Osama Kamal visits a place where tradition is alive and well Makan is a place like no other. Its singers are a class of their own. Some are folk singers who travel the length and width of the country; some are artists who have dedicated their lives to old and distant, some say dying, forms of art. Makan is an art venue with the exotic aroma of things past. Its walls are of no particular colour, pale and crumbling. The lighting is simple to the point of primitive. But there is magic in the air, and melodies that you don't hear so often these days. The performance hall has shelves everywhere, stacked with books, periodicals and old magazines, some in Arabic and some in English. In one corner I see a radio set from the early 20th century, silent and dusty, and not far from it there is an old clock with a pendulum, grandfather style; all the comforting props of a distant past. Seats are arranged in a semi-circle for the audience, a signal that this is not a stage, but rather a place where artists and audience are allowed to mingle. There is less of a concert and more of a party mood; intimacy is waiting to happen. I am in Makan (the name is Arabic for "Place"), an art venue situated in Mounira, close to the Saad Zaghloul metro station. Its founder, Ahmed El-Maghrabi, says that folklore needs to be understood in all its artistic and human aspects. It needs to be preserved so we may draw upon it for inspiration. Tuesday nights at Makan are set aside for Nas-Makan (People-Place). On Tuesday, you can hear singers who do not appear much on television or in Cairene nightspots. Some come from small towns in the Delta. Some come from Sudan. Some sing Egyptian gypsy songs, known as ghagari. Others perform the zar, the dance and song routines many people associate with exorcism. Some of the musical instruments I see here come straight from countryside festivals. The melancholic tunes of flute-like instruments such as the kawala and arghul are often accompanied by the strumming sound of the tanbura, which sounds like a harp, while a full range of drums and tambourines keep the beat. There is a Sufi quality to the music, and you can often sense the enthusiasm bounce from audience to performers and back in a progressive catharsis that is sometimes encountered at religious ceremonies. I see Western instruments in use, but the artists assure me that the songs are performed in their original form. New instruments, when they are incorporated into the range, add to the power of the performance without compromising its traditional feel. Sayed Rekabi tells me that he sings only Jaafari music. He believes that Jaafari singing has to be performed in its original form, and views with suspicion those who try to improvise on that conventional form of singing. His singing repertoire includes Betnadini (She Calls Me), Agibni (I Like Her), and Neanaa Al-Genena (Garden Mint Leaves). When Mohamed Mounir recorded the latter song five years after Rekabi's first recording, it became a popular hit. Neanaa Al-Genena, a major song in the Jaafari tradition, was perhaps written about 1911 and became a fixture in southern Egyptian weddings. Its lyrics vary from one occasion to another, with the singers making additions and omissions as they please. Rekabi says that the media gives too little coverage to folk art and artists. He has travelled abroad, however, having performed in Germany and Italy, in France and Morocco, and having been thrilled by the reaction of the audience. "It would be nice to get the same reaction in one's own country," he tells Al-Ahram Weekly. Interestingly most of the members of the audience surrounding us are foreign, a mix of European nationalities. Asia Madani is a Sudanese singer who has lived in Egypt for the past 10 years. She has performed at the Opera House, Beit Al-Harrawi, Wekalet Al-Ghouri, and the Mohamed Ali Palace. She took part in the Aswan Symposium and sang with musicians Fathi Salama, Ghassan El-Youssef and Dina Abdel-Hamid. Madani has her own band and has released an album called Moltaqa Al-Nil (Nile Forum). Sayed Imam, the well-known Egyptian mawwal (countryside ballad) singer, says that the art of the mawwal is on the verge of extinction. "The hope now is to create a natural protectorate, if you may, for this type of singing," he says. According to Imam, mawwal originated in the Delta and spread from there to other parts of the country. "There is nothing wrong in fusing music styles from different countries and cultures," he tells the Weekly. But to do so, one has to know a lot about the points of similarity and difference among various music forms. To illustrate his point, Imam cites the attempt by Ahmed El-Maghrabi to fuse operatic and folk singing. Imam himself has sung mawwal with a French band playing rai music. Imam has performed in Germany, Italy, Morocco, Algeria and Pakistan. Umm Sameh makes a brief appearance on Nas-Makan's Tuesday nights. But on Wednesday she and her band Mazaher take the floor at Makan all night. Mazaher is a band specialising in zar, and is particularly popular among Cairo's expatriate community. According to Umm Sameh, zar is originally a Sudanese-Abyssinian art from and is unrelated to exorcism. " Zar offers people a chance to relax by letting out their pent-up emotions." When Umm Sameh was a child, she would skip school to watch her mother perform zar songs. She learnt her entire repertoire as a child without ever obtaining formal education: zar has been her life and profession for the past 50 years. This could explain why she is now so attached to Makan, the place where tradition lives. Her connection with zar is as strong as her connection with Makan, or, to be more exact, the place that offers a venue for her and her art. Makan is not only a place, but a state of mind shared by the lovers of arts that invoke distant images, images which have almost escaped Egyptian memory amid the noise and the crowding that surround us in all directions, amid the absence and decay of our identity and national culture, at a time when we are pulled apart by those who want to have stronger links with the Arab Peninsula and those who want us to tie our fate to distant shores, to shores that are just as alien to us as folk art has become to current generations.
