Overview - Sphinx Festival
Event @ Makan Cultural Centre
Day 3 - Thu 3 Dec
8.00pm-10.30pm
“Nile Gypsy Rhythms - Gypsy Drums and Earth Songs”
Egyptian Gypsy Music & Shamanic Traditions @ Makan
Visit a downtown Cairo cultural centre with an authentic Egyptian shamanic Zar display, drumming and singing with Traditional artists. Earthy, gutsy and raw! Excursion commences after Dinner from hotel, 8pm.
Ahmed Maghraby, founder of the award-winning cultural centre in Downtown Cairo - ECCA, aims to record and present traditional music and musicians in Egypt as vibrant and renewable cultural resources that bridge Mediterranean and sub-Saharan African cultures. ECCA further encourages efforts to re-awaken the multi-layered complexity of Egyptian culture of music and arts, to return the music to the critical role it has played in the daily life and imagination of the Egyptian people, to counter the trend to isolate it from its original communities, to share this rich resource with the world community and, by presenting it in new contexts to encourage perception of this music as a resource for creativity.
www.egyptmusic.org
About the Zar
The ECCA helps preservation of the Zar - the instruments and practice of this unique musical legacy. It has brought together some of Egypt's few remaining authentic Zar performers (musical shamans) and as a result, the group, Mazaher, was formed.
In its original form, the Zar is a healing ritual, one of the few, ancient healing ceremonies. Zar is meant to pacify spirits and to harmonize the inner lives of the participants. For participants, it is most often a cathartic experience, a form of communication with different spirits in an intense rhythmic interaction leading to an altered state of consciousness or possibly a trance.
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Nasser Osman, Saiidi Percussionist