The tormented life of an accomplished ballerina who falls out of practice and loses her figure as she tries to overcome the evil of “the black swan” rival who is trying almost successfully to take away her loving prince — this Odette versus Odile story was the theme of a widely watched Ramadan soap opera in Egypt entitled For the Highest Price starring ballerina-turned-actress Nelly Karim. Over the 30 nights of Ramadan viewers had the chance to glimpse the life of a ballerina, something that no one who has not trained in ballet can have a notion of apart perhaps from when a tired dancer is seen leaning exhausted on the training bar. “It is only a very small glimpse of the difficulties that a ballerina has to face,” says Sherine Abdel-Ghani, a former ballerina at the Cairo Opera Ballet who has now become a full-time instructor for professional and amateur dancers. In the Ramadan soap opera, Abdel-Ghani argued, viewers got to see the kind of “passion for dancing that keeps a ballerina alive even if she is in pain. But they did not get to see the long and hard path a ballerina has to take before she puts on her tutu and slippers to perform as part of the corps de ballet or the role of prima ballerina” dancing in Tchaikovsky's famous ballet Swan Lake. Abdel-Ghani performing Carmen. (photo: Sherif Sonbol) For Abdel-Ghani, this path of dedicated hard work started at the age of seven, when she developed “an incredible passion for ballet by watching ‘The Art of Ballet' every week on channel 2 of Egyptian TV.” This was in the early 1980s when few middle-class parents like Abdel-Ghani's would have allowed their daughter to embark on a dancing career. But Abdel-Ghani's parents, both civil servants who lived in downtown Cairo, were prepared to challenge a society that was apprehensive about the choice of a little girl in facing the exceptionally long days of school and then tough dance training at the Ballet Academy. Abdel-Ghani recalls that when she joined the academy her class had 24 girls in it, only a few of whom graduated. “It was really hard work, and at times it was very painful — the ballet training I mean, and the teachers were uncompromising about the slightest mistake made by any of the dancers,” she said. “But I knew that this was the only place to be if I wanted to be like the ballerinas who had performed Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker and Adam's Giselle on the TV programme I adored,” she added. Every time she thought about quitting, Abdel-Ghani remembered the disappointed faces of the girls who had failed the entrance exam of the academy simply because they did not have the right physique. Upon her graduation, Abdel-Ghani joined the Cairo Opera Ballet and toured the world performing famous classics as well as Osiris and Isis, a new Egyptian work, and Al-Leila Al-Kabira (The Night of the Saint) adapted by Abdel-Ghani's mentor Abdel-Moneim Kamel from a traditional Egyptian work. Abdel-Ghani is convinced that had she not married Khaled Al-Shawehi, a musician in the Cairo Opera Orchestra, at the age of 22 her path would have taken a sad turn. “A ballerina's work is really hard, and it takes a lot of energy — not just physical, but also emotional. If a ballerina is forced to succumb to the rule of male chauvinism she will simply be unable to perform,” Abdel-Ghani said. Her own marriage, on the other hand, was ideal for her to develop her career, thanks to her supportive husband. However, the decline in morale of the lead character Gamila in For the Highest Price as she loses her relationship with her husband can be “almost typical”, according to Abdel-Ghani, for many dancers. “It might sound like a cliché, but a ballerina's body and soul are intertwined. They cannot act independently of one another. Even when ballerinas get older and stop dancing professionally, they find solace in training the younger generations. But they crack when they are forced to be away from the stage or the training studio,” she explained. Abdel-Ghani herself has been forced into a separation from the stage twice, first when she had her first daughter Farida, herself now an 11-year-old ballerina in the making, and second when she had her now seven-year-old twins Asser and Laila, the latter also being trained to be a ballerina. “The making of a ballerina is quite different now from what it was when I was growing up. I have enrolled my daughters in French convent schools to make sure they get a good education and the required discipline, and I am sending them to the training studio every day,” she said. She shows no leniency when it comes to the training routines either of her own daughters or of the ballet students she instructs. “There is no room for leniency if we are talking about the making of a professional ballerina,” Abdel-Ghani said. Sometimes parents are “shocked” by the strict discipline, she said, but as the girls make progress and go from basic moves to a more advanced level they understand that “having your daughter trained as a ballerina is much more complicated than having her picture taken in a tutu.” For her amateur class, which meets twice a week in order to help its members keep fit, Abdel-Ghani allows more clemency. Today, she is no longer performing, but she rejoices in the training of young girls who she hopes will one day perform at the Cairo Opera House or even, as Abdel-Ghani has herself done, at the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow or the Paris Opera Ballet.
