Cairo

Performing Arts

The new Cairo Opera House (National Cultural Centre), rebuilt in the 1980s after the nineteenth-century original was destroyed by fire in 1971, is the city's principal performing-arts venue. The Cairo Opera House presents touring theater and ballet troupes and musical groups, as well as local performers, including the Cairo Opera Ballet Company and the Cairo Orchestra. Located in the parklike setting of the Gazirah Exhibition Grounds on the island of Gazirah, the opera house complex includes an open-air theater and amphitheater, as well as two indoor halls (a main one and a smaller one). A newer facility, the 2,500-seat Cairo International Conference Centre in the suburb of Madinat Nasr, was a gift from the Chinese in 1991. It opened the following year with a performance by the Grigorovich Ballet of Russia's Bolshoi Theatre.

Popular performance sites in Islamic Cairo, especially during the holiday period of Ramadan, are the House of Zeinab Khatoun and the Al-Ghouri complex. Plays and recitals are also presented at the Ewart Hall and Wallace Theater on the campus of American University in Cairo.

Cairo is a center of legitimate Arabic theater, although performances are subject to government censorship. Both ballet and modern dance are exceptionally popular in Cairo, whose ballet company (the Cairo Ballet) was founded in 1960 with help from the Soviet Union, which sent its own dance teachers to help train the members of the company. However with the expulsion of Soviet advisers from Egypt in 1972, the Russian presence at the ballet ended. The quality of the troupe is subsequently said to have declined, and in 1991 it was bolstered by the addition of dancers from Russia and Italy.

Cairo is the film capital of the Arabic world, although its film industry has declined since its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, thanks to strict censorship and economic factors. However, Cairo's residents are avid filmgoers and flock to both Egyptian and foreign movies.

The Cairo Puppet Theater performs at the Ezbekiyya Gardens north of Ataba from October through May.