KAZAKHSTAN: Traditional tribal Kazakh puppets win new audiences at a puppetry festival in Almaty

Record ID: 609809

  • Title: KAZAKHSTAN: Traditional tribal Kazakh puppets win new audiences at a puppetry festival in Almaty
  • Date: 28th September 2010
  • Summary: TEACHER IN APPLIED ART AT KAZAKHSTAN'S NATIONAL PEDAGOGIC UNIVERSITY, JOLAUSHI TURDIKULOB, PLAYING INSTRUMENT, MAKING TWO PUPPETS DANCE VARIOUS OF HANDS PLAYING INSTRUMENT, THREAD ATTACHED TO LITTLE FINGER MOVING
  • Embargoed: 13th October 2010 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Kazakhstan
  • Country: Kazakhstan
  • Topics: Arts / Culture / Entertainment / Showbiz,Lifestyle
  • Reuters ID: LVA6QURC75ZHS3RGW8BFRBQGJJRB
  • Story Text: Traditional Kazakh puppets, originally made by tribal artists in the southwest of Kazakhstan, have won new audiences at the 'Orteke 2010' puppet festival in Kazakhstan's cultural capital Almaty. The festival is devoted to the carved figures mounted on stands and manipulated using slender sticks and strings attached to their wooden parts.
    The classic 'Orteke' puppet is the character of a mountain goat, manipulated by a puppeteer who also plays a traditional Kazakh tribal instrument, the 'dombra'. The goat dances on its drum plinth, creating a percussive rhythm to accompany the string music of the 'dombra'.
    During the Soviet era, the tradition of 'Orteke' puppets was all but forgotten and only survived because of the few master craftsmen and puppeteers who preserved the tradition and passed it on.
    Jolaushi Turdikulob teaches applied arts at Kazakhstan's National Pedagogic University and also performs with puppets himself.
    "This is an old tradition preserved by the tribal people. There are a lot of descriptions about the puppet Orteke. There are a lot of poems about the animal that people used to sing and that is why this art has been preserved," he said.
    In contemporary Kazakhstan, with its search for a national identity, 'Orteke' has been taken up as a part of the region's folk heritage and experienced an officially-funded revival. 'Orteke' puppetry is also being taken up in other Central Asian nations with a tradition of wooden puppets.
    Performers from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan attended the festival in Almaty. Some of the 'Orteke' performers were as young as the audience and Rod Petrovich, Secretary-General of the World Association of Puppeteers, was impressed by how alive the tradition appeared to be amongst Kazakhstan's younger generation.
    "Mostly at the puppet festival children watch and old people play for them, and here it is very interesting that young, very young people, from five years, they play for the audience. This is fantastic, you can not see involved so many young children like in Kazakhstan, nowhere in the world," he said at the festival in Almaty.
    Alongside the theatre festival, an academic conference on traditional puppetry in 'Eurasia' was held, attracting scholars, ethnographers, art historians and historians of the countries participating in the festival. The aim of this meeting was to discuss ways of preserving and developing the traditions of 'Orteke' for future generations in Central Asian nations.
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