(Inner) Mongolia Comes to Canberra

Canberra has an annual multicultural festival and one of the events was a performance last week by the Inner Mongolia National Song and Dance Troupe. This was sponsored by the Chinese Embassy -- "Inner Mongolia" is the part of the traditional Mongol lands that is now located within China's borders. Reflecting the increasing sinicization of Inner Mongolia (80% ethnic Mongol in 1900, something like 20% now due to Han Chinese immigration), all of the performers but one had CHINESE names, not Mongolian. But still, I must say they looked basically Mongolian.

But one dancer looked exactly like Chiaki Kuriyama, the Japanese actress who played the psycho schoolgirl killer G0-Go Yubari... fortunately, without the weapon.

It was a pretty good show. Lots of dance -- whether it was "traditional" Mongolian dance I really can't tell, because I don't know squat about dance, but they certainly didn't feature the Buddhist tsam mask dances that I recall from Mongolia. At least a couple of numbers didn't seem very "Mongolian" to me -- for example, something called the "Pagoda" Dance with a dozen women dancing with a stack of bowls on their head. Never saw anything like that in my time in Mongolia. And another dance that at one point featured the ladies going "cuckoo ... cuckoo." Huh?

Some of the costumes seemed a bit odd to me. One routine featured a half-dozen guys as "wrestlers" dancing. Their outfits looked like an elaborate exaggeration on the traditional Mongolian wrestling outfit, which is basically a blue pair of shorts shaped like briefs, and a short sleeveless vest, the purpose of which is to leave no doubt that none of the participants are women. Another performance had the same guys in something vaguely resembling the dress uniforms of the Mongolian Army, carrying urgaa (long poles with loops on the end, serves as a Mongolian lasso) and dancing energetically as if they were riding horses. But the dancing was entertaining, even if I'm still uncertain of its authenticity. (Frankly, at times I was thinking of the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii, a Mormon-run place with Disneyfied depictions of Polynesian music and dance featuring students from the Pacific Islands who are on scholarship at Brigham Young's Hawaii campus. )

However, there was no doubt as to the authenticity of the standout performances of the evening. Four men sang a couple of Mongolian numbers, later joined by four women singing some songs that were beautiful and reminiscent of the steppe.

But the highlight, the part of the show that must have been the most foreign to the Aussies in the audience, was the sextet that played the Mongolian horse-headed fiddle and other instruments, and featured throat-singing, aka khoomei. That is a "singing" where a man (although nowadays a few women are studying the art) produce a low, guttural rumble and a high-pitched whistle -- at the same time. The horse-headed fiddle is a bow instrument, with only two strings made of horse hair. It's incredible the variety of music you can get out of such a simple instrument. Anway, these six played and sang for 20 minutes and entranced the audience. When they finished, people rose to their feet -- the only standing O of the evening. The rest of the show was very good, but THIS was the true highlight, a wonderful exhibition of a type of music unique to Mongols and their cousins, the Tuvans.