Rania Khallaf sways to esoteric rhythms It is 8.30pm at the door to Makan, and there is a group of men and women in traditional galabiyas sipping tea and smoking outside. I don't know this yet, but the leader of the zar band is that woman smoking a cigarette by herself on a wooden seat on the pavement: Madiha Abul- Ela, 56, who looks markedly younger than her years. For decades now, the zar has been seen as a backward form of psychological healing, in which music, notably drums, helps drive out the djinn from the bodies of the patients. The zar mistress, known as a kodia, is seen as an ignorant person who pretends to dabble in magic to further mercenary ends. Yet Abul-Ela -- with a Sudanese mother who was herself a kodia and an Upper Egyptian father -- is a proudly self-avowed artist. "I'm a member of the Mazaher group," she says, "which has built a worldwide reputation. But I also work by individual request in popular neighbourhoods like Bab Al-She'riya, Al-Hussein and Bulaq." The mother of three children, by now also a grandmother, Abul-Ela says she has never been ashamed of her career. "They are all well- educated," she says. "I couldn't have afforded it had I not worked as a zar performer." Still, they took different life courses: "It's a gift, you can't force somebody to learn it." The songs and performance style have not changed for 50 years, Abul-Ela -- vocalist and Mazaher player as well as kodia -- insists. Rather, she is concerned about the diminishing popularity of the ritual: "Our band is the only one left in Cairo. Sadly there is no younger generation eager to preserve the tradition." Nor will it help that, Mazaher and Makan notwithstanding, the majority of Egyptians still think ill of zar. "Europeans really appreciate what we do, though they don't always understand it. It's a tradition with roots, to be respected." Chatting with other band members, the male lead, Hassan (aka El-Soghaiyar) Mersal, is equally self-possessed. Born in Ismailia to Sudanese parents, El-Soghaiyar too inherited this trade. "As a child I'd listen to my father playing the tanbura " he says, referring to the Suez Canal string instrument's larger cousin, used exclusively for zar until the 1990s -- "and I loved it so much I followed him everywhere so long as he took it with him. In a few years I'd learned all there was to learn about it." For El-Soghaiyar, Mazaher is a family in more ways than one: "I was raised with Madiha and that was how we first performed together. The years have strengthened our ties." None of El-Soghaiyar's children wanted to become a zar performer, something to which he is resigned. But already it is 9pm and people are shuffling into Makan; in less than ten minutes it will be so full there will be no space to stand. A necessary exorcism Makan (A Place) -- the independent performance venue on 1 Saad Zaghloul Street, also the headquarters of the Egyptian Centre for Culture and Arts (ECCA) -- offers the opportunity to enjoy authentic Egyptian folk music. Ahmed El-Maghrabi, the Italian language professor who founded it, says that his aim is as much to document and preserve, as to show popular art on the verge of extinction. A cultural attaché in Paris for four years, in 2002 El-Maghrabi founded ECCA to "preserve collective memory"; he opted for the independent designation to avoid red tape. Travelling across the country with a team of dedicated researchers, he made audio-visual records of a wide range of forms from the mawwal (peasant ballad) to religious chanting and zar, originally an exorcism ritual. But since he feels that "exoticisation, or the fate of collecting dust in academic archives" would be a form of extinction, the centre works to integrate folk music back into the daily life of Egyptians. On Tuesday and Wednesday nights Makan therefore offers a regular, largely participatory show. "I was looking for a long time for a space where a performance could be held without the traditional barrier separating the musicians from the audience -- in vain. Then I ran across an old print press," he recalls, "by complete coincidence, and it had been closed for 35 years. I took a long time to convince the owners of my idea but finally I could start renovating. It was dirty and dilapidated, and even now it preserves that industrial feel about it." In less than a year the space has cultivated a loyal audience of many backgrounds, both Egyptians, expatriates and visitors. "My aim is to bring Egyptians and foreigners together through music, and thereby to bridge the gap separating daily life from the popular arts, which are still looked down upon as cheap and inferior, even though names like Yassin El-Tohamy and the Mazaher band have emerged." No microphones are used, he went on to explain, and Western-Egyptian workshops and seminars with poets, dancers, storytellers and technicians -- among other means -- are used to bringing the folk arts on to a respectable contemporary ground, integrating zar with rock, for example. Makan, El-Maghrabi boasts, has established an effective international network and will continue "to build on its strategies to promote creative intercultural dialogue" with a special focus on the Mediterranean. Makan made three compilations, widely distributed and even pirated in Komombu, Upper Egypt. But perhaps the most famous outcome of its work is the Egyptian Mozart CD, phenomenally popular since its release.
