While this mission was not shared online when I started working at the Cairo Opera House in 1993 as a founding member of and dancer with the Cairo Modern Dance Company, the message of Westernising the performing arts was already present and tangible in the sense of following certain canonised performance models considered to belong to the so-called ‘high culture’ of the global north. As a critic who can use her previous – and current – experience as a performing arts practitioner, I can look back at the history of the Cairo Opera House, and to the multiple resonances of operatic arts in Egypt and analyse the situation from a critical and decolonial perspective.

I will start by tracing the history of the old Khedivial Opera House – established in 1869 and destroyed by a fire in 1971 – and its relation to coloniality, and provide the example of Sayed Darwish (1892–1923) as the pioneering Egyptian composer and musician who tried to create an Egyptian music theatre and Egyptian operettas during the 1920s. Then I will move on to the new Cairo Opera House – opened in 1988 – in relation to the regime of the fourth President of Egypt (1981–2011), Hosni Mubarak, and the political instrumentalisation of music theatre. I will conclude by interpreting this state control of the arts as a new form of coloniality executed by the political regime, which was gradually confronted by waves of opposition.