Shapeshifting
from Siberia
International
Arts Festival
in conjunction with the San Francisco World Music Festival
Ancestors of Siberia, part one
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Friday, September 12, 2003
reviewed
by Ann Murphy
It
ís rare to be sent hurtling over distant grasslands
and vast mountain spaces during a performance, but Friday
nightís quietly sublime, deeply humble concert,
Ancestors of Siberia (part one), tossed
the audience into a world of open land, forests, volcanoes,
and a menagerie of animal life. Like any serious cross-cultural
experience, it echoed back to us how particular our
own cultural expressions are. Ballet,or the hip hop
festival taking place next door at the Forum, are our
folk art, the echoes underscored, and although they
go by other names, we too have shamans. We call them
therapists.
The shamans Friday came from Tuva, Kamchatka, Altai
and other places scattered around the vast Asiatic lands
of Siberia, which extend from Ural Mountains to the
Pacific Ocean. But as much as geography linked them,
it was their shared relationship to nature, from the
weight of snow and mud, to the wind and the spirit of
animals, which bound them far more deeply than their
joint inclusion in the land north of China.
It was a relievedly unslick evening. Décor, for
instance, consisted of an ingenious array of nine screens
hung together in the form of an angled wall-hanging
upon which were projected beautiful Siberian designs.
And at either side upstage were two small candelabra
lights. That was all. What's more, there was none of
the amped-up or over-produced effect that so many world
culture concerts are swamped by nowadays. In fact, the
low-tech mood as the program opened was almost worrisome.
Were these performers really masterful? Angie Choi,
the emcee, read empty text on the artists based on material
from a related web site, as though the Bay Area were
the capital of ethnomusicological neophytes rather than
one of the world music and dance hubs of the western
hemisphere. Program notes were also an impediment rather
than a help, having none of the sophistication that
the Ethnic Dance Festival long ago mastered. Spelling
styles even varied from one column to the next.
But these small failings paled as the Tuvan singers
alternated with Etelman dancers from the Kamchatkan
peninsula, a young Russian folk troupe called the Bazurov
Opera, and the Altay musician Sarymai Urchimaev. As
only Meredith Monk can do in song and virtually no contemporary
dancemaker does in dance in the West, these artists
recreated the natural world as both a place of human
and animal habitat and a realm of large, mysterious
and animate spirit forces.
Tuva
is a small autonomous region wedged along the northern
border of Mongolia where historically nomadic peoples
have lived for millenia in a stepped mountain basin
of high, forested lands to the east and dry lowlands
to the west. Tuvans are the world's greatest throat
singers. They make a hauntingly weird tonal compote
that sounds like a gruff-voiced Popeye playing the digeridoo
with a Jew's harp trapped in the mouth, yet is accomplished
with nothing more than the instrument of the voice.
Sonically it involves the creation of a deep fundamental
tone, often a droning sound like a bagpipe, with a second
level of harmonic tones sung over it.
 Historically,
throat singing has been learned from childhood, like
language, and performed as part of the spiritual interaction
with the natural world. It has been and performed only
by men, because it was thought capable of making women
infertile, although nowadays, women have begun to learn
throat singing as well. The group that was on the bill
Friday, called Chirgilchin, is an ensemble reputed to
have some of the greatest young Tuvan throat singers
alive. They included a female singer whose song style
was beautiful though far less layered. They also played
two-stringed instruments, like the lute-like doshpuluur
or the violinesque igil.
Much further east is Kamchatka, a peninsula that angles
toward Japan and is a stone's throw from Alaska. From
a dwindling people called Etelman, one of several in
Kamchatka, the troupe Elvel performed song and dance
deeply reminiscent of Aleutian style from Alaska and
hula from Hawaii.
 In
keen contrast to Elvel's shapeshifting, sensuous and
humorous performance, the company Oktay, full of preternaturally
mature 7-to-17 year-olds, represented the dour, melancholic
and stolid soul of Tolstoy's Russia. Through their melodic
chants, Oktay captured the relentlessness of lifeís
hardships while infusing polyphonic melodic repetitions
with unpolished wit and beauty. Their traditional dancing
was thick in an adult-bodied way and even more stolid
than their song.
Sarymai, in Kirghiz-style hat, a brilliant red gown
with gold borders and sash, offered up a forest canopy
of birdsong and a forest floor of goats, sheep, camel,
reindeer and galloping horses. If it weren't so stunning
that one man could manufacture so many sound effects
with such reverence for the world he reproduced, it
would have moved into realm of variety show bizarreness.
His last song "Altai Khomus," epitomized a
beautiful, yearning melancholy that was as mesmerizing
as dusk in a still forest.
Music is rarely thought of as occupying space in a dancerly
way in the West. Animistic cultures, by contrast, seem
to have no difficulty perceiving sound as part of three
dimensions. Unlike 19th century sound painting, which
tends to occupy a two dimensional floating canvas, sound
sculpture creates a deep, multilayered spatial universe.
We can literally hear the boundaries of a forest or
the shape of a cave. In this realm the material world
conjured up is sign and signifier of the immaterial
or spirit realm. This brings fleshyness to music and
lodges it close to dance, as dancer/composer Meredith
Monk does, as opposed to moving dance toward the plane
geometry of music, which is what many choreographers
strive for in the West.
Such animistic artistry was replicated by Elvel, two
men and two women from the village of Kovran, whose
slithery, puppyish movement suggested seals at play.
Shamans in real life, some of these artist/healers are
renowned for their shapeshifting prowess. Such skill
was wholly believable, as they seemed to embody richly
sensual animal and human worlds simultaneously. Decked
out in furs, the sweetly clownish men were forever chasing
the women, also in furs, with bent knees and in solid
2/4 rhythms. The women, in more complex syncopation,
with far more overt sexuality, went after the men with
the most deliciously serpentine arms and hands, rippling
torsos, shimmying shoulders and stylized glances. They
topped off their seductions with a high-pitched yap,
like young hungry whelps.
For the finale, all the performers took the stage and
Siberia, so vast and multifaceted, achieved an improbably
unity in which the busy polyphony of the natural world
was dressed in harmonic splendor.
copyright
Ann Murphy 2003
First
photo: the group Chirgilchin.
Second
photo: a member of Elvel
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