Island Profile: Prima ballerina, cultural diplomat and daughter of Egypt
Even if Magda Saleh, Egypt’s first prima ballerina in her 20s and founding director of the Cairo Opera House and National Cultural Center in her 40s, had not placed a large bowl of sweet, salty roasted nuts in front of me, I would not have moved from her living room sofa overlooking Congdons Creek.
It wasn’t the view, which was magnificent. She was relating the story of her life, with bureaucratic intrigue, world political movements and revolution and war as a backdrop. Her husband, Jack Josephson, an Egyptologist and the man who brought her to Shelter Island, was there to add context and avail himself of the peanuts.
Magda told part of her story in an interview on March 13 in the New York Times Magazine and in a 2017 documentary called “A Footnote in Ballet History.” She will appear at the Shelter Island Library Saturday, September 15 at 2 p.m. for a screening and Q&A.
Magda’s mother was Scottish and her Egyptian father was a well-known scholar and educator. The only girl in a large family, Magda grew up and was and educated in Cairo in the 1950s.
Professional dancers in Egypt at the time were called “Oriental” — known also as belly dancers — and their art was considered to be close to prostitution. It was acceptable for little girls to study ballet as part of a well-rounded education, but never with a view to dancing professionally.
When Magda’s father realized she was determined to be a professional ballet dancer, he warned her that it would subject the family to a grave social risk.
Egypt’s first minister of culture, Sarwat Okasha, was a hero to Magda then and now. Okasha had been a leader of the Egyptian Revolution and during the years Magda was trained as a ballerina, he was responsible for the establishment of an Egyptian ballet program.
Cairo’s theatrical and musical life was centered on a grand opera house. “People dressed up for the performances held there and became part of the spectacle. We were no strangers to performance,” Magda said. “Cairo was called Paris on the Nile.”
When the Bolshoi performed at the Cairo Opera House, Magda was there and was “just blown away by the virtuosity,” she said. “The ballet master was brought to our ballet class to watch and he called me over and said ‘I have news for you. You have talent, and next year a teacher will be coming from the Bolshoi and I advise you to audition.’”
Magda was invited to enroll in the program and became one of five Egyptian girls chosen to study in Russia, returning to become Egypt’s first prima ballerina, dancing leading roles. Her father attended her performances at the Cairo Opera House and enjoyed being congratulated, telling everyone, “I am Magda’s father.”
In addition to the social risks of a daughter who danced professionally, Magda’s parents worried about the physical stresses of ballet on her young body, a concern that proved prescient. During what would be the last year of Magda’s career as a performer, the Cairo company put on “Don Quixote,” and the short season required her to dance for 13 consecutive performances. “I don’t think any ballerina has done that,” she said. “When I went back to regular training, my leg wouldn’t bend. It just locked.”
She and her partner were scheduled to appear as guest artists with the Bolshoi in Russia and she was determined not to miss the opportunity. In the middle of this catastrophe, Magda heard that the Opera House was on fire. As she stood watching flames destroy the building, she knew any hope of continuing her career in Cairo went with it.
“The Russians invited me to the Black Sea to take the baths, and I made it through that season as guest artist,” she said. “But by the end of the last performance I knew I was done.”
Magda’s most radical act as a woman in Egypt in the late 1960s was a thing she did not do: get married. In a culture where fathers and husbands controlled womens’ lives, she had seen two of her colleagues marry at the insistence of their families and then quit ballet when the demands of family life became too great.
“I wasn’t interested,” she said.
At the time, any unmarried girl was considered risky lest she bring shame on her family, let alone a girl who was a professional dancer. But Magda’s parents supported her wish to remain single.
When suitors began to come around, her father had to entertain them. “At first he’d say, ‘She’s too young.’ And later when he couldn’t get away with that he’d say ‘She’s too busy,’” Magda said.
“That was exceptional. As conflicted as my parents were, they did everything to further my career.”
She left Egypt to study at UCLA when her performing career was over in spite of the fact that Egypt was still firmly in the sphere of Soviet political influence and the U.S. was seen as an enemy. She stayed in the States to complete a PhD at New York University before returning to Egypt in 1983. Magda remembers that period spent studying in the U.S. as “formative and transformative years.”
She became a professor and dean at the Higher Institute of Ballet in Cairo and when Egyptian President Mubarak accepted a $50 million grant from the Japanese government to build a new opera house and cultural center, Magda was asked to become founding director of the new center.
She planned the inaugural ceremonies, lobbied foreign diplomats for support from the international business community, took ambassadors for tours of the site where the center was being built and generated a constant buzz of favorable press.
Within months, she was sacked.
Magda went overnight from being talked up as a candidate for the next cultural minister of Egypt to being out of a job and unwelcome in her own country. “The new minister who invited and subsequently got rid of me may have felt threatened,” Magda said. “It ended very suddenly and I was an exile. I felt I had lost my country and my job.”
Magda had met Jack Josephson in 1978, at the Brooklyn Museum when she and her mother came to the museum looking for research materials to support Magda’s NYU dissertation. At the time Jack was married with children.
But 13 years later, Magda was back in the United States and looking for a job. She called Jack, then six years a widower, and they married in 1993.
“When we were seeing one another we were discreet,” Magda said. “When I finally decided, yes, I’ll get married, the news broke and it went like wildfire that ‘Jack Josephson has gone and married this Egyptian belly dancer.’ I’m afraid I was a bit of a disappointment. I couldn’t even offer them a shimmy.”
“When I married Jack, a whole new world opened up,” Magda said. She decided to leave dance history behind and turn her considerable skills to marriage and Egyptology, serving as an editor for Jack’s writing, which is centered on the art history of early Egypt, particularly sculpture.
Not long after Magda and Jack decided to marry, she began coming to Shelter Island on weekends. Now, 25 years later, they spend as much of their time in the house on Congdons Creek as possible, even though it means seeing friends in the city much less often.
“Peace. It changes you,” Magda said. “Here you can hear the blood tingle in your ears. It cleanses you.”
Three times Jack and Magda have led a group of friends from Shelter Island to Egypt. “We had been blathering about how wonderful Egypt was and we realized that we have a very special privilege in Egypt,” Jack said. “People recognize Magda on the street. I was referred to all around Egypt as ‘Magda’s husband.’”
She continues to serve her country as a cultural diplomat, bringing together exciting Egyptian artists and American audiences. She even brought Egyptian pianist Mohamed Shams to perform for the Shelter Island Friends of Music after arranging for his sold-out Carnegie Hall debut at Weill Recital Hall a couple of years ago.
Magda understands better than most people the difficult position of the performer caught between power and art. “So much talent in Egypt and we waste it,” she said. “We are proxies for the powers that are raging above us and we get to be shuffled around.”
Lightning Round — Magda Saleh
What do you always have with you? Photographs of my parents.
Favorite place on Shelter Island? Here. We don’t leave.
Favorite place not on Shelter Island? I have two, the Pyramid of Djoser, a step pyramid in the Saqqara necropolis and Seti at Abydos.
What exasperates you? Human obduracy. I saw it in Egypt over the decades … and in the U.S. now. What are we doing and why are we so bent on destroying ourselves?
Favorite book? ’The Lord of the Rings.’ I am fascinated by Tolkien, his imagination, his language and the fascinating world he wove out of whole cloth.
Favorite food? Right now, these honey peanuts. I love eating. I am omnivorous.
Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? Sarwat Okasha. A great son of Egypt.
Most respected elected official? President Obama and his wife Michelle. A remarkable couple.
