NADA Magazine,
Winter 1999/2000
YASMINA: AN ENGLISH ROSE DANCES IN CAIRO
By Maggie Caffrey
Guests fluttered excitedly to their chairs as the 15 piece Oriental
orchestra crammed itself onto the back of the stage. Bride and groom were grandly
seated to one side proudly surveying the scene. Another Egyptian wedding was
about to be blessed by the joyous presence of a Raqs Sharqi dancer, something
which has continued through the generations since Pharaonic times. The musicians
struck up and Yasmina appeared resplendent in gold. Gypsy tiara on her head
and cloak afloat, she glided around the small disco dance floor before coming
face to face with her audience. Her hair fell straight to her waist; her skin
was a whiter shade of pale under the intense lights. Small dark-haired, dark-skinned
children clustered eagerly at her feet, gazing up expectantly at this icon of
womanhood.
Two dances later Yasmina was gone, only to reappear this time in a figure-hugging
purple dress. It was held together by interlacing which spiralled around her
slender form. The queen had become a vamp. Next costume change, and there she
was with a blazing candlelabra on her head and just about the hugest smile I’ve
ever seen. Her mermaid-green skirt was slashed to the thigh, the revealed leg
tastefully enclosed in a fine embroidered lycra. She toured the room pursued
by a trail of children and her tubby sagat player who enthusiastically wafted
burning incense in our faces. Once again on stage he began to play the sagat,
saucily accentuating parts of her anatomy whilst she played the coquette, delicately
flicking her skirt open and closed. At one point he listened to her stomach,
nodding sagely, as she danced, before running his tinkling finger cymbals up
the contours of her leg as she performed a one-legged shiver. He was the perfect
foil for this beautifully composed English rose wjo was playing the goddess
at this Egyptian wedding in the Meridien Hotel, Heliopolis.
Deceptively simplistic
Yasmina’s style of dance is deceptively simplistic. Poised and elegant,
she parts the space around her with care, executes each step with tenderness.
“She’s very soft,” Raqia Hassan told me. “People like
her. She gets a lot of weddings.” I noted some influence from Dina –
tiny subtle movements, pauses, high floating arms, drop-squats. This was combined
with complete composure and a leisurely pace reminiscent of Hanan. One movement
I loved was a soft stop using the centre of her back.
I had first met Yasmina as real-life Francesca Sullivan only the day before.
Kay and I rushed into the hotel lobby hot, sweaty and dusty after a gruelling
two hour class with Aida Nour, and then an even more gruelling battle through
Cairo’s lunchtime traffic. She was waiting with not strand of hair out
of place, her impeccably applied make-up emphasising her striking Jerry Hall
looks. She spoke of going riding that afternoon. I wondered if her features
would become smudged, and then, gazing at her perfectly outlined lips, I dismissed
the idea as inconceivable.
Having persuaded Francesca to submit to yet another interview (she has undergone
several recently for UK national newspapers) I arrived a few days later outside
her apartment off Pyramids Road. The dusty street was awash from a burst pipe
and the building opposite was boarded up. “A lot of people are surprised
I live in an area that’s not particularly salubrious” she told me,
“but it’s very convenient for me.” She leases a horse nearby,
and likes to ride whenever she can.
Once inside her spacious family flat, however, the dirt and hustle of Cairo
seemed very far away. Huge chandeliers adorn the spacious rooms whilst heavily-carved
gilt furniture hints at a colonial past. Colourful birds twitter in a cage in
the dining-room and the softest grey Siamese kitten I’ve ever seen turns
over lazily on the bed. I felt this extraordinary Englishwoman would always
create her own world of tranquillity wherever she chose to settle.
A long winding road
Yasmina has been until very recently England’s sole representative in
the world’s capital of Oriental dance. She describes her road there as
‘a long and winding one’. Beginning classes in ’83 in London
with a belly-dance teacher, she found she had to un-learn everything when she
started studying off and on with Suraya Hilal. She had been performing already
in smaller clubs, having been taught how to ‘put on a show’ by a
beautiful dancer called Sheherazade.
In 1988 she went to Italy to work as a dancer in a nightclub in Milan. It was
well-paid, but dancing to cassettes and being part of a show with a magician,
a dance troupe etc was very depressing especially as the nightclubs tended to
be quite seedy. “Because I actually fell in love with Italy itself I stayed
much longer than I would have. By the time I finished, which was about a year
and a half later, I had almost decided to give up Oriental dance.” Hope
returned however when Sheherezade contacted Francesca again and asked her to
go and work in Casablanca with her. “I arrived in Morocco and my eyes
were opened,” remembers Yasmina. “Although I’d worked with
Egyptian musicians in London, in Casablanca it was with a far bigger orchestra.
There were big names from Cairo coming to perform. It was just a revelation
to me. I spent one of the best six months’ of my life there.”
The, back in London, she found the effects of the Gulf war had decimated the
night-club scene. Once again hope appeared on the horizon and she was introduced
to an agent called Toros who was based in Beirut. Most of his dancers were Lebanese
but he took a few non-Middle-eastern dancers. Francesca ended up working for
him for three years, usually in the Gulf – Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain.
In the summertime it was in Syria and Jordan. Then destiny called and, when
a contract in Damascus was suddenly cancelled in ’95, she decided to take
a holiday in Cairo to check out the costumes there. Until then all her costumes
has been Lebanese – big chiffon skirts, heavy beads, big pearl fringe,
2 piece without a net. In Egypt she found everything far simpler. Everything
was in stretch lycra with no fringe. “Dancers like Dina would wear a stretch-lycra
dress with almost no work on it at all. Although people think that that means
when you shake your hips or do a movement nothing will show. In fact the subtleties
show better and perhaps you can’t hide as much.”
Here Violetta Barb (a French manager who now runs the nightclub at the Marriott
Hotel) helped Francesca look around, even though the situation was already getting
pretty bad with less work for less money, she was able to win a contract at
the Meridien, Heliopolis. “Everything fell into place.” She had
the good fortune to remain there for two years.
It was at this point she found herself on the circuit of cabarets and weddings
where a dancer has no contract and is very expendable. “You can be in
one day and out the next. You can make good money from tips (because in cabaret
tips are allowed – in hotels there is no tipping), but on another night
you can come away with almost nothing. By the time you’ve paid your orchestra,
you don’t take much home. Now I understood what everybody else had been
telling me about.” Fortunately Francesca was able to go to work on the
Nile Maxime (a restaurant boat on the Nile) for a year, before being asked to
come back to the Meridien in June this year. She told me that the gap in the
market, created over the past five years by so many good Egyptian dancers giving
up, has worked in the favour of non-Middle-eastern performers like herself.
Living in Cairo today
She plans to remain living and working in Cairo for the time being even though
there’s relatively little work these days, and absolutely no job security.
Most of her money goes on costumes and on daily living expenses. “Contrary
to what people think, cairo is not that cheap. You have to be prepared to live
without security and not know what’s going to happen tomorrow let alone
next month or next year.”
Yet Francesca feels that coming to Egypt has definitely enriched her dancing.
She took classes with Ibrahim Akef the first six months after she arrived, and
then moved on to Raqia Hassan. But she feels it is important to develop your
individuality and to incorporate what you have learned into your own natural
style. “When you’re doing a performance you don’t want people
in the audience pointing at you and saying ‘Oh look she’s doing
a Raqia!’” She also goes to watch other dancers as much as possible.
But sadly there are fewer and fewer Egyptian dancers performing these days because
of the poor return. “Why risk your reputation, why throw away a normal
life if there is no financial pay-back?”
Apart from dancing Francesca has made a point of developing a well-rounded life
for herself. “It’s very depressing when the only landmarks of Cairo
become the dressmaker, the nightclub where you work, the dance teacher and your
home.” She rides nearly every day and has developed a second career as
a journalist for an English-medium magazine called Egypt’s Insight. In
this capacity she has been able to meet lots of interesting people including
a Middle-eastern heart-throb and a family of snake breeders who live in the
desert.
What it takes to be a dancer
Talking to Francesca made me realize how it takes much more to be a raqs sharqi
dancer in Egypt than just having the ability to execute a range of steps beautifully
and respond well to the music. She has to be able to get the costume maker to
design and create unusual and workable costumes, to be a make-up artist, to
be able to win contracts and attract one-off bookings, to get together a live
band of around fifteen musicians and to get them to play the music as she wants
it played, to live in a different culture and not get homesick, and above all
to be resilient to the ups and downs of an insecure profession. “You must
have a stable personality and keep your equilibrium,” she advises anyone
fancying having a crack at becoming a dancer in Cairo.
I asked her if she would come back to England when she stops dancing. She answered
“I may stop dancing and still not come back to England. But there are
things I miss about being home. I miss being able to go down to the local shop
to buy a bottle of wine that’s drinkable.” Casting my mind back
to yasmina the beautiful dancer I had the privilege to see at the Meridien Hotel
wedding, I’m glad Francesca has what it takes to survive life in cairo
without her English home comforts.