Issues of Translation and Adaptation
in conversation with:
Ilkhom Theatre
Tashkent, Uzbekistan
and
Bata Theatre
Almaty, Kazakhstan
Respondents:
Leslie Buxbaum Danzig
Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts, University of Chicago
and
Leah Feldman
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago
Attendees are encouraged to view pieces by The Ilkhom Theatre and The BATA Theatre in advance of the workshop. A clip of The BATA Theatre’s Pushkin Standup can be found here and a clip of The Ilkhom Theatre’s Imitation of the Koran can be found here.
Logan 701
Tuesday, November 13th 4:30-6:00pm
The Ilkhom Theatre is one of the first non-governmental professional theatres in the history of the Soviet Union, founded in 1976 by Mark Weil and a group of graduates of the Tashkent Theatre and Art Institute. A studio-based theatre, Ilkhom engages its young adult acting students in its performances. The theatre focuses on diversity, producing many plays based on translations of ‘World Literature,’ problematizing the term by generating pieces that engage with the multi-lingual and confessional cultural environment of Tashkent Uzbekistan and its Uzbek, Tadjik, Russian, and Yiddish as well as Islamic, Judaic, and Orthodox Christian communities. In this way, the theatre expresses the at once deeply local and cosmopolitan character of the city. In September of 2007 after the murder of its founder Mark Weil, his former student Boris Gafurov became the artistic director and the theatre was renamed “Ilkhom,“ the theater of Mark Weil.
The BATA Theatre is an independent theater founded by Veronika Nasalskaya in 2017, which produces performances that incorporate traditional Central Asian music and poetry with electronic music and movement work, translating canonical poetic texts to a contemporary context to raise issues around representations of gender and race in post-Soviet Central Asia. The brainchild of the theater was the play ErTostik Groove, a modern epic involving two actors and a sound-transformer. They have collaborated with both the Ilkhom theatre and Omnibus musical ensemble.
Boris Gafurov is an actor, acting instructor, and the artistic director of the Ilkhom theatre in Tashkent Uzbekistan. Gafurov studied under Mark Weil, the founder and former director of the Ilkhom theatre and has been involved in the Ilkhom since its transition to independence in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Artyom Kim is a composer and the co-founder of the Omnibus ensemble, a musical collective blending rhythmic poetics, traditional Uzbek, and contemporary European music styles. Omnibus has worked closely with the Ilkhom on musically driven physical theatre projects since 2004. The name of the ensemble, meaning “able to move in all directions” or “to serve for all,” describes its mission to work collaboratively with actors to generate collective compositions.
Veronika Nasalsayaka is an acting instructor, actress and co-founder of the Bata theatre in Almaty Kazakhstan. She founded Artishok theatre (the first independent theatre company in Kazakhstan), produced the Studio of Audio-Visual Arts Blow.up, and is the head of the Creative Training Center. She has organized numerous international festivals of contemporary art and culture in Central Asia and is the recipient of awards for her theatre productions.
Vyacheslav Evstafiev is an actor, musician, director, and co-founder of the Bata theatre. He also previously worked with Artishok and has collaborated with Omnibus.