Nabaweya Mustafa

Nabaweya Mustafa was an Egyptian dancer and occasional actress whose career unfolded during the formative decades of Egyptian musical cinema. She came from a family connected with the Awalim professional entertainment tradition. Between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, she appeared as a dancer in dozens of films. Her screen work preserved a movement aesthetic closer to the earlier professional Egyptian tradition than some later heavily theatricalized performances. She is particularly useful for tracing how earlier Egyptian dance practices entered and were transformed by cinema.