General Information
It is well known that in as much as people strove throughout history to ensure their basic needs – food, clothing, shelter – they also strove, in the same degree to meet their spiritual needs, in which art played an unquestionable and integral part. Thus humanity found its way to music, as a spiritual medium, discovering and inventing musical instruments, using strings, rhythm and percussion instruments, around which different ritualistic artistic celebrations emerged throughout the ages. From the religious and spiritual rituals, love songs and popular epic songs and from the performances of popular actors who joined with the musicians and singers, was created what is called the popular ‘Samar’ or entertainment night. Popular artists gather in a street, lane or any available space and the local inhabitants gather around them. From this a space for a popular theater emerges. Without any previously prepared text, the show begins. The audience here is unlike the audience in the modern-day theater, since they are part of the show from the beginning. They sing along with the singers, demand certain songs or ask for specific singers, interject with comments on the performance, suddenly jumping in to join and participate in the dancing. From all of the above, a ‘state of being’ is reached, which is composed of all the elements inherited deep within us, in addition to our vision and need for the intimacy of communication. Seeping deeply into our spirits and passed on through generations, new tributaries are added to this river, into which each generation pours its own experience and elements of its time. This river continues to provide us with the source from which our spiritual thirst is quenched throughout the ages. This spiritual state to is weaved in with humanity’s strive to provide to meet its basic material needs, to complete and improve the conditions for a humane life, in what is termed ‘development’, in it’s holistic and comprehensive meaning. In Egypt, especially in recent decades, due to numerous reasons, popular music has been subjected to the worst kind of marginalization, to the point of near extinction. Factors contributing to the current state of affairs include; the negative impact of globalization, which leads to weakening local cultures and its spiritual heritage, especially music; the spread of religious fundamentalism, which prohibits music and all forms of art and; bureaucratic government structures through the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, which has created, a tamed breed of musical groups. All of these factors have emptied arts from their spontaneous and popular content, mutating them to instead reflect a sanitised, state-approved output, divorced from their original environment of the streets, and their capacity to express the hopes and needs of the collective. For this reason, the popular musician, whom has a spiritual affinity to his music, suffers from any forces of oppression, which empty this music form its true spirit and content. It was therefore necessary for someone to attempt to fill this gap through working towards reviving, documenting and disseminating traditional forms of music. Zakaria Ibrahim began this journey in Port Said in 1989 with the search for the old artists, who carry this popular musical heritage but were forced, as a result of the aforementioned conditions, to withdraw to their homes. Zakaria Ibrahim was successful in convincing these artists to return to their music, in its original context, and not through the governmental or commercial performances, while adding a number of young people, in order to ensure that this musical heritage be carried down to the next generation. From the memory of these veteran performers, old songs and old tunes were gathered, totaling nearly twenty hours of material, and taught to the young. Initially, funding to undertake these activities came solely by from himself, however in 1994 financial assistance was secured from the Ford Foundation it was possible to extend the research endeavors to include to documentation through video, sound recordings and photography and further dissemination through hundreds of live shows in their original environment of Port Said, wider venues in Egypt and performances in Arab, African and European countries. These revivalist activities undertaken in Port Said were repeated in Ismailia and Suez with the support from SIDA (The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) and now the original folk music of each of the three cities can be heard at weekly performances that enjoy a strong local support. Additionally, with further support from Ford Foundation, Zakaria rediscovered an instrument called "Rango" (Marimba) after its extinction, an instrument that had its origins with the people who come from south of Sudan to work in the Egyptian army and Cotton agriculture after the Egyptian conquest of Sudan in 1820. As with Port Said, Ismalia and Suez a Rango group was established to perform this long-forgotten dance music in places such as "Araisheat El Abed" in Ismailia city, Cairo and Alexandriaand internationally in UK, Abu Dhabi and Sweden.
