It seems odd that as dancers we have to sit basically still while moving through space in some kind of a vehicle to get to a place where we can finally do some dancing. Our trip from Athens, Ohio to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan took a very long time and employed a number of vans and taxis and airplanes and buses. I was nervous and concerned about so many things for our trip, and one of them was if our costumes would be appropriate for the Muslim countries we were visiting. We are generally covered up on stage even though the clothes we wear are very body-conscious, but before we arrived in Turkmenistan it was made clear to me that I would have to make sure that dancers' legs and backs and even arms would be covered. The week before we left I made quite a few trips to Capezio and American Apparel to buy turtlenecked, long-sleeved leotards, long leggings, and even skirts so as not to embarrass or offend our audiences. Imagine my confusion, and minor frustration, when, while sitting at immigration in the Ashgabat airport we saw Russian MTV on a large-screen television playing a music video of two naked women with small bars over their breasts and pubic areas while walking around a city at night. The stone-faced female guards with their long-skirted, army-like uniforms were unfazed and the male workers did not even seem to notice. This would be the first of many entertaining and enlightening paradoxes this trip would present.
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| Ashgabat by night |
Our drive from the airport to the hotel was like Dorothy and company arriving in Oz, but without all the inhabitants. It was 5AM and the streets were empty, though they were almost as empty during the day too. The large and impressive white and gold, brightly lit up buildings were a strange mix of beautiful and intimidating, with an architectural mix of Ottoman Empire meets Radisson Hotels. Amazing, but they seemed empty inside and there was no one to admire and enjoy them on the outside. It was also interesting that the loud music playing on the van's radio was Whitney Houston followed by Michael Jackson. I have learned from many trips long ago that pop music and soda pop are the same all over the world. The hotel was another one of these white and gold structures, with an impressive imitation Chihuly glass structure over the reception desk. We seemed to be the only guests and everything was open 24 hours a day. The oatmeal with sweetened milk at breakfast was very good, and we got the BBC news in English on our TV. The BBC news theme that repeats over and over made me think, in my jet lagged confusion, that I was back in Cambodia, which was the last place I watched the BBC when I was choreographing Phnom Penh's first rock opera a couple of years ago.
Our first day in Ashgabat was just sightseeing; a national museum and an ancient mosque. Still not any people around. I wondered where are all those interesting people in traditional dress with way too much carry-on luggage from our flight from Istanbul to Ashgabat lived. We had great classes to mixed populations at the Lotus Health Club.
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| Enthusiastic Lotus students |
The dancers ranged from 6-60 and seemed mostly interested or slightly versed in folk dance, ballroom, or hip-hop. What I saw, which I would happily see at every class we taught and in every class that I have experienced in all my travels, is that people love to find new ways to move and to dance and to show off and love the feeling of being what I call "in their bodies". They especially love to do so to interesting music. "Where can I get that music?" is a question I got everywhere we went, and I always told them where they could find it. I hope there has been a spike in modern dance percussion CD sales from Central Asia recently.
I especially enjoyed teaching the Mengli Traditional Dance Company. They were hesitant and ambivalent at first, and I thought "Oh no, tough crowd. They have to be here at this class," but with a bit of humor and a shared love for moving together to a beat, we had a great time. They taught us some traditional dance, then we showed them what we do, and then they danced for us. As we were to be performing in their theater, I invited their artistic director to have her dancers share our program with us and I am thrilled to say that they did. The curtain call with them in their long black braids and long colorful costumes with my dancers with their long-sleeved turtleneck leotards and their long leggings was a real "now" explosion of the traditional and the new, and the crowd went wild.
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| Bowing in Ashgabat |
One Mengli dancer, in halting English, tried to explain that they love to dance and they are lucky to be in their company, but the monotony of their traditional dance lives can be hard and so it was great to try something different.
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| Backstage with Mengli |
After many autographs were given and photos taken, we drove back to our hotel and I was once again struck by the vast, empty, brightly lit streets and I thought about another paradox: nothing is as it seems here. I felt like I was in someone else's grandiose dream and it was not a feasible reality. I then remembered that we had just danced and connected and entertained and, I hope, inspired a curious crowd and I was reminded that this was art doing its job.
Kazakhstan was so different from Turkmenistan; people everywhere! Beautiful, interesting, different-looking people. I was so happy to be back in a grocery store or at a beautiful Russian Orthodox church with other lookers looking and people praying. We saw a group of people, infants to older teens, getting baptized. There was also a bride waiting to get married, and old Russian Orthodox church ladies cleaning up old candles and wax to make way for new candles.
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| Outside the Russian Orthodox church in Almaty |
I bought a couple of candles and, although I am, sadly, someone who has given up on and stopped praying, I lit one candle for my Irish Catholic parents in Boston, and I lit the other for the safety of my beautiful, intelligent, and deeply human dancers. I thought to myself "if I am lighting candles in a church for people does that mean I still pray?"
Yes, we saw people everywhere, but my favorite people were the beautiful dancers of the Samruk Dance Company. I had taught many classes already, but this was the first time I had a group that we shared a common language with. They knew what a tendu is and how to stand in parallel position, but, much to my surprise, they had not heard of Jose Limon or Merce Cunningham or Trisha Brown, though they seemed like they might have heard of George Balanchine. I gave them a demanding two-and-a-half hour technique class. We broke for lunch, and when we came back they ran through a program of three dances they would be performing in a couple of nights time after we were leaving.
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| In class with Samruk |
They were great and versatile, moving from a Euro-centric brand of contemporary ballet to Broadway-style jazz. The jazz dance made me think of another of my heroes, Twyla Tharp, and I wondered if the jazz dance had been inspired by any of Twyla's Sinatra pieces, but they hadn't heard of Twyla either.
In Almaty we danced in a traditional opera house and in Astana we danced in a glass pyramid. What gifts to my company to be dancing in an old place and a new place. At the Pyramid in Astana we were told we had sold out the theater for the first time in its history, and also that we had ticket scalpers! That was a first for the Sean Curran Company. It was at a class at the Pyramid that we worked with the Terra Dance Company. I pushed them to go deeper and dance bigger, and then they delighted us with 5 different dances.
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| Terra Dance Company in their studio at the Pyramid |
My favorite was a traditional Uzbek dance, so unusual with decorative hands, smiling, flirty eyes, and a strange percussive chest pump that was the most inventive kind of what I call "punctuation" in choreography. They finished with a jazz number, their version of "All That Jazz" from Chicago. I meant to ask if they knew Bob Fosse, but did not get around to it.
That amazing Uzbek dance stayed with me and made me think of my massage therapist in New York City, a healer from Uzbekistan named Mukhtar. So many of the faces here made me think of him and I thought, "I cannot wait to tell him that I saw this gorgeous, unusual dance from Uzbekistan." I also remembered that when I told him I was coming to Central Asia, he asked in shock "Why ever are you going there?"
Our last country was the Kyrgyz Republic. As the local people seemed to know this was the last place we'd be visiting, they all asked which was our favorite place. Human nature, I think, to ask that, and as I have been trying to be a real diplomat and a true cultural ambassador I said, "Countries are like performances and no two are alike, so it is not useful to compare them." This no-two-are-alike is one of the many things I remember from my days dancing with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. I was very upset as I thought I had danced poorly one night and Bill said "Get over it, no two shows are alike." and I still agree.
I did have a night unlike any other when in Bishkek, my company was invited to a private concert of traditional musicians. They were called Ustat Shakirt, and they were they were so young, so talented, so beautiful. Then I actually remembered thinking, now this was like one night when I was a boy. My parents would take me and my sisters to what the Irish call a "sessiune", a gathering of traditional musicians playing music with other people there, the listeners listening. The music that night was otherworldly. The instruments were quite foreign to me and the faces looked nothing like the musicians' faces of my childhood, but this was a sessiune. A dozen or so people facing us making amazing, rich, timeless music and a dozen or so of us facing them, happy to be watching and listening, tapping toes and bopping heads. I have a big dream and a crazy idea but I want to make a dance to this music and I want to get those young, invested, talented musicians to the US to play live for us.
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| Our new friend from Ustat Shakirt |
On a day off we went to a gorge up a mountain, and as the saying goes "the gorges were gorgeous" just like my gorgeous dancers. I am no nature boy, but I was overwhelmed. I have used the quote here that "Art holds a mirror up so that we see ourselves reflected" Evan said that, for him, places in nature like this mountaintop hold a mirror up for him. Evan was in heaven; we all were.
Speaking of mountains, we had quite a long drive over and through some mountains to reach Karakol. The clouds seemed so close. There was a rushing river, a giant salt lake, and China just another mountain road away. In what seems to be Kyrgyz-style graffiti, people take white boulders and spell out names and sayings in the sides of the mountain hills with the rocks. I asked what it all said, and like everywhere else, it was "Iskender loves Irina" or "so-and-so was here" but then we saw 'American School' in big, block, recognizable letters.
We talked at an American Corner and it was another great time to tell our stories and have others tell theirs and to take questions. We got the question "How do I learn to dance?, "Can I teach myself to dance?" "What do I do if there's no dance schools where I live?" and I had to make the challenge to the asker that, "You have to do it yourself, be a self-starter. Use the internet and YouTube, get your friends together and make up your own dances, teach others." In other words, make something out of nothing.
It made me think of my company dancers and how they challenged themselves, and took great relish and joy in making a new "build-a-phrase" in each new city that we visited. They taped these phrases and I hope to use them in future collaborations, or maybe in my Central Asian dance. It also made me think of our lighting designer, Joe Doran, and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles he faced in each city, with outdated, broken, and extremely limited lighting instruments. Each performance was lit beautifully. Maybe it did not look like the original design, but he made it work. Joe, I think now, could light a show with three flashlights and a Zippo lighter.
As we drove back to Bishkek over the mountains so close to the clouds, I watched out my window admiring the yurts, small tent-like homes from nomadic days. I marveled at the many marvelous looking mosques, and I was so curious about the ancient cemeteries that looked like tiny villages with miniature houses for the dead. I actually got excited when I saw the wild grazing horses, and the sheep, the goats, the cows, and the chickens, but mostly I just loved looking at the people walking by or sitting down on the bumpy, tooth-chattering road. I saw wisdom in the old faces and an open quizzical look in the young ones. Like everywhere else in the world there children playing with sticks and old junk, making something out of nothing and improvising, kind of like a choreographer might do when looking to find new movement, or playing in the studio, starting or continuing the making of a dance, or the ending of a tour. The transition is no transition and success is a journey not a destination.
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