*EPF317 05/22/2002
Smithsonian Folk Festival Will Showcase Central Asia in June, July
(Festival will highlight Silk Road, legacy of inter-cultural linkages) (1110)

By Phillip Kurata
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- Chinese opera stars, Turkish paper makers, Tibetan monks, Afghan chefs, and Uzbek throat singers will be among hundreds of artisans, musicians and cooks from 20 countries from Italy to Japan who will soon come to Washington to participate in a festival celebrating the legendary Silk Road.

The festival, "The Silk Road: Connecting Cultures, Creating Trust," will be staged on the Washington Mall, a broad expanse of lawn stretching between the Capitol and the Washington Monument, during ten days in late June and early July.

Organizers say they expect record-breaking crowds because of growing interest in the storied trade route made famous by the 13th century Venetian trader and writer Marco Polo. The U.S. State Department will host journalists from a number of Central Asian countries associated with the ancient Silk Road to visit and report back to their home countries about the festival.

The Silk Road was in fact a series of trade routes that connected Europe to Asia from the first millennium B.C. to the middle of the second millennium A.D. In addition to silks, carpets, teas and spices, the Silk Road also carried ideas, philosophy, religion and art.

"As a result, great transformations took place," said Larry Small, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the organizer of the festival. "All the cultures that were involved changed, and that process of change continues to this day."

The idea for the Silk Road festival came from renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who suggested it to the Smithsonian Institution three years ago. Ma, the co-producer of the festival, said the idea for the festival came to him as a result of his travels.

"One of the things that one learns from traveling is that in visiting you're welcomed into people's homes and into people's hearts, and as people share with you what is most precious to them and open their hearts to you, sometimes it's impossible to reciprocate. Maybe the only thing that I can do as a traveler is to take what is precious then advocate it and share it with others," Ma said.

"It is really not about east, west, north, south," said Ma. "I think ultimately it is about circulation, the understanding and the connections of all the different cultures and that's the heart of the message of the Silk Road."

Ma's Silk Road Ensemble, a musical group consisting of Ma and musicians from throughout Asia playing their native instruments, will perform concerts in the evenings during the festival.

The Silk Road exhibits will be organized both geographically and thematically. At the western end of the mall, visitors will find Venice Piazza, Marco Polo's starting point. Walking eastward, they will stroll through the pavilions of Istanbul Crossroads, Samarkand Square, Xian Tower and Nara Gate. Along the way, they will see seven meter high replicas of the Bamiyan Buddha statues that were destroyed the Taliban in Afghanistan, a Central Asian caravanserai, Pakistani truck painters, nomad yurts, a Chinese rest house and a Japanese inn.

Beside Nara Gate, Asian kite masters will fly their intricate and beautiful masterpieces in the swirling breezes of early summer.

In an open expanse of grass to the east of Nara Gate, Central Asian polo players will mount their ponies and demonstrate how the game is played in their homelands, but with one difference. It won't be the classic form of buzkashi, played with a goat or sheep carcass. The games of polo at the Silk Road folk festival will be played with a ball.

The thematic displays will be set up beneath the tall elm trees parallel to the larger geographic exhibits in the open space of the mall. At the paper-making pavilion, visitors will see the various paper-making techniques used from the Uighur region of western China to Turkey and Venice.

"The idea is to bring people from different traditions, separated by hundreds of years and thousands of kilometers of geography together in the same space so that those artists can exchange ideas about their culture," said Richard Kurin, director of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian.

At the ceramics display, visitors will be able to see Chinese porcelain makers turning out blue and white ceramic wares and Turkish potters using modified Chinese designs and methods to produce Islamic and Turkic motifs. The Silk Road connected potters from the eastern and western ends of the Asian continent and enriched their wares.

The weaving pavilion, called the "Silk Grove," will feature carpet weavers from Turkmenistan, Turkey and the Navaho Indians of the American Southwest, who will demonstrate how carpet-making techniques spread around the world in the Silk Road caravans.

"But the Navaho Indians had nothing to do with the Silk Road," a journalist commented to Kurin. "Why have a Navaho weaver at the Silk Road festival?"

Kurin's response highlighted the enormous impact the Silk Road has had across centuries and continents. "Native American craft wool came from the Spanish during the colonial era. The Spanish brought Turkic designs from Central Asia. Native American weaving tradition has roots in Central Asia," Kurin said.

Visitors also will be able to "taste" cultural linkages in the cooking stalls of the festival. Pizza, a world favorite, apparently was brought to Italy via the Silk Road, Kurin said.

"My kids like pizza. Where does pizza come from?" said Kurin. "If you've been to an Afghan restaurant in Central Asia, you've had that flat puffy bread that is known as nan. It looks an awful lot like pizza. We're looking at the correspondences between different people's cuisines."

Kurin said the Silk Road played an important role in the spread of ideas and music as well. Buddhism spread north from India into China and the guitar arrived in the West via the Silk Road, he said.

"In Central Asia, there is a simple one-stringed instrument, the tar, and it's played by wandering bards, mystics and fakirs. The idea of the tar seems to travel to ancient Persia where one string becomes two, and it was called the dutar. In India it became the more familiar sitar. The string instrument seemed to travel to China and also westward and in the Arabian countries, it's called the quintarra. In Greece, it's known as the chitarra, which is much like a zither. In the form of a stringed lute, it travels to Spain and it is known as the guitarra and then to America where it is known as the guitar," Kurin said.

(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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