Tanoura folk dance show amazes audience in historic Cairo

During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, many Egyptians go out with family or friends in the evening for a good time after fasting from dawn to sunset. A show featuring Egyptian folk dance Tanoura is surely among their destinations.

On Wednesday night, an open-air Tanoura dance staged in historic downtown Cairo carried local and foreign audiences away, as dancers' spinning off their skirt-like colorful outfits turned the stage into a spectacular of ever-changing kaleidoscopes.

The show started with a Sufi music performance with minstrel chanting, then a solo Tanoura dancer joined the stage and kept whirling for almost 20 minutes nonstop.

"The performance is breathtaking and the atmosphere is very joyful. It is my first time to attend this show but surely will not be the last," said Marwa Siam, one of the audience.

"It makes it a special Ramadan night for me. And it is also great to preserve such a kind of elegant traditional art," she told Xinhua.

Egpyt's Tanoura dance carries the meaning of the Sufi tradition of whirling meditation when a dervish spins his body in repetitive circles. The word Tanoura, which means skirt in Arabic, refers to the detachable colorful skirt-like piece worn by the dancer.

"It is a Sufi, spiritual dance and a kind of art that comes from the heart," said Mostafa Moftah, who performed the solo dance. "A Tanoura dancer must be filled with purity and love to be able to perform well and touch the audience," said the artist.

As the most impressive part of the show, three men danced to the traditional Upper Egyptian music for a long while, spinning around with arms in the air, making fascinating circles of mixed colors.

The show was held at an arts center located inside historic five-century-old Wikalat Al-Ghuri, a caravansary complex built by Mamluk Sultan Qansuh Al-Ghuri, and under deem but changing stage lighting, which added magnificence to the show.

"The dervish dance is unbelievable. It is amazing how the artist dances and whirls for 50 minutes or an hour without getting dizzy," said Desiree Boyneburg, an Austrian tourist, adding the vibe was "really festive and lively."

"What impressed me the most was the choreography of the dancers. And the music was really, wow, very nice," Jens Aerts, a Belgian tourist, told Xinhua.

The show was performed by the Al-Tannoura Egyptian Heritage Dance Troupe operating under the Cultural Development Fund (CDF) of the Ministry of Culture, which also runs the arts center.

Hany Aboul-Hassan, head of the CDF, who attended the show, said that the cultural fund is concerned with reviving Egyptian heritage, through both restoring historic buildings and presenting traditional folk art.

"The idea behind the CDF's restoration of historic buildings, like Al-Ghuri's Complex, is not only to rescue the building but also to turn it into a popular and frequently visited arts center," Aboul-Hassan added.

"Ramadan for the Ministry of Culture and the CDF is a month full of various cultural and artistic activities, including Tanoura dance, whose body language and colors captivate people of all nationalities," he told Xinhua.