An Ancient Asian Tale Of Female Resistance
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan — Gathered in a concert hall recently in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, a group of eight women and one man rehearsed a musical retelling an ancient epic tale called “Forty Girls.”
The story dates back more than 2,000 years but has a strikingly contemporary theme: how a band of female warriors in the deserts of Central Asia had resisted aggression by the men who wanted to conquer them. The women all die in the end but nonetheless avoid submission.
The new telling of “Forty Girls,” which mixes video, songs and traditional and modern music, marks a bold departure for a Muslim country. That is particularly so in Uzbekistan, as it struggles to shake off a legacy of brutal repression left by its former president, Islam Karimov, who ruled the country from independence in 1991 until his death in 2016.
Mr. Karimov left so little space for independent creative activity that many of the country’s artists stopped working or moved abroad, including Saodat Ismailova, the creator and director of “Forty Girls.” She spent most of the last decade in Paris but recently returned to Tashkent to rehearse her show, which had performances in New York last month and was also scheduled to be performed in Tashkent.
It has been funded by the Aga Khan Music Initiative, a program that withdrew from Uzbekistan when Mr. Karimov’s rule took a repressive turn in the 2000s.
The performances, Ms. Ismailova, a filmmaker, said, would “break all the clichés about our cultures” — and also remind Americans that “girl power” has a long history.
Ms. Ismailova has drawn a distinctly feminist lesson from the “For- ty Girls,” a story originally transmitted only orally but put down on paper during the Soviet era by a Russian poet and ethnographer who understood Karakalpak, a language spoken in western Uzbekistan.
Ms. Ismailova’s fascination with “Forty Girls” — “Qyrq Qyz” in Uzbek — began with a visit in 2012 to a bookshop. She found a Russian translation of the epic by Arseny Tarkovsky, the ethnographer father of the celebrated Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. She had a dim memory from childhood of having heard the story, but the Russian translation brought into clear focus a story that has since taken over her life and work.
The story of the female warriors long predated the arrival of Islam in Central Asia in the middle of the eighth century, and despite efforts by some Islamic preachers to mute its message, the epic survived, thanks to traditional storytellers and the nomadic ways of much of the population. “Nomads adopted Islam in syncretic forms that assimilated and preserved myriad local practices and beliefs, many of them connected to veneration of spirits and various forms of shamanism,” said Ted Levin, an expert on Central Asia at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, who has worked to promote the region’s culture in the West.
“Forty Girls,” the earliest layers of which date to the sixth century B.C., revolves around Gulaim, a 15-yearold girl who rejects marriage and gathers around her 40 like-minded horsewomen on an island in the Aral Sea. That inland sea, in Karakalpakia, a remote desert region in the western part of what is today Uzbekistan, has now mostly disappeared.
The music for “Forty Girls” was composed by Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, a musician born in Uzbekistan who previously served as composer- in- residence at Harvard University. He described it as a “collage of musical forms that is both modern and traditional.”
Mr. Yanov-Yanovsky said he saw the production as a parable open to different interpretations. “If the audience has many questions, then I think we have succeeded,” he said. “The more questions, the merrier.”