“This flowering of ballet in Egypt, an East-meets-West tale of Cold War cultural politics, happened long ago, in the 1960s and early ’70s. … The Egyptian ballerina Magda Saleh danced the dream role of Giselle in Moscow as a guest star with the mighty Bolshoi Ballet … and in the opera house in her hometown, Cairo – where to call a woman a ‘dancer’ was an insult – with a full troupe of Egyptians trained by Russians in an academy established by the Egyptian state.”