Magda Saleh was a Bolshoi-trained Egyptian ballerina and a star of the Cairo Ballet who played a major role in introducing ballet to wider audiences in her country.
She then served as director of the company’s ballet school and of a new opera house. She recently died on June 11 in Cairo at the age of 79.
Ms. Saleh, who had been living on Shelter Island, N.Y., moved back to Cairo in March, shortly after the death of her husband, Jack Josephson, to be with family.
Born to an Egyptian father, Ahmed Abdel-Ghaffar Saleh, a renowned academician and a trailblazer in agricultural education in Egypt, and a Scottish mother, Magda was the sole girl among her three siblings.
Her fascination with ballet blossomed at a tender age, leading her to enroll in the ballet section of the Alexandria Conservatory, overseen by a British artist from the Royal Academy of Dance, when her family relocated to Mediterranean city.
Egypt, like the United States, didn’t have a dependable national-scale ballet company until the 1950s, despite having a great opera building in Cairo.
Americans, on the contrary, had attended ballet performances; prominent European dance companies had performed in the United States since the nineteenth century. Ballet performances in Egypt were primarily limited to private dance schools, generally conducted by British teachers, with pupils from upper-middle-class families like Ms. Saleh’s.
Ms. Saleh trained with these teachers until the late 1950s, when teachers from the Soviet Union arrived to hold classes at a new government-subsidized school affiliated with the Cairo Ballet.
She was then invited, along with four other teenagers, to study in Moscow at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy.
The young Egyptian lady returned to the Cairo Ballet after intensive training there from 1963 to 1965. Ms. Saleh and Ms. Diana Hakak were the most well-known of the group, which also included Nadia Habib, Alia Abdel Razek, and Wadoud Fayez.
The dancers of the company spent the summer of 1966 practicing a massive performance of the 1934 Soviet ballet “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai”. The ballet, based on a poem by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, relates the story of a Polish princess who is kidnapped by a Tatar chief and murdered in a jealous frenzy by the harem favorite. Ms. Saleh played the pristine princess Maria, while Ms. Hakak played the fiery favorite Zarema.
The show was a major success, and it was considered as justification for the establishment of the government-subsidized Cairo Ballet company and a ballet school a few years earlier.
The young ballerina performed at the stage of the Khedivial Opera (1966-71) several times, yet in 1971, at the peak of her successes, the Khedivial Opera burned down, severely impeding the development of Egypt’s ballet company.
She continued her career at the Higher Institute of Ballet, where she became a professor and dean (1984-86). However, at this time there was no national ballet company present.
In 1979, she completed her PhD, entitled “A Documentation of the Ethnic Dance Traditions of the Arab Republic of Egypt” at New York University. During that stay, Saleh struck up a long-term friendship with Jack Josephson (1930-2022), the renowned art historian and authority on ancient Egyptian sculptures, whom she eventually married.
In 1987, Saleh was appointed the founding director of the new Cairo Opera House, helping to prepare the new institution, until it opened its doors in 1988.
In 1992, Saleh moved to New York, where she continued to remain close to the Egyptian artistic scene.
Saleh was behind many concerts organised in New York’s prestigious halls – the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts at the Lincoln Center in particular – featuring Egyptian artists, whom she supported throughout their careers outside the country.
In 2016, Saleh was featured in Hisham Abdel-Khalek’s documentary A Footnote in Ballet History which looks into the history of Egypt’s ballet and its first stars.
In 2018, Saleh was honored by the New York’s Theatre, and afterward honored again by Egypt in events celebrating her life and art.
