not interested.

I decided I was going to start my own course, so I was talking to Roxxanne and I insisted I had to present each one of the regions. I have to present how the people dance, how do the local professionals dance, how does the Saqafa present dances, how does Reda, how does Kaomeya… I decided I needed 20 hours to be able to present all of this content.

Roxxanne had an apartment at the time and with a beautiful shared recreation room. She was able to get it for a weekend. She says, “okay now we have to figure out the costs and details” (which is never my favorite subject). So we figured out we needed six people to cover the costs. I confirmed that yes, for sure I want to do this. She says, “so for sure if we get six people we're going to do this right?” I remember I said “if we get one person we're going to do it!” Because the first time is always the hardest. And I really wanted to teach this subject that I had done so much research on.

We put our name down for the the recreation hall. That was before social media, but we

had email. I sent an email out to all of my mailing at the beginning of December and the event was going to be in January. Roxxanne warned me that they usually need more time than this. Plus it was right before Christmas, so maybe people didn't have the extra money to do a full weekend workshop. And I am still convinced it is ok if we can even just get one person to get the idea started. Other dancers may then hear about it and we'll do it again. To my astonishment it was sold out within two days!

When I called Roxanne, “it's all sold out!” She told me; “right now you have to write another email and say you're sorry it's all sold out.” I felt bad because many dancers were writing me emails saying that they wanted to do it and that they were mailing a check. Of course those were the days when a person would have to mail a check to pay.

Roxxanne and I went to the recreation hall and reserved a weekend in March. So now I had to email or call of all those people and say sorry January is all filled up now, but there's a place in March. And then that weekend filled up. We had sold out two JTE weekends before the first one even started! It has going very strong for years and years.

Inside I'm going I really want to be there in person, but I also know it is easier for many people to do it online. We're working on it right now, and in person is a little more difficult than it used to be, but I still want to do both so that's where it stands right now.

I called this course “Journey through Egypt” JTE for short. I originally added the “1” to show we are just starting this information. I liked “JtE-1” because I'm academic and I like it when you're signing up for classes to have the Class initials and then a number; like Anthropology 1 is “Anthro-1”, and I liked the concept of that.

At the end of my first JTE we were relaxing in the Rec Hall, one of attendees, who loves folklore said; “oh I loved it!

Then she continued; “so when is JTE2?”

First I  said “I just finished one!”… then I said; “you're right. I left out so much. I can do a two, no problem.” Then she says; “and when is three?” I said; “Rhonda, we can't do that! To have a three, we would have to actually go to Cairo.” She says “okay.”

So before the first JtE-1 weekend was finished, JtE-2 Classroom, JtE-3 Cairo Study-Tour was set! I have been doing the JtE classrooms and going to JtE Egypt Study-Tours for 20 years or so and I still see new things and learn new things!

Then we made a JTE-4 in Upper Egypt, focusing on Sai’di and Nubian. Since then, I've added the JtE-5 Suez Canal and we've done that a couple times. I am also planning JtE-6 Alexandria, but we haven't done it yet. So that's where everything is right now.

Nizana: Everyone must progress to attend?

SAHRA: Yes, everybody has to go through one and two to get to be able to go to three or four. I used to be able to get talked into things more easily, but I found when I did let somebody in, even if they traveled to the area before, but they hadn't taken one and two, I was referring to things that they had never heard or learned about.

Nizana: Makes sense for sure, so everyone is on the same plane. so tell me a little more about your dance inspiration before we wrap this?

SAHRA: My main dance inspirations are the people of Egypt, performers and home-style. My stage performer idol is Farida Fahmy, I have learned so much from Mahmoud Reda and the Kaomeya Troupe of Egypt. I went to college with Farida, too. Farida’s book has recently been published; “Farida: a memoir” written by Farida Fahmy, presented by Keti Sharif. It is wonderful! Farida’s amazing master’s thesis information, which is published in seven languages! “Farida Fahmy's UCLA Master’s thesis is titled "The Creative Development of Mahmoud Reda" (1987), focusing on her academic research in Dance Ethnology. It examines the Reda Troupe’s historical significance in elevating authentic Egyptian folk dance into a celebrated theatrical genre.”

Nizana: That is wonderful, thank you for sharing that and all this fascinating and wonderful history! You are a treasure!! Thank you, Sahra!!  

If you get the chance to study with Sahra, do it!! She danced the nightclubs in Cairo when bands were the norm, and she has traveled, studied and lived the Egyptian dance culture. Her connections to other dance icons are fascinating to hear about- like I told her, I could listen to her talk all day! I so appreciate her taking the time to share a glimpse inside all the history, the now, and the future!