# THE BOY DANCERS OF UZBEKISTAN

By LANGSTON HUGHES

THE NATIONAL DANCE

Sovfoto

The art of the dance is still preserved in Uzbekistan. This young
dancer is executing the difficult movements of the "raks," a favorite
national dance, in which he holds two full cups of tea in his hands.

THE Central Asiatic Republic of Uzbekistan lies in that por-
tion of the map where Afghanistan curves toward China.
Before the Communist revolution, the cult of boy dancers
permitted any handsome young man skilled in the subtle steps
of the dance to achieve the kind of fame that in the West at-
tends a Greta Garbo or a Clark Gable. From Ferghana to Bok-
hara, from Osh to Samarkand the great boy dancers, before
Stalin came, were known and loved by the men who crowded
the tea houses and dance fairs to see them perform.

As in the orthodox theaters of China and Japan, so in Central
Asia formerly only men took part in public performances of
any sort. No women were allowed to act or dance. Nor did the
men in Uzbekistan ever take women to public spectacles.
Woman's place was very much in the home—locked up.

Those boys who danced as women put on wigs and dresses
and cultivated the delicate gestures of rhythmic pantomime.
Some became great artists, but many were only common enter-
tainers in tea houses, the centers of masculine life in Central
Asia—particularly in Uzbekistan, where the *chai-khanna* is as
common as a soda fountain in America.

To these tea houses only men came. In sunny weather they

sat outside on raised platforms squatting on soft Oriental rugs
from Merv or Bokhara, little bowls of tea in front of them
and gourds of powdered tobacco in their laps. Their padded
gowns, their turbans and their bright round caps were gay
against the mud walls of the *chai-khanna* as they sat on the
shaded platforms, a bit removed from the dust of the road
and the passing camels and asses.

At night, long-necked instruments with one or two strings
and the *hashnigh*, a kind of double flute, would send up their
curiously wailing music. The boy dancers would be there shak-
ing curly black heads in the courtyard, stamping out their
patterned rhythms. Allah and the Prophet forbade the drink-
ing of wines and liquors, but on nights of revelry the tea bowls
did not always contain tea. Through the dark streets in these
Oriental cities, shouts of merriment would echo from the fre-
quent pools of light that were the tea houses.

I learned most about the boy dancers from Achmedjean Aca-
Uzmozaif, to whom I was introduced in Tashkent by that amaz-
ing woman, Tamara Khanum, leading dancer of the Uzbek
National Theater. Aca-Uzmozaif is an old man of great gentle-
ness and fine musicianship. His memories go back far beyond
the recent Bolshevik revolution, back to the days when both
the British and the Russians were seeking control of that vast
territory east of the Caspian—and he was a flute player for the
wedding feasts of the rich beys. Now he is an honored mem-
ber of the National Orchestra of the Uzbek Republic and one
of the finest makers of reed instruments in all Soviet Asia.

Seated with tea and cakes and candy in the modern home
of Tamara Khanum, with chairs and tables instead of rugs
and cushions on the floor, Aca-Uzmozaif told me about the boy
dancers of the past. None of the younger members of the present
theater, Soviet educated boys and girls, would talk with me
about this particular phase of the old native life. Even those
men who once were boy dancers before the revolution would
not speak of it. They knew it was something visitors from the
West might not approve of, or understand. Besides, the young
people were full of the present, full of excitement about the
Second Five Year Plan and the latest plays from Moscow on
the triumphs of Communism that were being translated for
their native theater. Not that Aca-Uzmozaif was uninterested
in these things—but he remembered the past, too, and spoke
of it.

Through an interpreter, (a member of the former Russian
nobility at Tashkent) he told me about the great dance fairs
that used to be held years ago throughout Uzbekistan. To
those fairs the rich beys came from mountains and desert to
buy the boy dancers, or employ them as semi-permanent en-
tertainers in the great walled gardens of their remote estates.

At those widely heralded dance fairs, great crowds of men
would gather in their robes and bright sashes, turbans and
round little caps, their gourds of tobacco tasseled to their waists.
They squatted or stood, their yellow-brown faces in a tight
packed circle, about a vast cleared space in the open air.
(Tamara Khanum had an old photograph of such a fair in one
of her albums.) There would be an orchestra of strings, flutes,
and drums to play the traditional tunes. The sun would blaze
down. The dust would fly.

From the four corners of Uzbekistan, all the boy dancers,
*bacha*, who were free and could travel and knew about it would
come to perform. They would put on their wigs with the girl-
ish curls, their silken robes and bright boots. Then each one

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in turn would begin to circle to the music in the vast outdoor space, recreating in his own way the patterned movements, the delicate turnings of the head and wrists, that characterize the Uzbek dance. The huge male audience would shout their approval as each especially beautiful traditional movement revealed itself anew expertly developed by the boy in the dusty ring.

Aca-Uzmozaif told me of one very famous boy dancer called Ata Haja whom he had once seen circle an enormous area three times repeating with each step the intricate and delicate pattern of a difficult traditional movement, repeating it so beautifully that the four thousand onlookers at the fair broke into roar after roar of shouts and cheers.

About these dances there was nothing vulgar or uncouth. They were ancient gestured rhythms and plastic pantomimes moulded into traditional patterns, handed down by generations of dance-makers out of the past. The spectators knew the movements of many of them by heart, and loved them for their beauty. To Western eyes nothing would have seemed unduly strange—except that the dancers with their long curls, smiling and beckoning with their eyes, were boys, not girls.

As each boy finished dancing, he would leave the circle and

go with his father or guardian to bargain with the merchants, the beys and the tea house proprietors. Only the very rich beys could secure for themselves the services of a great dancer like Ata Haja. Only the rich, anyway, were able to maintain on a grand scale the use of numerous boy dancers for the entertainment of themselves and their male guests and, at the same time, to keep the large harems that went with position in the East.

The less expert of the dancing boys at the festivals, finding no favor in the sight of the wealthy, would have to pass their time performing in the roadside tea houses until another dance fair came around. But the lucky ones who secured a good master would be well cared for. They would dance before his company in luxurious courtyards with music and fountains and silken rugs and food aplenty, and would no longer have to go about the land from tea house to tea house, dance fair to dance fair.

All this, however, was yesterday—fifteen years ago, twenty, thirty; then on back into the past, far, far back into the past as long as man can remember. Suddenly, one year there were no more dance fairs, there were no more boys in the tea houses!

(Continued on page 49)

PANTOMIME UNDER THE NEW REGIME

Sovfoto

Formerly the art of the dance in Uzbekistan was practiced exclusively by boys for the entertainment of rich beys and the masculine audiences of the tea houses. Today dancing is performed by men and women alike and women are no longer excluded from the audience. Here at one of the festivals in Uzbekistan a boy and girl dancer are giving the tea dance. The musicians are seated in the background with their stringed instruments, their flutes and their drums.

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