BAGHDAD — Ann Khalid did not feel well, but she insisted on dancing a brief scene from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake with her classmates. The 12-year-old is determined to one day have a career dancing and teaching ballet, not an easy path in a country torn for years by conflict.
“My school and my church are the two things I love the most in Baghdad,” Khalid, in her black leotard and white ballet shoes, said with pride after the dance.
If she has a shot at her dream, it’s because of the Baghdad School of Music and Ballet.
The school has managed to survive decades of turmoil, a feat that speaks to the resilience of Baghdad’s residents through war after war. The Iraqi capital’s past as a Middle East center of culture is a distant memory, but the school has carved out an island of creativity amid the violence that is an inescapable part of daily life and the religious conservatism that now defines public life.
“Where else in Iraq can you walk into a school and listen to a small boy playing Antonio Vivaldi on his violin?” said the school principal, Ahmed Salim Ghani.
Another rarity: It isn’t segregated by sex. Male and female students take classes together from kindergarten to high school.
“The second you walk through the gate, you find yourself in a different world, one of art and culture,” Ghani said, who speaks nostalgically about Baghdad’s golden age — the 1960s through to the 1980s. Back then, the city’s elite patronized art and culture. The school, founded in 1968, thrived.
Things worsened for Baghdad and the school with Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. U.N. sanctions devastated the economy and ruptured the nation’s social fabric. The city plunged deeper into chaos after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. The school was looted days after Saddam Hussein’s ouster.
Amid the violence, religious extremism rose, nurturing the notion that ballet — and to a lesser extent music — is immoral and anti-Islamic. During the height of the violence, in the mid-2000s, the number of students plunged to an all-time low of 100-120, Ghani said.
The school now has about 500 students. Many parents pull their daughters out of ballet when they are 12 or 13 because they object on religious grounds to the girls being lifted by boys their age while performing, said Zeina Akram Fayzy, 40, a ballet instructor.
Khalid, the 12-year-old, says the moral questions don’t dent her enthusiasm. “Everyone says it is haram (religiously prohibited) and disgraceful. But my parents are happy for me to dance,” she said.
Fellow dancer Moayed Nawar, 13, said defiantly, “I want to dance professionally. I am not going to stop.”
