when he was in Moscow i remember he said that he played in more than 15 movies

Maybe Hossam Ramzy would know?

Heike, UK

www.hossamramzy.com

P.S. I'd love to spend more hours on tribe.....there just aren't enough in the day!

Thanks for sharing!

Hi Shira! This is awesome - thanks! (and thanks for ALL that you do at your site! It's astounding!!)

I just got the soundtrack LP to "Khally Balak Men Zouzou" on eBay, and will be playing it soon on Radio Bastet. There of course is no indication on the LP of who did the music in this film, and I can't seem to find it anywhere (in fact, it took me a Google search to realize that "Khally Balak Men Zouzou" is the name of a movie; I was ready to list the artist as "Khally Balak"! Good grief.). Would you happen to know? I may have to list it as yet another "uncredited artists" album...
Thanks again for all your hard work!

Sausan, yeah, it's pretty frustrating when we're given misinformation, isn't it? Sigh. Oh well. The belief that Mo Geddawi appears in this movie seems to be widely held. I've seen Geddawi in person lots of times (including 20 years ago when he looked a bit younger than he does today). There is a guy in the movie that, if you use your imagination, you could guess MIGHT look like a younger version of the Geddawi we know today. So I can see why some people think so. But now we can put that rumor to rest, thanks to Reda himself coming out and saying it.

I'm hoping I'll have an opportunity to interview Reda for my web site while he's in town this week, but I'm not sure whether it'll happen or not.

I imagine there were a couple of things that influenced what you noticed.

One is that Reda was never formally trained in the "American musical theater" style of dance, nor did he ever appear in a corps of dancers that had been choreographed and directed by a professional in that area. The parts of "Karnak" that are in this style of dance, such as the train station scene and the stage building scene, are based on what he gleaned by watching movie musicals over and over (and over and over). This had two impacts on the final product in Karnak - 1) He may have missed some nuances without a teacher at his side to articulate the finer points of technique and correct his form, and 2) It's similar to one of us trying to learn how to do Oriental dance like an Egyptian by studying footage over and over of Fifi Abdo, Soheir Zaki, Samia Gamal, or other great Egyptian dancers - we can learn a lot by doing so, but we can also just as easily miss nuances.

Another issue is that the only formal dance training Reda had early in his career came from his time in the Argentinian folk ensemble. He joined it sometime after 1952 (I'm not sure exactly when), and left it in 1955. Imagine an athletic gymnast taking only a couple of years of focused dance instruction, not in ballet, but in a folkloric dance form that uses classical training as its foundation. Because of his athleticism and his passion, he certainly would have learned a lot in a short time, but I can see how after just a couple of years of spending some time in classical technique and the rest in Argentinian-specific technique plus rehearsing choreos he might have some gaps as compared to someone who studied only classical technique for a comparable time. One impact of this is that the pedagogy he would have been exposed to wouldn't have been entirely classical. There would have been Argentinian-specific material in there.

Reda told me that when he started Reda Troupe, he needed to collect and classify a formal movement vocabulary to use as the foundation for his troupe. He focused on Egyptian-specific moves for this - the hagallah shimmy, the hip lifts and drops, the Saidi hops, etc. Although he incorporated some ballet moves (Arabesque, for example), it was never his intent to have Reda Troupe's format be rooted primarily in ballet. He saw ballet as offering some techniques for theatrical presentation, some useful dance technique such as principles of arm carriage, and some helpful concepts for pedagogy that could be applied to the Egyptian movement vocabulary. There was no pre-existing pedagogy for teaching people how to do Egyptian folkloric dance moves, so he created one. He did bring ballet instructors in to bring theatrical presentation and polish to Reda Troupe, but his concept remained that of a folkloric foundation. In contrast, Kawmiyya, which came later, chose a direction much more oriented to Russian ballet, with only minimal emphasis on the folk moves foundation.

What do you think, based on the perspective you were applying to watching it?