It's a lovely summer afternoon right at the start of August 2024. I'm in my workroom with my feet up, catching up with some mending, when the landline rings. It's my long-time compatriot friend Hattie St John on the phone: when I was a teenager I used to see her singing on TV in Aotearoa New Zealand and she was one of the first people I was introduced to after moving to Berlin in April 2002. She's back in town for the sunnier months, doing lots of shows and catching up with friends. We do a bit of our own catching up and then she springs a surprising question...
 |
| Certainly wasn't expecting this... |
"Would you like to go on an all-expenses-paid trip to the Sharq Taronalari festival in Uzbekistan for a week at the end of the month? You might be performing or attending a conference, it's not entirely sure what." Ok, possibly not her exact words but definitely the gist. And despite having been not entirely well for the preceding 20 months – part of it involving near-death and, bar a couple of months high-speed loping along on crutches, most of it literally limping along – of course the answer is "Yes!" I commiserate with Hattie on not being able to go herself and offer thanks for being offered this amazing chance. Exactly the kind of fortuitous boost I've been needing. I like to think the successful springing about/testing out of my 5-month-old replacement ankle during a northern Korean shamanistic 'casting-off-burdens' dance at ADG7's see and hear Ak Dan Gwang Chil's Korean shamanic folk-pop here concert on the outdoor terrace at Haus der Kulturen der Welt the week before seems to have been responsible for putting more than physical healing into motion...
 |
| New ankle at 1.5 months OR why I had my feet up |
Suddenly all of my relaxed three-week rehearsal schedule and last organisational tasks for the upcoming Berlin edition of Aotearoa New Zealand's Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day are looking at lot more crunched. Following a telephone call with the Berlin agent, AHOI Kultur's Mahide Lein, I've now got extra bureaucratic duties to fulfil, audition videos to film, research and packing to do. I get my smallest best suitcase out, open it ready for action then remember it's needed for Poetry Day as well. Life is full of suffering and sacrifice, especially in service to the arts.
Nevertheless, despite the excitement, there is an audition conundrum. The biennially-occurring Sharq Taronalari (melodies of the east) festival organisers want traditional songs from Aotearoa New Zealand. From their curatorial perspective of folk music it makes sense, and so far as 'east' is defined my country of origin is one of our globe's most eastern lands – at least according to that invisible international date-time line dotted in the deep sands drifting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. But as any well-educated history and theatre graduate of Scots-Irish-English extraction knows, daring to represent my country's kapa haka (literally, line dance) group performance tradition singing solo and a cappella in Maori in this flourishing post-colonial era would seem a bit like grifting. I have several well-known and often-sung Te Reo songs in my repertoire, dating right back to a couple sung at intermediate school aged 11 and 12, others learned near-four decades ago at my local Āraiteuru Marae in Ōtepoti Dunedin, action songs we sang together at the bi-lingual primary school I worked at in central Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington a mere three decades ago, plus more sourced across the past two decades from the magical internet. In reality, I'm more professionally specialised in east European archaic village songs, but they don't want that from me and in any case that tradition is, as well, a group endeavour. (If winning the German Record Critics Prize for Folklore in 2008 for a CD of singing in Russian counts as expertise – that with ensemble Polynushka, of which I was one of three co-founding members in Berlin in 2004.) To my mind I can't comfortably tick all the right boxes, so the following day I throw the audition with some slightly sub-par performances shot on the laptop, taking advantage of the shoddy acoustics of my workroom. The festival happily invites me as a journalist instead.
 |
| Press credentials |
Do I have regrets about not cloning a couple of doppelgänger and blagging/working up my representative act in favour of singing in front of the beautifully restored mosaic tiled madrasas on Samarkand's historic Registan Square? Yeah, a bit. Though 'Tūtira mai ngā iwi' (we the people stand together) would also have felt a bit weird with clones. Yeah-nah. Probably a lot weird. So it goes. Maybe I can start a kapa haka group in Berlin and get us invited in 2026... maybe.
I've never been on a junket before. I DuckDuckGo an Internet search on Uzbekistan. Looks like some tax-or-otherwise-generated revenue possibly from gold or uranium extraction in turn extracted from the Ministry of Culture coffers could be paying for this. At last! Some of the wealth of the richest 5 percent of the country's population shall be diverted into the hands of someone who can still only yet aspire to be the first and only poet in the 1%! Return flights, 5-star hotel, meals, several nights of live entertainment as part of a seemingly invite-only audience, hair-raising 'Press'-labelled mini-van transportation between locations, a bit of sightseeing, the lot. Incredible, the speed of transition into a privileged existence. Though of course, for my such outrageous jet-fuelled extravagant fortune we are in fact all paying for this.
The last time I'd been on a plane was for a family-related trip to Switzerland in 2017 and I've been on record since then as a proponent of train travel and public transport. I do the carbon calculations. BER-ADB-SKD 0.72 tonnes + 0.67 tonnes SKD-IST-BER = 1,39 tonnes. Assuming all my sequestration planting survives to maturity and isn't destroyed by an extreme weather event it's the equivalent of 13.5 large trees for these 16 hours of flight: it's a good thing I started a second street garden in front of my building earlier in the year. 'My' tiny centralish Berlin permaculture empire now totals four sites – if you count the landed garden and the potted garden in the courtyard as two separate entities. Going aloft, I shall have to do far, far better on and with the ground to keep my ecological credentials afloat.
 |
| Compensatory street-side carbon sequestration in action |
Having flown across central Asia in 1998 from one home and economic crash in Seoul to another pending in Moscow, I do at least feel well-fitted and culturally educated as a modern traveller to finally set foot on the ancient silk road. I've seen traditional Chinese performances in Beijing, sung an arirang ginseng harvest song and attended concerts of numerous Korean performers in Seoul, attempted over-toning after being inspired by adept Tuvan throat-singing magicians, heard babushkas singing old village songs in the Moscow Metro, and ended up singing Ukrainian, Polish and Russian village songs professionally myself thanks to what I first learned via the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław and Fundajica Muzyka Kresów's workshops on Poland's eastern borderlands. I place my Russian-English dictionary into the packing pile, look up how to say hello – Salom – and thank you – rahmat – in Uzbek, follow the Sharq Taronalari Instagram page, take heed of two friends recommending the street food, read other travel writers' tips, select some semi-dressy, culturally appropriate working-holiday clothing, add the toiletries collection and check various travel advisories. There are some minor border skirmishes and a tiny bit of local political dissent about but generally things in Uzbekistan are extremely safe, and you, me and everyone else are good to go; even Germany's then-Chancellor, Olaf Scholz had his own trip there in September 2024, we just missed each other by a couple of weeks. Fortunately my reputedly 4th-best-in-the-world passport is pretty much a golden entry ticket in visa terms and alongside print-outs of the flight tickets and a copy of my travel insurance policy it goes on the top of the packing pile. Prepped.
 |
| Good to go |
Almost. I pitch an old friend on RNZ's culture programme and online magazine The Spinoff but with none of we AotearoaNZ on the Registan stage I know it's an outside chance they'd take anything. Similarly, English-language monthly The Berliner won't be interested in retrospective reporting about the festival appearances of the Berlin-based band of global musicians and culture Profis I'm heading east with as the majority of that magazine's coverage is pre-emptive. The Guardian only accepts pieces from UK citizens and/or writers who have a track record with them. So a series of blog articles and sharing on social media it is. What to do? Monetising freelance journalism these days is hard yakka but that's literally the only way I can pay my dues to the festival, and here we are. In any case, who am I to complain on this front? After all, I'm among we multitudes who consume things online exclusively for free because pay-for content is a luxury item.
Back in Berlin reality check, the first 24 hours after Hattie's phone call are spent in a haze of surreality and it takes two days to accept it's really actually happening. Only then do I write a note to my family telling them what I'm doing.
Life's usual 'everything-all-at-once' clips along apace: yoga, physio, grocery shopping, cooking, fasting, resting, sleeping, garden resilience-building, extensive watering, two batches of biscuit baking (Anzac Crispies & icing-less afghans), poetry set finalisation and practice, 23 August's Poetry Day done and dusted. Two days later I'm on the tram down the hill, riding the S-Bahn south-east to Brandenburg, pacing through the seeming endless kilometres of BER airport's Terminal 1 to line up and endure the excruciating, time-consuming queues and check-in procedures, even before aboard the plane reminded in spades exactly how tedious flying is. Sadly, we already lose one of our party right there in the terminal: without six months remaining on her passport and despite a return ticket in a week's time she's not permitted past the outward gate keepers. Note to everyone: if you're travelling and transiting internationally check individual countries' visa rules on near-expiring-passport eligibility.
 |
| The ultimate Sharq Taronalari Berlin airport assembly line-up, L-R, Olga Kovalevska, Aly Keïta, Mahide Lein, Noureddine Ben Redjeb, Sol Okarina, Angela Ordu, Sandra Sarala |
Yet luckily for her that means she misses the horror of travelling for 8 hours of no complimentary food nor water with Türkiye's budget concern JetExpress, the only airline the festival could book us on to get across there at such short notice. In transit in Izmir I splash out on the necessity of a pretty small, fortunately very yummy, heated sandwich roll that's subject to airport prices and a tragically inflation-ridden-currency: paying near-on €10 with my EC debit card I get a taste of why so many people in Turkey are struggling to afford food these days. Alongside The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Uzbekistan, the Khokimiyat of Samarkand Region, UNESCO, ICESCO (Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), and Ankara-headquartered TÜRKSOY (International Organisation of Turkic Culture) are festival sponsors. I'm a big fan of governmental and international organisations giving financial lifelines to the arts in these days of well-cracked non-circular late capitalism and wonder if any small part of the VAT on the sandwich goes indirectly to the latter. As I ponder this while eating my delicious and welcome food I really hope to return to the country again for a longer visit than just a two-hour airport transit.
And here in this moment of transition I pause to explain the logic of publishing my serial account of this mini-odyssey exactly one year after the fact. Those preceding 20 months of not-entirely-well mentioned in the second paragraph had actually fortunately occurred at a moment in time when I was, somehow, weller than at other times, in that they occurred when the chronic neuro-immunological condition I co-exist with, ME/CFS, (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) was in remission. Unfortunately it returned on the heels of the return trip from Samarkand to Berlin, triggered by being awake for 24 hours during the crossing back. It's been with me ever since, and I've really been feeling it today while editing this after last night's 2025 Poetry Day celebration. But that's another story. The story of day one in Samarkand at Sharq Taronalari 2024 is coming tomorrow...
 |
| Here's a sneak preview |
No comments:
Post a Comment