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08 April 2010
Saving Modern Treasures in Uzbekistan and Sri Lanka
U.S. Ambassadors Fund grants help preserve dance, film archives
New York — Hearing about preservation of a country’s heritage and history can conjure up images of ancient buildings or crumbling documents. But more modern relics need not slip into utter decay before they are preserved for future generations, as Uzbekistan and Sri Lanka are proving.
The U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation (AFCP) has partnered with the Tamara Khanum House Museum in Uzbekistan and the Government Film Unit of Sri Lanka to preserve 20th-century cultural treasures. AFCP grants support preservation projects and partnerships throughout South and Central Asia and the world.
UZBEK DANCE AND WOMEN’S PROGRESS
“Suddenly from the wings in a velvet coat and soft high leather boots, straight across the stage there came a human vibrance like an electric magnet, instantly pulling the whole audience into the dynamic stride of her dancing feet,” was how American writer Langston Hughes described the first time he saw the Uzbek dancer Tamara Khanum on stage in Tashkent.
Khanum, a professional performer of traditional Uzbek dance, a genre that did not grace public stages until her talent and allure brought it to light, was captured in Hughes’ 1934 essays “Tamara Khanum: Soviet Asia’s Greatest Dancer” and “A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia.” Just as Hughes’s poetry helped break down racial barriers in America, Khanum’s courage to shed the traditional veil worn by women, and pioneer national dance as professional theater, forever changed Uzbekistan’s artistic history and opened doors for its female citizens.
With support from an Ambassadors Fund grant, a museum in her name, the Tamara Khanum House Museum, has updated and expanded its offerings. The museum, created in 1994 in the part of the house Khanum lived in before her 1991 death, displays a collection of Khanum’s costumes, photos, memoirs and theater posters, as well as audio and visual materials documenting her life and career. The museum previously was unable to display all of its wares and protect them from deterioration because of a lack of funds.
Khanum, who was born in 1906 to an Armenian family, performed for nearly 70 years, touring and bringing Uzbek dance to new audiences in countries worldwide. She put a modern twist on the traditional dances, interpreting them in her own energetic style. According to Gulsum Khamraeva, director of the Tamara Khanum House Museum, Khanum would also learn a traditional song and dance for each country in which she performed, and she would request a costume from each host country to wear during her performance. By the end of her career, she had learned 86 dance numbers from different places.
With the AFCP grant, the museum has restored 75 of the 100 costumes in the collection; the dresses, shoes and accessories reflect the national styles of countries including Albania, Indonesia, Korea, and Bulgaria, among others.
A new exhibition presents hundreds of photographs that tell Khanum’s life story and show how culture in Uzbekistan changed in her era. The display covers Khanum’s days as a young dancer, to her performances with various musicians, to advertisements for her international performances. An audio tour is now available to museum visitors, with recordings in Uzbek, Russian and English.
The project included the creation of a Web site, http://thanum.uz, which provides background information and photos of Khanum. The Ambassadors Fund supported the construction of the Web site in anticipation of it driving more traffic to the museum and preserving the legacy of a woman who captured worldwide attention.
“She is … brave and creative, breaking down old taboos, and, through her example, helping others to break them down,” Hughes wrote.
FILMOGRAPHY OF SRI LANKA’S RECENT HISTORY
Upon gaining independence from the British Empire in 1948, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) established its Government Film Unit (GFU). From the moment of its inception, the directors of the GFU began to record the newly autonomous country’s history, encapsulating everything from the independence celebrations to cultural practices such as song and dance, death rituals, medical traditions and religious observances. The GFU’s documentaries toured the country to bring news and cultural awareness to remote rural areas until television became more widespread in the 1980s.
But the collection, “perhaps unparalleled in South Asia,” was damaged by weather, poor storage and outright theft, with 60 percent of the original reels disappeared or destroyed, a U.S. Embassy Colombo report noted. Today, the GFU film archive consists of 1,500 reels of 15- to 60-minute films.
With a 2008 Ambassadors Fund grant, the GFU continues work to categorize the remaining films, create proper storage facilities to preserve the reels, and create a digital and print catalogue, featuring 152 documentary films and 18 other reels. The catalogue will be given to libraries, universities, the national archives and other institutions. The GFU will convert 100 of the most significant films to DVD format and make five copies of each; the films will be shown at public screenings, including a traveling film festival and on television.
“Documentary films from the independence era are a modern cultural treasure that can reach audiences all over Sri Lanka in a way that static sites cannot,” the grant said. “The portable and transmittable nature of this cultural archive makes it accessible to even the most remotely located Sri Lankans.”
The AFCP hopes the preservation project will encourage cultural awareness among Sri Lankan scholars and citizens, while also enabling future historical research efforts. The films reflect a shared past among the different ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, which have endured 30 years of conflict and tensions.
(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)
