THE BOY DANCERS OF UZBEKISTAN
BY LANGSTON HUGHES

Langston Hughes (1901-67) was an American writer of significantly mixed slave and slave-owning ancestry who was allowed, most unusually for a foreigner, to travel in Soviet Central Asia for five months of 1932-3. He then wrote two articles on what he learned there that touch on Greek love. One of them, “In an Emir’s Harem,” does so only very slightly, but the other, “The Boy Dancers of Uzbekistan” published in the American monthly travel magazine Travel issue 64 (December 1934), pp. 36-7, and presented here, is very relevant to it even though it does not mention it. This is because of the testimonies of countless other writers, many of them on this website, that the dancing boys of the future Uzbekistan often served in the boy harems of their patrons (which is known to have been the case for at least the last four Emirs of Bokhara) or, if public performers, could be sexually available to their admirers.

The Central Asiatic Republic of Uzbekistan lies in that portion of the map where Afghanistan curves toward China. Before the Communist revolution, the cult of boy dancers permitted any handsome young man skilled in the subtle steps of the dance to achieve the kind of fame that in the West attends a Greta Garbo or a Clark Gable. From Ferghana to Bokhara, from Osh to Samarkand the great boy dancers, before Stalin came, were known and loved by the men who crowded the tea houses and dance fairs to see them perform.

As in the orthodox theaters of China and Japan, so in Central Asia formerly only men took part in public performances of any sort. No women were allowed to act or dance. Nor did the men in Uzbekistan ever take women to public spectacles. Woman’s place was very much in the home—locked up.

Those boys who danced as women put on wigs and dresses and cultivated the delicate gestures of rhythmic pantomime. Some became great artists, but many were only common entertainers in tea houses, the centers of masculine life in Central Asia—particularly in Uzbekistan, where the chai-khana is as common as a soda fountain in America.

To these tea houses only men came. In sunny weather they sat outside on raised platforms squatting on soft Oriental rugs from Merv or Bokhara, little bowls of tea in front of them and gourds of powdered tobacco in their laps. Their padded gowns, their turbans and their bright round caps were gay against the mud walls of the chai-khana as they sat on the shaded platforms, a bit removed from the dust of the road and the passing camels and asses.

At night, long-necked instruments with one or two strings and the hashnigh, a kind of double flute, would send up their curiously wailing music. The boy dancers would be there shaking curly black heads in the courtyard, stamping out their patterned rhythms. Allah and the Prophet forbade the drinking of wines and liquors, but on nights of revelry the tea bowls did not always contain tea. Through the dark streets in these Oriental cities, shouts of merriment would echo from the frequent pools of light that were the tea houses.

I learned most about the boy dancers from Achmedjean Aca-Uzmozaif, to whom I was introduced in Tashkent by that amazing woman, Tamara Khanum, leading dancer of the Uzbek National Theater. Aca-Uzmozaif is an old man of great gentleness and fine musicianship. His memories go back far beyond the recent Bolshevik revolution, back to the days when both the British and the Russians were seeking control of that vast territory east of the Caspian—and he was a flute player for the wedding feasts of the rich beys. Now he is an honored member of the National Orchestra of the Uzbek Republic and one of the finest makers of reed instruments in all Soviet Asia.

Seated with tea and cakes and candy in the modern home of Tamara Khanum, with chairs and tables instead of rugs and cushions on the floor, Aca-Uzmozaif told me about the boy dancers of the past. None of the younger members of the present theater, Soviet educated boys and girls, would talk with me about this particular phase of the old native life. Even those men who once were boy dancers before the revolution would not speak of it. They knew it was something visitors from theWest might not approve of, or understand. Besides, the young people were full of the present, full of excitement about the Second Five Year Plan and the latest plays from Moscow on the triumphs of Communism that were being translated for their native theater. Not that Aca-Uzmozaif was uninterested in these things but he remembered the past, too, and spoke of it.

Through an interpreter (a member of the former Russian nobility at Tashkent), he told me about the great dance fairs that used to be held years ago throughout Uzbekistan. To those fairs the rich beys came from mountains and desert to buy the boy dancers, or employ them as semi-permanent entertainers in the great walled gardens of their remote estates.

At those widely heralded dance fairs, great crowds of men would gather in their robes and bright sashes, turbans and round little caps, their gourds of tobacco tasseled to their waists. They squatted or stood, their yellow-brown faces in a tight packed circle, about a vast cleared space in the open air. (Tamara Khanum had an old photograph of such a fair in one of her albums.) There would be an orchestra of strings, flutes, and drums to play the traditional tunes. The sun would blaze down. The dust would fly.

From the four corners of Uzbekistan, all the boy dancers, bacha, who were free and could travel and knew about it would come to perform. They would put on their wigs with the girlish curls, their silken robes and bright boots. Then each one in turn would begin to circle to the music in the vast outdoor space, recreating in his own way the patterned movements, the delicate turning of the head and wrists, that characterize the Uzbek dance. The huge male audience would shout their approval as each especially beautiful traditional movement revealed itself anew, expertly developed by the boy in the dusty ring.

Aca-Uzmozaif told me of one very famous boy dancer called Ata Haja whom he had once seen circle an enormous area three times repeating with each step the intricate and delicate pattern of a difficult traditional movement, repeating it so beautifully that the four thousand onlookers at the fair broke into roar after roar of shouts and cheers.

About these dances there was nothing vulgar or uncouth. They were ancient gestured rhythms and plastic pantomimes moulded into traditional patterns, handed down by generations of dance-makers out of the past. The spectators knew the movements of many of them by heart, and loved them for their beauty. To Western eyes nothing would have seemed unduly strange—except that the dancers with their long curls, smiling and beckoning with their eyes, were boys, not girls.

As each boy finished dancing, he would leave the circle and go with his father or guardian to bargain with the merchants, the beys and the tea house proprietors. Only the very rich few could secure for themselves the services of a great dancer like Ata Haja. Only the rich, anyway, were able to maintain on a grand scale the use of numerous boy dancers for the entertainment of themselves and their male guests and, at the same time, to keep the large harems that went with position in the East.

The less expert of the dancing boys at the festivals, finding no favor in the sight of the wealthy, would have to pass their time performing in the roadside tea houses until another dance fair came around. But the lucky ones who secured a good master would be well cared for. They would dance before his company in luxurious courtyards with music and fountains and silken rugs and food aplenty, and would no longer have to go about the land from tea house to tea house, dance fair to dance fair. All this, however, was yesterday—fifteen years ago, twenty, thirty; then on back into the past, far, far back into the past as long as man can remember. Suddenly, one year there were no more dance fairs, there were no more boys in the tea houses!

Why? How could that be?

What could have happened to change the customs of a thousand years—to start women pouring out of harems, tearing off their veils, and beys fleeing to Afghanistan?

“The revolution,” said Aca-Uzmozaif. “All is changed! Changed! Today, a woman, Tamara Khanum, does the steps the bacha used to do. Today the young boys have jobs. They go to school. They belong to the Komsomols.”

For Asia’s youths, the old man told me (as I already knew), there are now many schools, compulsory up to a certain age, filled with brown and yellow boys and girls. There are illustrated text books for them in all the Oriental languages of that part of the world, Uzbek, Farci, Tartar, and even in languages that had no alphabet before 1922. Since the revolution, athletic activities of all sorts have been introduced to Central Asia. Football, boxing, tennis, and track events. In Samarkand, Kokand, and

Tashkent several large stadiums and many tennis courts are built, or are being built. Huge crowds gather at rugby games on rest days—cheering native boys fighting for a goal.

Those days when men crowded about the dusty circles of the dance fairs are over. Healthier, if less traditional, amusements now hold the popular fancy, and every youth is anxious to be a fisculturnik, and wear the badge given by the state to those who are physically perfect.

The days of the boy dancers in the tea houses—those youngsters who whirled in silks and wigs at the fairs and sold themselves to the rich— those days are over. The Soviets forbid the buying and selling of anybody, male or female.

However, the old dance steps are still preserved in the Uzbek theaters. They are danced at festivals and taught to young theater workers—but these workers get a salary from the state. They belong to a union. And the art of dancing in public is no longer limited to men, either as participants or spectators. Indeed, the dancer most famous today—from Ferghana to Bokhara, Khiva to Kokand—whose every move across the stage brings shouts of approval, is this same little woman with dark eyes and long black hair, Tamara Khanum, my hostess of the evening.

Aca-Uzmozaif says she knows almost all the steps the great boy dancers once knew. They say in Tashkent that she will soon be made a People’s Artist of the Republic of Uzbekistan, the highest honor the government can give to one who creates beauty. Had she grown up twenty year ago, she would have been locked in a harem. Now, when she goes on tour you may see her name TAMARA KHANUM on the bill boards of many ancient cities along the golden road to Samarkand. Already, she has traveled further than any of the boy dancers, even those belonging to the richest beys, ever traveled. As a Soviet artist, Tamara Khanum has been to Moscow and even to Paris.