Traditions of Performance Across the Silk Road & Through the Ages
Emily Haaksma, Nathan Lee, Emma Rice & Jilly Campbell
Silkworm: Elena Sippel
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Welcome to the Heart page! Our professor Zhihong dubbed our group with this beautiful title because she believed that all of our interests related to feelings of the most crucial organ and that our various passions for music, dance, and performance united us into one thumping rhythmic beat. We look forward to sharing our research with you, and we hope that as you explore our map you are able to assume the role of an audience member in a very metatheatrical sense: we are essentially creating our own performance via storymap in order to effectively explain traditions of silk road performance to you. After all, all the silk road’s a stage and all its nomads merely players.
Our group focused on different branches of performance along the silk roads, from Shamanic ritual to the horse head fiddle. Our research investigated the ways that the movement, spread and dispersion of music and dance across the Mongolian steppe region related to the corresponding traditions of ritual in the area. We found a lot of fascinating instances of iconic cultural traditions evolving with the spread of technology and general access to information. Examples of this phenomenon include a festival known as The Call of the 13 Shamans in Mongolia, and a Mongolian-style metal band that is based (interestingly enough) in New York City. After compiling our findings, we examined how the growth of one aspect of silk road performance impacted the evolution of another. We considered the way that this impact created room for the growth of cultural expansion of musical and ritualistic ideas.
Our initial collective goal was to determine the expansion of musical traditions related to regional religious and ritual practices, and we found as we went that a lot of questions of authenticity and appropriation began to crop up. We therefore eventually shifted a focus to the internationalization of silk road performative traditions and their relationship with authenticity.
Our professor Eric talked to us about the triangulation of the three concepts of agency, efficacy and authenticity, and this is an idea that we feel is crucial in understanding and critically evaluating the results of our research. To put it more simply, the modernization of performance along the silk road comes with a whole gamut of nuances. The religiosity of music is very important in the Mongolian regions, but we often ran into complex questions of realness: what makes a musical performance authentic? How do we determine whether or not something is appropriative, and if it is an appropriation of something more traditional, how does that detract from its meaning and importance?
We were especially interested in our personal roles in this globalization, and initially questioned whether or not we should include ourselves in the trajectory of our storymap. While our research was certainly a part of the ignition and spread of ideas that the modern day silk roads are so adept at facilitating, we were aware of the appropriative qualities inherent in inserting ourselves into a narrative that we do not necessarily have a place in. We came to recognize more and more our roles as observers; our intake of information and consequently our production of this project is a part of the transactional web that makes up the modern silk roads.
Something that we discovered is that it is easier to describe what’s happening now by relating it to what was happening originally. We realized that in order to best understand the present we had to acknowledge and examine the past from which it came. Essentially, we found that we needed a historical background in order to comfortably situate our modern-leaning research in a logical fashion.
This proved difficult because as we conducted our research, we discovered that in some situations there is no clear boundary between the past and the present. Take, for instance, the songs of rock bands Hanggai (see “Hanggai: Chinese Punk Looks to the Past” (Lim, “Hanggai: Chinese Punk Looks to the Past.”)) and Tengger Cavalry (see “Heritage, Horses,and Tengger Cavalry: Inside the World of Mongolian Folk Metal.” (Kim, “Heritage, Horses,and Tengger Cavalry: Inside the World of Mongolian Folk Metal.”)). Their music is produced using a combination of modern and ancient instrumentation, and many songs feature themes and lyrics associated with events of the distant past. Although they exist in the present, their songs call the listener back to a time of open grasslands, swift horses, and the warriors who rode them. While this romantic vision of the past may not be perfectly aligned with the historical reality of Mongol conquests, it does say something about those who seek to communicate it. These bands look to the spirit of the past to find hope for the future, refining ancient ideas through a modern lens to create a more ideal present.
Although present performances are often vital for preserving the past, ideas rarely travel through generations and emerge unchanged. For example, shamanism, a belief system which can be difficult to define and which exists in multiple distinct geographically-dispersed forms, means different things to different people and practitioners. While the shamans of inner Mongolia are rapidly aging and the longevity of their specific form of practice is therefore uncertain, tickets for publicly-performed shamanic dances are sold to tourists in the Mongolian capital of Ulaan Baatar. While an international festival of shamans assembles in the Tuva Republic to discuss the current events of the cosmos, Nature Ganganbaigal, the lead singer of Tengger Cavalry, obtains what he feels is a shamanic experience through performance of metal songs in various United States venues.
In the end, we are simply a group of wide eyed liberal arts students in Greensboro North Carolina spiraling into the Eurasian steppe region through our internet capabilities. However, we are now convinced that by conducting this project we have integrated ourselves into the new plastic mass of the digital silk road. This sort of silk road bricolage that we have waded through and eventually found ourselves completely quagmired in is an extraordinary opportunity, and we have realized that the silk roads are still very much alive today. We hope you enjoy our project within a grander project, written as a performance about performances, bridging gaps in time and space as the old silk roads once did.
(Open StoryMap in a new tab: https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/3fcacb6a29cb0caec95c97e93b898f19/testing/index.html)
What’s Next? Check out the other projects on The Digital Silk Road at Guilford College!
Team Earth Team Sky Team Tongue