Although lacking additional barriers such as gender and religion present in the realm of dance, a video entitled "Coptic Christians battle prejudice in Egyptian football" displays the general struggle of Coptic Christians to have a space and a name in the public sphere. This lack of visibility appears mainly in two ways. Firstly, and most generally is simple religious prejudice, in which opportunities for Copts to exist in the same spaces as Muslim Egyptians are extremely limited. Secondly is less of direct prejudice but more a fear of losing face, as demonstrated when the young Coptic player Mina Samir tells of his brother being offered a football opportunity if he went under a false, Muslim name. The situation of the football players displays generalities that can be to some extent assumed to apply to the dance world. Likely it is much more difficult—though not impossible—for Coptic women to exist in the same spaces as Muslim women even if they wanted to. This holds great significance in the Egyptian dance world, as much of the roots come from all-women spaces, holding a heavy foundation in community. As such, it is much more difficult to breach into such a tight knit world if one is already an outsider. While this may provide some understanding as to the lack of famous Coptic dancers, it may also be a denial of the possibility of many ethnically Coptic dancers performing under Muslim or “neutral” names that do not point directly to their ethnic or religious heritage. While this carries heavy speculation, the more fundamental fact here is not that Coptic women might be in the public sphere under aliases, but that there are definitely no publicly Coptic women in the entertainment realm of the Egyptian public sphere. As a result, younger, ethnically Coptic women wishing to work themselves up in the dance world will not see a place for them, and may become discouraged from attempting, perpetuating the absence of this group from the public sphere.

"Coptic Christians battle prejudice in Egyptian football." YouTube, uploaded by AFP News Agency, 21 May 2018.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynb1pxeBlx0&feature=emb_err_watch_on_yt

In one of my interviews with a Coptic woman between the ages of 22 and 27, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt in the late 1990s to early 2000s, the topic of ethnicity recognition by name came up, and she tells a story of how prevalent the attention to one's name is and the limited opportunity it can create.

"There's a story of me and my brother...we were going to just get juice...when we walked in, the man asked my brother about his name. Name is a really significant way of knowing if someone is Coptic or Muslim, and my brother's name is ******** which is obviously a very Coptic name. So he chose not to say that one, he said his name was Fadi because it could work for both religions. Then the man asked what our father's name was. Again, my father's name is clearly Christian, and so again, my brother chose a different name. Then, the man asked for my grandfather's name, to which for the last time, my brother chose a generic name. Finally, the man got annoyed and asked whether we were Muslim or Christian to which my brother responded that we were Christian. He said 'there is no juice for you today' and we were kicked out of the store."

If lying about one's name is a common practice in navigating simple day to day tasks such as buying juice from the market, then it must be all the more present in realms of the public sphere such as dance. The public sphere contributes greatly to the construction of a national identity, and if Copts are not welcome in their own neighborhoods, they are certainly kept from being proclaimed nationally.

Hanna, Mariam. Personal Interview. 8 December 2019.
photograph by Anna Nessie, distributed under a CC-ASA 3.0 Unported license.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KSA-EGY_(4).jpg