http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/966/ee2.htm
1 - 7 October 2009
Issue No. 966
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
The mystic circle in motion
Mawlawya's religious chanting kept Rania Khallaf::rkhallaf dizzy for days. Here
she describes the show
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photos: Walid Montasser
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Sitting through the Mawlawya show for an hour and half was not an easy
assignment. To begin with, it started half past nine on a Ramadan night. Then
the founder of the company and its sole chanter, Amer El-Touni, commenced by
hailing the Prophet Mohamed and God. He began with poems of Ibn El-Fared and
then continued with other poets.
As he sang, four dancers in white costumes wove a circle around him. At first
they stood calmly with their right hands touching their hearts. A few minutes
later they started to move and revolve from left to right. And they never
stopped for the duration of the show.
El-Touni's strong, spiritual voice coupled with the live Sufi music brought on
an entirely surreal mood. It sent one's soul soaring to the sky, a sky that was
open and blue.
The show took place in the Wekalet Al-Ghouri, an old and evocative venue with
brown Arabesque windows; the ambiance was more than perfect. It was equally
amazing to watch the dancers who kept on moving in small circles without a
minute to rest. It certainly left me dazzled. How were they able to do it?
Some of the dancers joined the company when it was formed in 1994, while others
are still training in private studios. Those who have the skill to dance in the
tanoura (whirling dervishes) are luckier -- the technique is very similar. From
time to time the company publishes announcements welcoming new dancers and
offering training for those who have no knowledge but want to learn Sufi
dancing.
Mawlawya was established in 1994 as a religious chanting and dance company.
El-Touni studied the old ways of religious and Sufi chanting from different
eras. Mawlawya as an art was first established by Galaleddin Al-Rumi some 800
years ago, and it appears to have come to Egypt with the Ottoman conquest in
1517. "The tradition survived and flourished in several parts in Egypt until
1952, when the new principle of socialism set in place by the 1952 Revolution
outlawed it, just as it had been outlawed even in Turkey itself. However, the
mawlawya tradition has recently been born again in Turkey although merely for
touristic purposes.
The lyrics of the songs are derived from famous Sufi poems by Ibn El-Fared and
El-Hallag, Ibn Arabi and others. The technique is almost the same, and entails,
so to speak, moving around with a few gestures and movements of the arms and
twists of the head. "It is basically a mood of meditation, an attempt to
communicate with God," El-Touni says. "It was invented by Al-Rumi as a way of
mourning the sudden death of his master. Therefore it is known as a sad
ritual."
There is a kind of philosophy in the idea of revolving, he continues; the
planets revolve around the sun; the Tawaf or moving around the Holy Shrine
during hajj also goes from left to right, and the blood circle also goes from
left to right and it only goes from right to left when the heart stops beating.
"But, for me it is a matter of love; loving God, a carnival mood. I teach the
company how to love each other; how to love the dance itself; how to express
their feelings and to communicate with God while dancing," El-Touni adds.
El-Touni was born in 1966 and is a graduate of the Education College and worked
as an Arabic language teacher in a secondary school. Five years later he left
his job and travelled to Greece, where he stayed for six years and embarked on
an entirely new career as a munshid [religious chanter] with some Sufi music
bands there. The Mawlawya also run some workshops with Sufi musicians from
Cuba, Spain and the United States.
So far, Mawlawya has danced on hundreds of nights in many places in Egypt,
Greece, Cyprus and France and in the US, and has received a warm acclaim
wherever it has appeared for its unique and sincere performance. In Egypt, the
company performs in several governorates, most notably in Malawi, a small town
in Minya governorate, where about two million Sufis from the surrounding
villages have attended its recent shows.
The company will soon embark on an entirely new experience when they present
for the first time a play called The Mountain, an adaptation of a novel by the
Algerian author Al-Taher Bin Galloun entitled Laylet Al-Qadr. This will be
presented within the framework of the Cairo International Experimental Theatre
Festival, due to take place next month. El-Touni, who studies his masters, says
it is apparently involved in the theme intertextuality in theatre, with a
special focus on Russian drama and the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin. For him
mawlawya is "some kind of theatrical art, which needs to be developed and is
open to mix with other kinds of music like world music."
El-Touni dreams of a tekeya, the old Ottoman word for the premises of such
dance companies, a place where a good reciter of the Quran teaches his
students. "Such a place should have productions from other similar Sufi
companies from around the world, as well as a school to teach the Quran to
young people, and it should provide loans for assisting the poor and the
elderly as a way of teaching people how to cooperate and love each other."
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