A Bishkek Performance Without the Art Angst

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I never expected to see performance art in Bishkek, but that is exactly what I found in the back hall of the popular Metro Pub early last week. For 40 minutes, I could have been in a distant avant-garde cabaret or Brooklyn loft.

I am not sure if I really "got it," but what is art, anyway? In this case, a cascading pile of dozens of white plastic lawn chairs, each branded with the West cigarette logo, formed the stage's limit. Three films played on televisions and projections around the room, depicting nakedness, water, desert, ruined buildings and men in turbans.

The main action came when a man juggling fire rolled around in the center of the open space, spinning and turning on thin strips of shiny aquamarine cloth. He was followed by an even more limber woman who had a similar routine, but left the flaming sticks backstage. She walked upside down on all fours, with her chest thrust upward, before taking a turn inching around the floor in a leotard, like a giant oddly sensuous caterpillar.

The troupe was rounded out by a talented jazz band dressed in dark shades and floppy white hazmat suits. One of a handful of decent Bishkek bands, they usually play in the much more urbane Hyatt Hotel. Here they played light minimalist riffs, punctuated with bright cymbal splashes.

The last time I had been in the space was for a strikingly mainstream Halloween party attended by almost all the expats in town. That night, the manager of the pub dressed as a glow-in-the-dark skeleton and deejayed Europop from behind a laptop in the corner after the band went home.

The room is a beautiful old theater, the likes of which are becoming more and more rare in the United States. There are box seats and grand columns, and one side is covered in technically impressive conglomerate murals of Salvador Dali paintings -- melting clocks, dripping eggs, tigers, waterfalls and the Virgin Mary. For good measure, last week's performance was supplemented by a small exhibit of original photography. My favorite print was sensitive and ironic, depicting an elderly Kazakh man using an American flag as a Muslim prayer mat.

The show was refreshingly bizarre. There were only about a dozen people in the audience. Most seemed to know participants and sat around the perimeter smoking cigarettes. There was a striking difference between this crowd and fans of obscure art elsewhere. I sensed no elitism, no deluded sense of a hidden symbolism in the hypnotic movements before us. People smiled and were friendly, apparently just there for a good time.

Ethan Wilensky-Lanford is a freelance journalist in Central Asia.