The Haggala is a coming – of – age dance for a young girl (the Haggala). It is done by one young girl, dressed in a long caftan, whose face & head are totally covered. It is about celebrating a young girl’s reaching puberty, to tell her how beautiful she is becoming & what a wonderful wife & mother she will make & what a lucky man the one who marries her will be.

The Haggala is also often performed at weddings as a celebratory dance. The Haggala spread from Libya to Egypt via Libyan worker migration. Being mostly Libyan immigrants, people in the Mersa Matruh region of Egypt often still dress the way the Libyans did.

One possible translation of the word Haggal means bird but a bird that flies across the Sinai Dessert and when it steps on the sand, it does a funny walk because the sand is hot. Some say that this is the accented shimmy walk imitated by Haggala dancers. Another possible translation from Arabic is “to hop, skip, leap, or gambol.”

The Haggala is traditionally performed without any music except the clapping and chanting of the men of the village. The line of men is called “Kefaffin” (clappers).

Mahmoud Reda, a choreographer famous for bringing folkloric dances to the stage had music composed for his version of this dance. The costume used in folkloric performance has a skirt around the hips to exaggerate the movement of the distinctive twisting Haggala shimmy walk. For an Orientalized version the costume is adapted further, but having something to exaggerate hip movement is important.

See Farida Fahmy’s wonderful article on the subject:

Al-Haggala

Shems’s Haggala YouTube Playlist