Ballet dancer Fady el-Nabarawy feels he can finally breathe again the moment he enters the gates of the Cairo Opera House after a commute from his ramshackle, poor neighborhood. “I became a ballet dancer by chance but, glory to God, I’m told I was born to be a ballet dancer,” he said. El-Nabarawy, now 29, said he’s proud both of being a ballet dancer and of being from Cairo’s district of Omraniyah, though it is not always easy. “I just go home to sleep.”Instead, his time is spent in the refuge of the Opera House complex. In the 1990s, President Hosni Mubarak’s government revived ballet as part of a more capitalist-driven prestige project, building the Opera House complex with Japanese backing.

Source: Egypt Independent May 12, 2017 06:11 UTC