I guess I’m a sucker for spectacle.
I’ve been known to watch the Olympics opening
ceremonies (just leave out the smoke machines, please), and I’ve traveled
around the world more than once with music and cultural events in mind and on
the itinerary, if not exactly the destination
per se.
That includes WOMAD’s and Womexes, and
multiple SXSW’s, and music and cultural festivals in cities as diverse as
Livingstone-Zambia, Pyongyang-North Korea, and
Zanzibar.
Sharq Taronalari is not the kind of music festival where you
top up on your favorite intoxicant, then boogie till the sun comes up with
music from all over the world.
No, this
is more like music carefully curated from state-sponsored entities in
Uzbekistan in
coordination with state-sponsored agencies in foreign countries to provide
representative selections from representative groups to showcase the world’s
ethnic diversity, sort of an Olympics of world music, without the competitive
edginess.
No, this is not WOMAD.
But then again, it’s not North Korea’s Arirang Mass Games, either, a
carefully orchestrated propaganda spectacle that would rival or surpass the
opening to the Beijing Olympics in showmanship, but still a carefully-staged
propaganda event.
Still, here you are
expected to sit down.
That’s one of the
only problems really, not that kids threaten to turn the venue into their own
private playground, but that the Soviet-era authorities seem overly concerned
to try and stop it, acting as truant officers to control the miscreants, to the
point of limiting access to the festival’s entry.
