Aya Metwalli: cabaret macabre

Cabaret Macabre is a rendition of a classic cabaret song from the 1920s by the legendary Egyptian singer Mounira Al-Mahdiya. Born in 1885, she studied in a nursing school and then began her career as a singer in the local cabarets of the Al-Azbakiyah nightclubs in Cairo. In the twenties and thirties, a vibrant music, theatre, film and cabaret scene flourished in Egypt, giving rise to a form of song whose lyrics were daringly sexual, with some pioneers in this genre; Mounira Al-Mahdiya was one of them. This genre can be seen as a reflection of the status quo of the time. According to some local scholars, the spread of cabaret art in Egypt began after the failure of the 1919 revolution and a general sense of hopelessness that settled over the country, inspiring a hedonistic outlook on life that was also reflected in art. Songs that are sexual in nature are not a new form in Egyptian art and date back not only to the 1920s, but also to Egyptian folklore and even to ancient Egyptian culture, where music and dance were a popular form of entertainment throughout Egypt and were equally associated with the exaltation of religious devotion, human sexuality and earthly pleasures. Sexuality and sensuality have always been an integral part of Egyptian lyrical and musical identity in one way or another, and yet they increasingly disappeared in the early 1940s after the creation of a national radio station and the establishment of a censorship office. Since then, the Egyptian artistic identity has slowly turned into a phantom of itself; a repressed, ugly, deformed phantom deprived of its own ethos; a cabaret macabre.

(Aya Metwalli)