Mark WEIL
THE UNKNOWN INFAMOUS ILKHOM
An «attempt» to survey the history of the Ilkhom Theater for those who don’t have the slightest idea about it

The history of the Ilkhom Theatre in Tashkent is a fragment of the history of an entire generation of young artistic intelligentsia of the 1970’s, as the people of our circle were called by the officials authorized to control and «create conditions» for our development. This is a history of people who showed their worth during the Brezhnev crisis leading to the Perestroika and disintegration of a huge country with a sonorous name, the USSR. Just mentioning the name of my no longer existing country, where I nevertheless managed to be born and grow up, brings up a huge wave of associations, myths and prejudices.

Apparently, people of my age who were born in the 1950s – the second half of the 20th century, after Stalin’s death, and who escaped the fear of repression and mass detention in Stalin’s camps - turned out to be the last generation that managed to stand on their feet and somehow show their worth on the scale of the Soviet Empire. I do not know what it means or whether it means anything at all, but the fact that someone heard our names and the name of Ilkhom in the space of a huge country, left a certain imprint on our minds and our way of living. And not just that fact.

Ilkhom’s history is an involuntary reflection on a small scale of the cultural history of a big country that had always been full of spiritual struggle with every political system since the time of the Russian Empire, full of an excruciating search for truth, full of God-seeking, and where the role of Theatre, and of Art and Literature in general, had always been extremely, perhaps, overly, important.

Those who are a little familiar with Russian history and its influence on the present Commonwealth of Independent States that used to be part of the USSR can understand why the first Russian social democrats - Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Hertsen - one after another called theatre «THE HIGHEST INSTANCE FOR ANSWERING QUESTIONS OF VITAL IMPORTANCE», and «A UNIVERSITY FOR THE TRAINING OF MINDS». Finally, developing Voltaire’s ideas, they were sure that «THEATRE must replace the CHURCH». Something similar could also be found among the views of the jadids – the new people in Uzbekistan who came into existence at the beginning of the 20th century.

Theatre was really something special in the life of the Soviet intelligentsia. The best theatres, as we understood them (there were not many of them), had a spirit of opposition to the system. However, the latter was watchful and guarded the interests of the party bureaucracy, declaring real war on those unwilling to follow suit. The winner of this war was already known.

In the mid-70’s, the crisis of the system coincided with the climax of various, sometimes painful quests in the intellectual and spiritual life of the society.

It was at that time that Ilkhom was created - when nobody believed in anything - when 10 years prior to Gorbachev’s era it was impossible to foresee how history would go. Ilkhom was born when the apologists of the system were up to their ears in lies, and the new generation did not want to put up with that.

The history of Ilkhom is also my personal history, the story of a young man who, just because of his young age and the independent views inherent in it, did not find himself in any of the governmental institutions and, contrary to common sense (for no one was able to win his independence in the Soviet system), created his own theatre, his own business that would become, as it turned out later, the first independent, non-governmental professional theatre company in the USSR.

Now, when I look back, I can analyze and assess what was going on, but as a participant, I can only say one thing: none of us ever thought that we would go down in history, and by no means did we think that our theatre would be able to survive in the depths of a totalitarian country.

But something even bigger happened: Ilkhom lived through the disintegration of the USSR, went through the crisis and again took up a special place in the new country - the Republic of Uzbekistan – whose politicians proclaimed the concept of «oriental democracy».

There are different ways to look at the ideologists of the «oriental democracy» concept, a concept that explains the nature of «castrated democracy» in the transition period, that stresses the unpreparedness of society to exploit democratic institutions, and, finally, that reveals the specifity of the oriental understanding of democracy. However, in reality we are witnessing the development of the old concept that justifies the totalitarian motto «all for the people,» in reality excluding the Right of every person to influence his/her own country’s political and social system.

If the reader of these lines wants to see them as political criticism, he will make a mistake. The conclusion is altogether different. Flying from one time zone to another, working in the East and in the West, I gradually grew accustomed to a simple truism: one can easily change one’s clothes but not one’s mentality or traditions. As there are flowers and fruit appropriate for each season, there is history suitable for each country. And another mistake would be to think that Uzbekistan is too special in its formation.

Once, working on the performance Mohammed, Mamed, Mamish (1980) adapted from a novel by Chinghiz Guseinov who wrote a family saga about corruption and lies in the highest levels of Soviet society, I asked the author how censorship had allowed this novel in Moscow. And he answered: «The officials decided that the novel does not touch the Moscow bosses, as the action takes place in the province, in the eastern republic of Azerbaijan». Then he added: «And they were mistaken, they forgot that our whole country (the USSR) is located in the East».

Today we come across numerous declarations: in Moscow, that Russia is a European country; in Tashkent, that Uzbekistan has found its own way. But with all the gradations and nuances, it can be seen from «wonderfully far away» – as the great Russian writer Gogol put it – how all attempts of the new countries to part with the past reflect it, and what a heavy burden this past is to bear, and how new statements are often only variations of old habits and vices. By the way, the monument to the Russian satirist Gogol was dismantled in Tashkent in the heat of strengthening Independence, apparently in order for it not to insult the new face of the capital.

All attempts to re-write history, to tear away the past from the present, to declare the New Happy Era rarely end in success. And, as usual, ordinary human life follows its own laws. A special history continued to develop in our theatre as well.

2.

As I have already said, when Ilkhom was only starting up, we couldn’t imagine that we would create our own company and, fortunately, we could not care less about going down in history. Our first performance, Maskaraboz-76, was made in the street theatre tradition. At that time, I was strongly influenced by the ideas of the New Left and the heroes of Western student revolution of the late 60’s, but as a student back in the 70’s, I could hardly find any information about their new art in Soviet publications.

During the Perestroika years, in the West I met with many of my former idols, who were doing quite well in life over the past decades, and I saw how different we were in reality, in our biography,  in life experience, and in serving our ideals. In the 70’s we were probably united just by one thing: our desire to express the views of our generation and to tell the truth the way we saw it.

Whereas in the West people my age were struggling with the bourgeois values of society, with consumer society, its morality and conformity, I seemed to be living in a happy nation that, although far from being overfed, was free of power of money and open to new ideas and renovation.

Western people my age did not know that in my society, free of «bourgeois ideals», people had begun to long for them passionately. Our «classless society» headed by the owners of the country – workers and peasants, as well as those of the intelligentsia «allowed» to join their rule – were in reality exploited by the Army of party and government bureaucrats living in luxury and enjoying numerous privileges for serving the people. They had much to lose and therefore they guarded the system like the family jewels.

Formerly one was not allowed to discuss the situation I just described. Officially we lived in a free society, full of optimism and bright perspectives, which may have had some individual problems, but, according to state doctrine, by no means knew any social tension.

That was the situation we started to think about in our performances. We introduced a character on stage who was a product of our society, who lived with double moral standards thinking in one way, speaking in another, and behaving in yet another way. Independent of official control, Ilkhom was able to put on a whole series of performances after New Wave drama which was impossible to stage in the official theatres of the USSR.

We acted recklessly working on plays that had not been examined by the censorship. According to then current laws, we could have been charged criminal law for anti-Soviet activities. Our older colleagues watched our performances with horror. And we simply did not understand the reason for that fear. This showed that we were different, we who were born in «Khrushchev's relatively warm time» that saved people from the generalized fear caused by Stalin’s terror.

We were not a political theatre, we did not appeal to anyone in our performances, we did not moralize – a feature characteristic of the Theatre of the New Left or its predecessor, the Theatre of Brecht. We just reproduced unedited life and real people on our stage. They could be eccentric as in the absurdist Scenes by the Fountain by Semyon Zlotnikov, or they could be absolutely realistic characters: cynical, pragmatic, who did not believe in love, family, serving the homeland, like the characters of Duck Hunting by Alexander Vampilov. Finally, we were simply free in experimenting with form and style in our performances, not following any ideology. Nevertheless, when Ilkhom had just started, those performances were seen as «anti-Soviet» because their attitude, characters and artistic means did not conform to the accepted stereotypes.

I often muse on how it happened that Ilkhom was born in Tashkent. I think this was due to several circumstances. First of all, the forth-largest city in the USSR with a population of about 2.5 million accumulated the energy that synthesized cultural traditions for a City with people of more than a hundred nationalities.

Over the past century Tashkent absorbed hundreds of thousands of those who found their homes in the sunny city, «the bread city», as Tashkent was called in the folk legend coming from the hungry post-revolutionary 20’s of the 20th century. During World War II, Tashkent became the rear capital that hosted the Academy of Sciences, dozens of theatres and film-studios of Moscow and Leningrad, gigantic evacuated factories and industries. They formed a basis for the development of culture and science in Uzbekistan in the post-war years. Back then, the largest Institute of Arts in Central Asia was established, with students coming from Alma-Ata, Kazan, Frunze (Bishkek) and Dushanbe. After the break-up of the Soviet Union this institute nearly died, deprived of its flow of students from this huge area and of its best professors, who suffocated in the atmosphere of nationalism and provincialism.

But that happened recently. The generation that created Ilkhom had received an excellent education and was able to get additional training in the best theatres of Moscow, the Baltic republics, and other regions, and they were capable of competing when they stepped into their mature lives.

Finally, and this is very important, the situation in Tashkent in the 1970’s was much more laid back than in Moscow, where the officials of ideology followed each step of the dissidents. This was again due to the remoteness of the region and the queer mixture of oriental and Soviet atmosphere. Officials simply missed the period when Ilkhom was created, and when they noticed it, it was already too late. The theatre became very popular not only in Tashkent. The myth and talk about the young independent theatre could be heard the entire country.

In 1982, the theatre toured in Moscow and Leningrad. A scandal burst out.

3.

After the success of the first performances, nothing could ever stop us. We saw that something real and important, not only for us – creators of the theatre – but also for the public, was emerging.

Each of us, the first Ilkhom people, from actors to lighting technicians, worked in various Tashkent theatres and organizations. For instance, I edited a small publicity collection «Teatralny Tashkent» (Theatrical Tashkent). None of us received any additional salary for our work at Ilkhom.

Today it would be difficult for some people to believe, but this went on for about 10 years. In fact, our professional requirements, as I realized later, when they started to invite me to other theatres, were as high or higher than in many respectable theatres where people worked for decent salaries.

Our rehearsals were unlimited. We worked as much as we considered necessary for the implementation of our artistic ideas. Very often we worked nights, then went home with the passing cars (our favorites were sprinkler cars), or with the last metro trains. And so it went day after day.

Our repertoire developed on its own. New plays were added to the old ones. The public poured into the theatre.

Performances generally started after 10 p.m. and the house was full! Never in later years did I see the public so involved in our work as in these first years of Ilkhom. Oftentimes people stayed after the shows, talked about life with us, shared their impressions, we discussed our works.

And what discussions they were! Those who listened to them sometimes could not believe their ears. Things were said out loud that people normally would not risk discussing in a close group of friends in the kitchen (the Soviet intelligentsia’s favorite place for holding political discussions).

Because of the actors’ busy schedules in other theatres, we could not plan our work far in advance and therefore our public administration kept a record book with a waiting list of the audience, wrote down their phone numbers, and called them up as the dates of performances were specified. We could not imagine what this harmless record book could cause us.          

Once the KGB claimed it, and we were accused of establishing a secret society: either Zionist or dissident. At least, I was awarded the most flattering compliment in my life, when the then ideology secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee in Uzbekistan declared that I was following Academician Sakharov’s example and was making a mistaken career.

This really was their verdict, the more so in that it coincided with critical articles in the official press(Yu.N. Galkin «Why Breaking Chairs?» Komsomolskaya Pravda. April 11, 1980. Moscow; S. Inomkhojaev «Speaking The Truth…» Adabiyoti va San’ati. 1982. Tashkent.) that accused us of every mortal sin: allegedly we were asocial, overly sexual in our performances and had a bad influence on young people. However, clearly no one wanted to risk exerting open repression. Ilkhom was in everyone’s sight. A real war of tactics started against our «creation».

We kept noticing more and more often that we were spied on. Some days, suddenly fire inspectors would appear just before the show and, for reasons of fire security, would simply seal the doors in front of an astonished public.

Working at Ilkhom, I was also graduating from the Theatre Production Department of the Tashkent Institute of Arts. (Before that I had graduated as a theatre critic and historian). I had behind me a number of well-known performances made on the professional stage, both in Tashkent and Moscow, but the Institute was instructed not to award me any diploma – certificate of an acquired profession.

Finally, they demanded that a public organization that was to some extent taking care of us – the Theatrical Society – throw me out of the Ilkhom Theatre.

But how could they do this? For no one had officially appointed me. Moreover, I was the initiator in establishing the theatre. To his honor, the leader of that organization, Rakhim Kariev, refused point-blank to take measures against me. He was an old man. I am not sure he understood and accepted our performances completely, but he believed deeply that we were doing something serious and kept repeating that «the party should take care of the young generation instead of destroying brave people». He was from the generation of idealists-communists who dreamed sincerely of building a fair society. I am grateful to him for the support he gave us, who were an absolute minority.

Moscow was waiting for the Ilkhom Theatre’s tour. The myth of the new theatre had reached the capital partly through the press, but mostly through rumors.

I remember the cold eyes of an official from the Ministry of Culture of the USSR: «A tour in Moscow? We do not know your theatre. It is not on any of our lists. This means that you simply do not exist! As for touring in the state theatres in the capital of our Homeland, they are booked a year ahead. Good-bye!»

Moscow was in a turmoil. In 1982 there was a tendency for different forces to oppose one another. Another official allowed Ilkhom to come on tour, although he authorized only a few performances of our repertoire. In particular, he did not let us to play Scenes by the Fountain and Dragon – Tale’43. This play was fundamental for us.  We made it out of surviving fragments from the archives. This play by Yevgheni Schvartz was forbidden in 1943. Later it was published in a shortened version. The full text of the play in our performance was incredibly modern and open. The performance itself created a sharp contrast with the system we inherited from Stalin’s era. Even the incomplete repertoire of Ilkhom evoked a string response in Moscow. During the tour, I had a curious meeting with one high-ranking lady – an art historian writing about theatre artists. This lady worked in the Culture Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR. After one performance, she shook my hand, thrilled, and whispered: «You are doing something important». «Luck has struck», I thought. «Finally Ilkhom is acquiring a patron in the upper crust». After some time I asked for an appointment with her to complain about how unfairly the authorities were treating our theatre in Tashkent, in fact, they simply would not let us breathe. On the appointed day «our patroness» met me in her office. I saw a completely  different person in front of me. The same face but a different expression. The same voice but absolutely different words: «Apparently, it’s your own fault that you are supported so poorly in Tashkent. I cannot help you. Deal with it yourselves».

Later I understood that the executive lady was very upset that she had surrendered to emotion after our performance, and she had inquired about us, or perhaps received some instructions. In any case, she was terrified that she had supported a «dissident theatre».

I also realized after our tour in Moscow that we had found not only new friends but also more powerful enemies. Moscow officials supported their colleagues in Tashkent. They simply untied their hands. Of course we were really to blame for creating the independent Ilkhom Theatre that grasped the meaning of our strange time and reflected it directly to the audience. But the perspective we had before us promised to be even harder for all Ilkhom's people. Attempts to ban us were doubled. Deep in my heart I was saying good-bye to our Theatre.

4.

Ifeel all the time like telling more in detail about the performances we managed to make, about many purely artistic discoveries and revelations that we encountered in our work. But the limits of this chapter make me avoid long narration and focus more on Ilkhom and its Time. In fact, even within this topic, it is not possible to describe everything. Sometimes it seems to me that we lived several lives, so much there was of everything.

Meanwhile, for us, young Soviet avant-gardists, 10 years passed like nothing. Ten years after we started, the epoch was quickly replaced by yet other important historical events.

The Perestroika saved Ilkhom from elimination. A year before Gorbachev came to power we received written instruction to remove 5 plays from our repertoire. Various commissions checked Ilkhom, they wrote junk reports. The KGB collected «written testimony of the public» demanding an investigation at what was going on and the closing of the theatre.

In 1983-1985, I worked a lot in Moscow. In a way, that saved me from direct collisions with the Tashkent administration. It was quite in the style of that time that they could do anything to me. Although as our present time shows, the means of bringing influence to bear upon the unwanted have not changed much since.

Gorbachev’s time turned everything upside down. Within a short period, armies of officials were dismissed from their posts. Society and the press started to speak. In one day, the new officials changed their color and suddenly began hailing Ilkhom as the banner of the new time. Awards poured down on us. Without long bureaucratic procedures, I was granted the title of Honored Art Worker and a large apartment (before that, I lived with my family in one room, and in the Soviet time the officials controlled the distribution of housing). I was invited to teach at the Institute of Arts. Ilkhom was now invited to official festivals. Finally, they permitted us to register Ilkhom as an organization: to open a bank account, to start selling tickets and earning money.

It all reminded me of a Hollywood movie with a happy ending. Dozens of theatres around us rushed to produce once forbidden plays: Dear Yelena Sergheyevna by Liudmila Razumovskaya, Good-Bye, the Ravine (Dogs) by Konstantin Sergheyenko, plays by Alexander Chervinsky, Semyon Zlotnikov, Sharaf Bashbekov, etc. that Ilkhom had already staged long before that and had paid dearly for being obstinate.

At that period we realized how far ahead of time we were. Immediately, we lost interest in plays with words and for a long period plunged into experimental work of non-verbal performances: theatre of visual metaphor, clown theatre. We also made several TV versions of our work.

The face of the theatre and its group started to change. The life of a virtually new Ilkhom began. The actors who played in the performances Ragtime for Clowns, Clomadeus, Petrushka brought a new energy and sense of theatre belonging to the new Perestroika time. And Ilkhom began conquering new space and new audiences.

Ilkhom received invitations from many western festivals. We started playing in New York and Dublin, Oslo and Vienna, Copenhagen and Belgrade. We won applause in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Italy, and Germany.

I mentioned only a few of the countries and cities we were invited to, as they make a special page in Ilkhom’s biography. There is a lot to tell about this, with very different themes and stories. For instance, what we felt when the curtain between the West and the East fell and we, once not daring to dream about a trip to America, with practically no foreign languages, suddenly found ourselves alone with western civilization, facing a different audience, different life style, the necessity to communicate with a different context, a different flow of history, etc.

I could tell a separate story about how and what changed in my actors as they discovered the world for themselves, what they acquired and what they, in my opinion, lost by stepping out into infinite space. For, alas, no acquisition saves us from losses.

In recent years we have produced a number of international co-projects and student exchanges. We have brought many foreign performances and performers to Tashkent. As director, I had a whole series of performances in the West, mostly in the US. One can say that Ilkhom became a real cultural exchange bridge between Oriental Tashkent and the West. We even held a big festival called «East-West» in 1993. However, nothing insured us against new trials and tribulations, and historical collapses.

In the early 90’s, Ilkhom looked like an islet that tried to relieve tension and hold together continents that were falling apart. Naturally, it was inadequate for this gigantic task. Everything around was cracking and breaking under the onslaught of violent political chaos, human irresponsibility, political considerations, ambitions, offence, and a desire for revenge. That was how the Soviet Union was breaking up. According to a poll (spring 1991), Uzbekistan was among those who wanted to keep the USSR. BUT: No one asked anybody anymore. «Satan rules here», as Goethe wrote.

The Performance of My White Mercedes according to Alexei Shipenko catapulted onstage our reaction to this troubled time and its atmosphere. Or, more precisely, it showed the surrealistic panorama of our state of mind.

By unexplainable coincidence, we started to rehearse the performance on the day of the August 1991 Putsch, and finished it in December – in the days of the agreement signed in the Belovezhskaya Puscha by the historic «temporary governors», who went there either hunting (this happened in the woods, in a national preserve), or to the sauna with some alcohol. Those were the brand new leaders of Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine. Out of the three members of the conspiracy none is left in politics. But they have done their business and played the last trump that helped to close officially the Break-Up Case. In no time, we, the former Soviets, all found ourselves in different countries, on different sides of borders, some on different sides of barricades.

When in My White Mercedes (1991) a tipsy main character with the name of Apostle John (Ioann) started to bawl the USSR anthem, the house used to burst out with heavy applause. I do not remember that our people had any special feelings towards our anthem (a big difference from the Americans), but when they lost their country, people started to feel painfully nostalgic of what was left behind.

In the meantime, other passions started to run high outside. Nationalists were arising who mainly relied on the provinces and provincial mentality. No, we did not betray ourselves, and the Mercedes did not become an apology of the past. Its handsome young hero John – a KGB officer – killed on assignment … a person he loved and, suffering, he revealed to us his distorted inner world that came into view as a black New Testament. But if the classical New Testament of John is a testament of love, the new one, made up by the sick imagination of our hero, is about a psychological complex of a person who never belonged to himself.

It looked as though with this performance we had closed a huge theme for ourselves, and said good-bye to the Soviet Union. Some nationalist-minded ruffians promised to burn the Theatre after the show.

No, they were not worried about the historical context of the performance. They just did not like anything in principle: the artistic means we used, the text of the play. They did not like the homosexual theme Ilkhom had touched for the first time, the nakedness of the characters and their excessive freedom of conduct. «You live in a Muslim country, so please take the trouble of following our rules», we heard for the first time. I realized that something was going back where it had been for Ilkhom. Struggle again?

God knows I did not want it. God knows by the time of the New Dramatic Changes I was just tired of it.

Early 1990’s – this was the time when it was dangerous to walk in the streets. When parents took their children to and from school. This was the time people were afraid to go to the theatre in the evening. Since that time, all shows in Tashkent start at 6 p.m. instead of the usual 7:30 – 8 p.m. For the first time the house at Ilkhom was not full.