Buz bazi

Buz bazi ( Persian , from buz , "goat" and bāzī , "game", so "goat game") is a very rare or disappeared form of a puppet show with a marionette in the shape of a goat , which was there at least until the 1970s in the north Afghanistan gave. A solo entertainer sings folk songs and accompanies himself on the two-stringed long-necked lute dambura . One hand of the musician, with which he strikes the strings, is connected by a thread to the goat figure, which hops up and down as the hand moves during the game. There are comparable goat puppets in other regions of Central Asia . They refer to an old popular belief in the magical meaning of mountain goats .

Origin and cultural environment

Puppet show

Puppet shows with visible puppets or as a shadow play are relatively rare in the Orient and Central Asia . The best known is the Turkish shadow play Karagöz , which can be traced back to the Ottoman Empire from the 16th century and was probably influenced by the older Arab shadow play . Possibly from the 12th century there were shadow plays in Central Asia, which, in addition to a simple form with static figures that appeared in Mamluk Egypt from the same time, can be considered as a starting point for the Turkish shadow play. The Mamluks were military slaves with nomadic roots and came from the steppe areas of Central Asia or the Caucasus . Turkic peoples who migrated westward from Central Asia in the late Middle Ages are generally held responsible for the spread of shadow plays, hand puppets and marionettes. The historical region of Turkestan is considered to be the home region of hand puppets (Turkish kol korçak ) and marionettes ( çadır hayal ). The latter means “presentation under a tent”, which refers to the stage structure. Such performances still take place there.

Literary evidence of the existence of puppet theaters in India is much older. The Indian epic Mahabharata (written down in writing from the 4th century BC) mentions puppet theater and shadow theater as one of the first sources, as well as that around 80 BC. Written Buddhist work Therigatha . Apart from the spread of the South Indian shadow play and other puppet theater in the first centuries after Christianity in Southeast Asia ( wayang in Indonesia), puppets with nomadic peoples presumably reached Europe from North and Northwest India via Asia. The kathputli puppet theater is still popular in the north-west Indian state of Rajasthan . It deals with topics from the history of the Mughal ruler Akbar I (r. 1556–1605).

Several historical works and literary texts have documented the existence of dolls in the Persian region since the 11th century. Some authors at the time suspected their origin in India or China. In fact, the Rajasthan puppet theater and today's Iranian puppet theater kheimeh shab bazi (from chaima , "tent", schab , "night" and bazi , "game") have a lot in common in terms of how the characters are guided, the sequence of the performance and the themes concerns.

Popular puppetry was part of the program of a traveling troupe in many places from the early modern period, such as the Russian Skomoroch , who traveled from Europe to Central Asia. In addition to puppeteers, there were storytellers, jugglers, acrobats and various animals to dancing bears . Some of the entertainers also appeared as hairdressers, healers or dental plumbers; in all cases in little-regarded jobs.

In the late medieval poetry of Sufism , the metaphor of God as the chief puppeteer often occurs in Ghaselen . Sufimystics saw the puppet show as “... the symbol of God's actions in the world.” For example, Omar Chayyām (1048–1131) connects the fate of people with that of dolls ( lo'bat ). God as a doll master ( lo'bat baz ) brings the dolls to life and puts them back in the dark box at the end of their life:

"Only dolls that fate plays with are here on earth,

Everyone must recognize that of the clearer face;

Pieces on the chessboard are pushed in the same way

Then they take us away and put us in the coffin of nothing. "

goat

Goats and sheep have been sacrificial animals in South Asia since the time of the ancient Indian Rigveda ; Indian gods are identified with goats and are shown surrounded by goats in religious myths. The cultic worship of mountain goats in the Hindu Kush and Pamir still exists in some places today. In one of the best-known folk tales of the Bashkirs , a Turkic people living in the Urals, the most important possessions of the youthful hero are a white horse, a white falcon and a he-goat figure carved out of wood that can dance and to which he addresses wistful verses.

There is only one report from 1948 on hand puppets in Uzbekistan, and references to hand puppet shows in Afghanistan are sparse. A puppet performance with a goat in Kyrgyzstan , comparable to buz bazi, was described by WS Winogradov in 1939. In the performance, known to this day as tak-teke (“the jumping goat”), the actress - mostly women - plays the jaw harp temir-komuz while a goat figure moves on a table in front of her. The goat on a stick jumps up and down, turns and makes bizarre movements with its legs, stimulated by a thread that leads through a hole in the table to the actor's right hand, where it is tied to a finger. If the tongue of the jew's harp is plucked with this hand, the goat begins to hop in time to the music. The jew's harp , komuz and accordion player Adamgaly Bajbatyrov, who like Vinogradov was one of the most famous Kyrgyz musicians of his time, moved around with a puppet theater in the 1930s. In his 1968 book on music in the Soviet Union for Turkmenistan , Vinogradov depicts a male dotar player in front of a box on which two goat puppets face each other, which he makes to dance with two strings. According to the description by EM Peschcherewa in 1957, simple goat puppets existed in all of southern Central Asia. From the Samarqand area to the heights of the Pamir Mountains and in the Afghan province of Badachschan , goats were widely used as children's toys among Tajiks and Uzbeks . The figure was held at the bottom with one hand while the other hand pulled on a string. A tightrope walker toy figure could be moved in a similar way. A movable goat figure as a children's toy was sold in the market in Kabul . Apparently, professional entertainment musicians incorporated the toy goat into their program.

Live, trained goats and other animals used to play an accompanying role in musical performances in the region. Known in northern Afghanistan, musician Bangecha Tashqurghani performed in the 1970s with a dog that sat on its hind legs and turned while playing. In Nizam Nurjanov's 1956 study of Tajik folk theater, a singing group is described that made a stuffed goat dance on a string in Kulob (in southwest Tajikistan). Dancing stuffed goat puppets as a comical addition to vocal performances as well as live goats have been described for the entire region. Buzkaschi , a Central Asian equestrian game, in which the participants fight each against each other to snatch a goat carcass (occasionally a dead calf) and bring it to a specific destination also belongs in this context . The competition is conducted with great rigor by the participants and enthusiastically accompanied by the spectators. In some areas, mountain goats are said to have a magical power. Goats, which are part of the game in the Tajik mountain region of Berg-Badachschan , are painted as lucky symbols on rocks and house walls. The shrines ( mazar , in dialect mazor ) of local saints and other holy places ( oston ) can be recognized in Berg-Badachschan by the raised horns of wild goats or Argali . Mark Slobin also saw goat horns at some mosques and holy graves in northern Afghanistan, which refer to the ancient cultic meaning of goats. In a pantomime dance by the Tajiks, which Nurjanow describes in 1969, the hunt for mountain goats is depicted.

In the Iranian province of Khorasan there was an Islamic sect until the 1920s, whose members worshiped goats and ritually slaughtered goats. Men and women accompanied the slaughter ritual with music and dance. Disguised and masked showmen, dancers and musicians have been known in Iran since the Sassanid Empire . Some rituals and performances, in which zoomorphic masks and costumes were important, were continued in Islamic times. Dancers disguised as goats can be seen on miniatures from the 16th and 17th centuries. Men acting with horns on in this way could refer back to an older, mystical shamanism , which may have survived as a cultural remnant among some extreme Sufi sects such as the Qalandar . Other images from this period, on the other hand, show comedians, dancers and musicians disguised as goats, who clearly did not appear in a religious context but as entertainers.

performance

The Persian expression bazi occurs as a suffix in many word combinations that designate a game or drama for children and adults for entertainment or a competitive game, for example lo'bat bazi or surat bazi , "puppet show", buzana bazi , Afghan competition with quail and - mainly found in northern Afghanistan - bacha bazi , "boy play". In the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, the pantomime theater mascharaboz was popular in the area of Tajikistan , which performed at weddings and on public holidays. The social position of the performers was, like that of the other traditional popular entertainers, very low.

During his fieldwork in northern Afghanistan between 1967 and 1972, the ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin interviewed a buz bazi player in Cholm who belonged to the socially inferior ethnic group of the (Persian-speaking) Arabs. He performed like street singers, comedians or acrobats and played preferably in tea houses in small towns around his hometown. There is also a description of a buz bazi player in northern Afghanistan in the early 1950s and of a variant of this performance with an antelope figure as a puppet ( ahu bazi ), which the ethnomusicologist Hiromi Lorraine Sakata found in the Hazara region in central Afghanistan in the mid-1960s .

The equipment of the musician from Cholm, whose nickname was Abdullah Buz-baz, included a precisely carved goat puppet from wood, which is attached to the tip of a stick and sits on an approximately round wooden plate. This plate is attached to a larger rectangular pedestal with a round wooden handle about 20 centimeters long. The figure is brightly painted and hung around its neck with a bell. A cord was attached to the vertically movable rod directly under the wooden plate, which Abdullah wrapped around his right wrist. As with the other goat puppets mentioned, the musician stretched the string so that the goat stood up a little and its legs floated freely. While he strummed both strings of his instrument at the same time, he made the goat move up and down and thereby turn indirectly in a circle. The goat's hopping seemed more random than specifically controllable. Towards the end of a song he let the goat hang motionless in the highest position for a moment and then collapse.

The long neck lute used is a Turkestan dambura , the most widespread form of dambura in Afghan music . The slender, pear-shaped body, carved from a single piece of wood, merges into an attached long neck, at the upper end of which the two strings are attached to front vertebrae. The third part of the instrument is the glued-on wooden ceiling. The total length is about 100 to 110 centimeters. The Turkestan dambura is significantly longer than the Badakhshan dambura , which is played in the Afghan province of Badakhshan and is similar to the dombra ( dumbrak ) used in Tajik music . Abdullah played mostly popular dance song melodies with a constant beat.

Abdullah met buz bazi in Badakhshan. According to him, the goat figure was made by a craftsman east of his hometown near the border with Badakhshan province. The figure embodies a screw goat that occurs wildly in Badachschan. It is called in Persian mārchor , "snake eater ". In the mythical stories of the Pamir Mountains, Mārchor, who possess magical powers, belong to the circle of fertility and shepherd gods.

literature

• Mark Slobin: Buz-Baz: A Musical Marionette of Northern Afghanistan . In: Asian Music, Vol. 6, No. 1/2 ( Perspectives on Asian Music: Essays in Honor of Dr. Laurence ER Picken ) 1975, pp. 217-224

Individual evidence

1. ^ Fan Pen Chen: Shadow Theaters of the World. In: Asian Folklore Studies, Vol. 62, No. 1, 2003, pp. 25-64, here p. 30
2. ^ Don Rubin, Peter Nagy, Philippe Rouyer (Eds.): The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theater: Europe. Taylor & Francis, New York 2001, p. 864
3. ↑ ML Varadpande: History of Indian Theater. Abhinav Publications, New Delhi 1987, pp. 62, 66
4. ^ Inge C. Orr: Puppet Theater in Asia. In: Asian Folklore Studies , Vol. 33, No. 1, 1974, pp. 69-84, here p. 70
5. ↑ Shiva Massoudi: "Kheimeh Shab Bazi": Iranian Traditional Marionette Theater. In: Asian Theater Journal, Vol. 26, No. 2, autumn 2009, pp. 260–280, here pp. 278f
6. ^ Frank Proschan: Puppet Voices and Interlocutors: Language in Folk Puppetry. In: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 94, No. 374 (Folk Drama) October – December 1981, pp. 527–555, here p. 545
7. ↑ Annemarie Schimmel : Mystical Dimensions of Islam. The history of Sufism . Insel, Frankfurt / Main 1995, p. 294
8. ↑ The Rubaijat by Omar Khayam accompanied by Persian miniatures. Translated by Adolf Friedrich von Schack . Parkland, Stuttgart 1979, p. 60, ISBN 3-88059-135-0
9. ↑ Cf. Maria Schetelich: Sheep and goat in the religious belief of Rgvedic people. ( Memento of May 27, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) In: L. Icke-Schwalbe, G. Meier (Ed.): History of science and current research in Northwest India. Dresden Museum of Ethnology. Proceedings of the third colloquium on Ladakh held in 1987 at Herrnhut near Dresden (German Democratic Republic) . Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden, 1990, pp. 90–99
10. ↑ Valéria Csikai: An unpublished Bashkir folk tale variant . In: Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1974, pp. 37-61, here p. 48
11. ↑ Svein Westad "Tak teke". Свеин Вестад Варган и куклы. Youtube video (Norwegian folk musician)
12. ↑ Ernst Emsheimer : Jew's Harps in Siberia and Central Asia. In: Ethnos , Volume 6, 3–4, Stockholm 1941, reprinted in: Ernst Emsheimer: Studia ethnomusicologica eurasiatica . Musikhistoriska museet, Stockholm 1964, pp. 13–27, here pp. 22f
13. ↑ Mark Slobin, 1975, pp. 219f
14. ^ Robert Middleton, Huw Thomas: Tajikistan and the High Pamirs. Odyssey Books & Guides, Hong Kong 2012, p. 634
15. ^ Mark Slobin, 1975, p. 222
16. ↑ Farrokh Gaffary: Evolution of ritual and theater in Iran . In: Iranian Studies , Vol. 17, No. 4, Herbst 1984, pp. 361-389, here pp. 362f
17. ↑ Nizam Nurjanov: Tajik Folk Theater and Puppetry . In: Asian Music , Vol. 8, No. 1 (Afghanistan Issue) 1976, pp. 65-77, here p. 66
18. ^ Mark Slobin: Music in the Afghan North 1967-1972: Teahouse Music. (Illustration of the goat figure: click on the bottom photo or on the word "marionette")
19. ↑ Mark Slobin, 1975, pp. 217f
20. ^ Mark Slobin: Music in the Culture of Northern Afghanistan. (Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, 54) The University of Arizona Press, Tucson (Arizona) 1976, pp. 212, 214, 219
21. ^ Karl Jettmar : The religions of the Hindu Kush. (The religions of mankind, volume 4.1) W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1975, p. 346f