The Ilkhom Theatre Performs A MASTERPIECE WITH ECSTASY WITH THE POMEGRANATE

April 10, 2008

The Ilkhom Theatre Festival at ACT Theatre closes this Sunday; tickets for Ecstasy With the Pomegranate are still available here.

By Jeremy M. Barker

Heading into ACT Theatre last night for the opening of the Ilkhom Theatre’s Ecstasy With the Pomegranate, we were for some reason under the impression that this show–running for one week only, and following a four-week run of White White Black Stork–would be a shorter, perhaps more experimental work, intended for hardcore audiences. Turns out, the reverse was true. At three hours and fifteen minutes (including one intermission), Ecstasy With the Pomegranate is, in terms of both ambition and execution, far superior. We left ACT Theatre last night deeply moved and emotionally and intellectually excited to have finally seen a play which uses the vast and wondrous tools of the theatre to tell a complex and multi-layered story, demonstrating this theatre company’s stunning grasp of movement, design, and acting to create something dynamic and challenging and, ultimately, revelatory.

The plot follows the semi-fictionalized life of the Russian-born painter Alexander Nikolaev/Usto Mumin, whose paintings feature prominently in the play. (This is actually a point we’re not clear on: In the play, the painter’s Russian name is not Alexander Nikolaev, rather Aleksandr Nezhdanov, but by the end he has adopted the pseudonym Usto Mumin; given the scarcity of information in English on this subject, we may well be mistaken somehow.)
Nezhdanov (marvelously performed by Anton Pakhomov) arrives in Tashkent in 1917, employed by the Imperial Russian army to document the culture and history of the region. His commander, Col. Valerian Byaltsev (Boris Gafurov), the military governor in Tashkent, has a relatively liberal outlook and is charged with formalizing Russian control with a light hand, in order to prevent violent opposition. As the play opens, Nezhdanov, having already converted to Islam, is helping the colonel and his staff arrange an art exhibition celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the “New Tashkent,” or the Russofication of the city. Nezhdanov’s work, with its Modernist whimsy and clear infatuation with Uzbek culture, is a poor fit amongst the tired Romanticist renderings of conquest and culture. He soon effectively goes AWOL, moving out of the barracks and taking a small guesthouse in the Old Town owned by Takhir (Farukh Khaldjigitov). Takhir is also the operator of a tea-house nightclub and the manager of the city’s most popular bacha dancers, himself having been one as a child.

All the materials we’d read before the show didn’t fully prepare us to understand the tradition of the bacha boy dancers; essentially, within the sexually repressive Islamic culture where women were virtually invisible in public life, the prepubescent boy dancers became hypersexualized objects in a form of socially sanctioned pedo-eroticism. While the bacha dances themselves seem only obliquely sexual by Western standards (sensual would be a better description), the boys are celebrities in Tashkent by virtue of being the only means of sexual expression in public, their favor passionately pursued by well-off patrons.

Insofar as this is the case, these boys’ plight is recognizable to American viewers familiar with lurid tales of showgirls or winsome Midwestern transplants in search of Hollywood fame on the silver screen and instead find themselves in the blue movies. The boys’ talent is both a blessing and a curse; blessing because these otherwise socially marginalized children (either orphans or castaways) have both social prestige and a means of self-expression that would otherwise be denied them, and a curse because, for all their notoriety, they lack any independence, the lavish gifts bestowed upon them by their suitors enriching Takhir, himself ambivalent about their fate once puberty robs them of their child-like–and therefore profitable–lustre.
For Nezhdanov, the bacha boys become an object of fascination precisely because of this. The boys’ dances, and the erotic fixation the public has on them, makes them a window into the private lives of a closed society that Nezhdanov seeks to enter. And if this were where the play left off, it wouldn’t be much more than White White Black Stork. But whereas that work was content to wind its way through a series of poetic images and symbolism as an expression of the tumultuous inner world of characters longing to break free from the constraints of their conformist society, in the second half of Ecstasy, history intrudes, casting aside centuries of culture in pursuit of Modernity, and theatre-goers are left not with a pitiable tale of sexual repression (as in Stork), but rather deeply ambivalent about the nature of social and cultural transformation.

The historical injunction is that of the Bolshevik Revolution. Takhir, murdered by angry patrons of the bacha boys, has left his troupe leaderless; Byaltsev, pressured by protesting wives whose households are being lost to bacha-obsession, seeks to repress the tradition as an opportunity to establish Russian control by meeting the needs of women; and Nezhdanov finds himself jailed for several months on charges of committing Takhir’s murder.

At this point, it’s impossible not to take a step back and discuss the production itself. Compared even to the design of Stork, Ecstasy is minimalist in the do-more-with-less sense. The sole setting piece is a large three-part scrim flat pivoted in the center. Capable of folding down, rotating, containing various moving panels, with lighting, projections and animation, Ilkhom gets more out of this single polymorphic set piece than Romeo Castellucci could with a bevy of special effects in Hey Girl!, the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio production that toured here in February. As for the performers, the movement in this piece is a incredible; the boys’ dances, evocative and precise, reveal Ilkhom’s remarkable physical and movement training. The only thing like it we’ve ever seen is the work of Lecoqian performers at Portland’s Imago Theatre.
All of which serves to reinforce how much was lost with the company’s founder, Mark Weil (see here if you don’t know the story of his murder). Stork simply didn’t do justice to Weil’s genius, though it’s possible Ecstasy was just a more personal show for him. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Weil – a Russian of German extraction who moved to Tashkent to form Ilkhom in the 1970s – saw something of himself in the character of Usto Mumin. Mumin is a liminal figure, trapped halfway between two cultures, ever pursuing the one, ever remaining the other. There’s a great irony that by the end of the play, it’s Nezhdanov who’s trying to preserve the traditional culture while the Uzbeks themselves – at least the bacha boys he befriended and protected after Takhim’s death – are embracing Bolshevism, promoting a radical form of modernization intent on stamping out the very things that Nezhdanov fell in love with in Tashkent. Nodira (Nargis Abdullaeva), a young girl intent on breaking the gender barrier and dancing bacha, marries one of the bacha boys and begins proselytizing radical feminism, only to come to a sorry end, stoned to death by backwards countryfolk. This twists the themes of White White Black Stork, with its simple story of sexual freedom versus repression, into something more complex and difficult, demanding we consider what’s lost with the transformation of culture and revolt against contemporary mores. The answer is not simple, and the artists at Ilkhom wisely intuit that great art’s purpose is to pose the question rather than supply the answer.
Image: The Ilkhom Theatre Company’s production of Ecstasy With The Pomegranate at ACT – A Contemporary Theatre.