Magda Saleh, influential Egyptian ballerina, has passed away at the age of 79

Magda Saleh, a Bolshoi-trained Egyptian ballerina who was a star of the Cairo Ballet and instrumental in introducing ballet to a wider audience in her country, and who went on to serve as director of the company’s ballet school and of a new opera house, died June 11 in Cairo. She turned 79.

Her death was confirmed by Diane Hakak, another former principal dancer in the Cairo Ballet. Ms. Hakak, who lives in New York, said Tarek Saleh, the brother of Ms. Saleh in Cairo, informed her of his sister’s death. No cause was given.

Ms. Saleh, who lived on Shelter Island, NY, moved back to Cairo in March shortly after the death of her husband, Jack Josephson, to be with family.

Like the United States, Egypt did not have a permanent ballet company on a national scale until the 1950s, although it had a grand opera house in Cairo. Americans, however, had seen ballet productions; major European ballet companies have been performing in the United States since the 19th century. In Egypt, ballet recitals were usually confined to private dance schools, often run by British teachers, where the students usually came from upper-middle-class families, such as Mrs. Saleh’s.

Ms. Saleh trained with these teachers until the late 1950s, when teachers arrived from the Soviet Union to teach at a new government-subsidized school affiliated with the Cairo Ballet. Then she, along with four other teenagers, was invited to study in Moscow at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy.

After training rigorously there from 1963 to 1965, the young Egyptian women returned to the Cairo Ballet. Mrs. Saleh and Mrs. Hakak became the most famous; the others were Nadia Habib, Alia Abdel Razek and Wadoud Fayez.

In 1966, the company’s dancers spent the summer rehearsing a massive production of the 1934 Soviet ballet ‘The Fountain of Bakhchisarai’. Based on a poem by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, the ballet tells the story of a Polish princess who is kidnapped by a Tatar chief and killed by the harem favorite in a jealous rage. Mrs. Saleh was Maria, the pure princess, and Mrs. Hakak was Zarema, the ardent favorite.

The production was a huge success and was seen as vindicating the establishment of the government-subsidized Cairo Ballet company and ballet school several years earlier.

Ms. Saleh was a guest performer with several Soviet ballet groups, including the Kirov in Leningrad, the Bolshoi at the Kremlin Congress Palace in Moscow, and companies in Novossibirsk and Tashkent.

Although she became a cultural celebrity—the Egyptian press called her Cairo’s first prima ballerina—Ms. Saleh often said she was less interested in galas and glamor than in exposing people of all classes to ballet. She often remembered a performance by the Cairo Ballet in Aswan, a city on the Nile River. A worker on the dam there who had been watching the performance then came on stage, she said, and told her the performance was “a really beautiful thing.”

Magda Saleh was born on April 2, 1944 in Cairo. Her father, Ahmed Abdel Ghaffar Saleh, was Egyptian. Her mother, Gertrude Florence Edgar (Farmer) Saleh, who passed by Florence, was Scottish. They met in Glasgow, where Mr. Saleh studied agriculture, and were married in 1937. Mr. Saleh, a prominent academic, later became vice president of the American University in Cairo; his wife was a housewife.

In 1993, Mrs. Saleh married Mr. Josephson, an American businessman who later became an Egyptologist and an expert on Egyptian antiquities. In addition to her brother Tarek, she is survived by another brother, Sherif. A third brother, Amr, died in January.

After she retired from ballet due to an injury, Ms. Saleh earned a master’s degree in modern dance from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1979 she received a Ph.D. from New York University, for which she made ‘Egypt Dances’, a documentary about little-known traditional dances in Egyptian villages. She later warned that there would be “cultural loss” if changing rural lifestyles led villagers to abandon these traditions, as they could be viewed as evidence of backwardness.

In 1983 she returned to Egypt and became Dean of the Higher Institute of Ballet. In 1987, she was named founder and director of a new opera house to be built with a $50 million grant from the Japanese government. It was built in 1988 but was replaced soon after, reportedly due to disagreements with a new culture minister.

She moved to New York in 1992 and became active in helping bring Egyptian artists to the United States. She also lectured on ballet and Egyptian dance, often at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and at the Smithsonian Institution.