Amal Choucri Catta goes modern Clara and the Quicksand, Egyptian Modern Dance Company, director Walid Aouni , Cairo Opera House Main Hall, 27 September Dark clouds hurry across velvet skies, while a distant choir softly chants Vesper melodies and stars sink onto a lower horizon shedding ephemeral light into remote spaces. A silhouette is dimly profiled: she advances, hesitantly, daintily raising her crimson dress while treading carefully in the sand, in search of the wondrous love she knew in bygone days. Her impeccable white-laced collar enhances the dark sheen of her jet-black hair and the pallor of her face. Her features are gentle, her demeanour meek and she seems quite unconscious of the quicksand pulling mercilessly at her stockinged feet. Suddenly, concealed among the sand dunes, she discovers the piano. Recalling long gone nights of joy and past days of anguish, she starts to play... So began, last week, Walid Aouni's most recent spectacle, titled Clara and the Quicksand, based on Robert Schumann's music and his wife Clara's life, with dancing improvisations by members of the Cairo Opera's Modern Dance Company. "This time," Aouni said prior to the performance, "I'm concentrating solely on dancing to piano music. I called this show Clara and the moving sands because it is dedicated to Schumann's music, played by his wife Clara, which balances a network of relations linking movement, melody and a love that led to sorrow, suffering, madness and death." Acclaimed pianist Marcelle Matta was a very convincing Clara, while Walid Aouni danced the part of Schumann. Ayman Abdel-Fattah had the part of Clara's father Friedrich Wieck, and Heba Fayed that of the young Clara. The show consisted of 14 members of the company dancing to around a dozen compositions by Schumann. Walid Aouni had covered the entire stage with a specially prepared sponge padding symbolising quicksand, on which the performers danced. Moving from one episode of the composer's life to the next, the music was gentle and soft as it evoked Florestan, turning intrepid and powerful when it came to Eusebius. And lurking behind those two names was the composer himself: Robert Alexander Schumann. Born in 1810 in Zwickau, the celebrated German musician was also pianist, conductor and critic. His father and mother had expected him to study law, sending him to Leipzig and Heidelberg universities, though his main interests were music and romantic literature, particularly the novels of Jean-Paul Richter, which Schumann had discovered in 1826. A romantic teenager, Schumann had identified himself with the author in his early compositions. Walid Aouni perfectly interpreted the talented young musician composing melodies into the air while humming tunes posterity was never to forget. Aged 16, Schumann became the pupil of Friedrich Wieck, a renowned music teacher, with pupils such as Buelow, and his own daughter, Clara. A tyrannical father, Wieck enforced his will upon his daughter when he discovered her feelings for the young Schumann, whom she had met in 1828 and who, around 1835, had fallen hopelessly in love with her, composing passionate sonatas for Clara, even though her father was strongly opposed to their union. That was when Ayman Abdel-Fattah came on stage, dramatically separating the young Heba Fayed's Clara from Aouni's Schumann, while Matta reminisced on her piano and the corps de ballet performed movements of hopeful dreams in a blissfully illuminated desert. Having permanently injured his hand by a device he had invented to keep the fourth finger immobile while practicing on the piano, Schumann turned to composing and writing. Contributing musical criticism to German papers and, depressed by the musical situation in Germany, he founded Davidsbund, an imaginary society of artists, in 1834, to fight artistic Philistines on the pages of his musical magazine Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik, which he edited for 10 years. Schumann gave himself a dual personality in his writings and compositions: Florestan for his impetuous, passionate self, and Eusebius for the contemplative, meditative side of it. In 1840 Clara and Schumann wed. Torn between obedient love for her father and "that other sort of love" for Schumann, Clara concentrated henceforth on her husband, on his music and their children. She had turned to composition, trying to pour into melodies her intimate wishes and desires. As the years went by, she sank into the quicksand destiny had prepared for her, until her husband's premature death, when she suddenly realised she had to go on alone. That was when Matta left the piano, going on a brief, eerie trip through the dimly lit stage, trying to avoid the bodies lying on the ground, in search of some feeling she had lost a long time ago. Her search was fruitless and she returned to the piano to reminisce. Clara's marriage to Schumann saw an outpouring of songs, symphonies, chamber music and choral works in which her husband excelled. On returning from a tour of Russia in 1844, Schumann suffered a severe bout of depression. They moved to Dresden and on to Duesseldorf, when in 1853 Schumann met the 20-year-old Johannes Brahms, in whom he recognised a great musical talent. That same year, Schumann was seized again by attacks of depression. His mental health declined rapidly and on 6 February 1854 he left his home and threw himself into the Rhine, only to be rescued by some fishermen. Taken to a private asylum in Bonn, Schumann never regained his mental health. Though he had moments of painful lucidity, he died two years later, in 1856, aged 46, leaving Clara with seven children. On stage, as Clara plays one of his most beautiful melodies, Traeumerei, her father's ghost seems to be looming in front of her, banging on the scales as if Judgement Day had come. After Schumann's death, Clara visited England several times. She lived in Berlin and later in Frankfurt, where she was appointed head of the piano faculty at the Conservatoire. She championed Brahms in his youth and remained his life-long friend. Having spent the major part of her widowed life promoting Schumann's music, she gave her last public performance in 1891 and died in Frankfurt in 1896, aged 77. On stage, the performers expressed in movement, choreographed or improvised, different sequences of Clara and Schumann's life: their love, their anguish, their joy and their suffering. Schumann came across as a passionate lover, lingering over Clara at the piano, wooing her, dreaming of her while silently calling her name. But as dark clouds were gathering in grey skies and the sands turned dusky and mournful, he knew his earthly end had come; and while Clara hurried out to him, gathering him in her arms as all movement stopped and the choir chanted a sorrowful melody, they both knew henceforth Clara would walk alone, dreaming her unfulfilled dreams while caring for her seven children. Decidedly, quicksand would never be leaving her. Though quite remarkable, Aouni's Clara was often too symbolic to be readily understood by each member of an audience that had, nevertheless, come in large numbers to applaud the show, even though many of them did not even know who Clara was.
