Bahor

Bahor is Uzbek for spring: a state dance ensemble in Tashkent. Mukarram Turgunbaeva founded it in 1957, a choreographer from the Andijan region whose grandmother first encouraged her love of dance. She wove traditional Uzbek movement together with Western classical form and shaped a stage style the country calls its own.

The company she built was mostly women: Uzbeks, Russians, Tatars, Poles, Koreans and Kazakhs on stage, men on traditional instruments. She called the dancers her forty beauties and the musicians her fifteen sons. She found them places to live and celebrated their family occasions with them. Her choreography set the standard for dances like the tanovar and helped establish the Muqimi Theater, Uzbekistan's first musical theater. The repertoire holds more than two hundred national dances, many of them her own. Tours have taken the ensemble to nearly sixty countries. Funding cuts brought hard years in the 1990s, and by 2007 the group had fallen silent. In February 2020 a presidential decree revived it.

Later directors such as Kunduz Mirkarimova, Ravshana Sharipova and Mamura Ergashova worked to keep her traditions alive. The state honoured Turgunbaeva as a People's Artist of Uzbekistan, and in Tashkent a museum keeps her costumes, posters and memorabilia, with exhibits centred on the dance of the 1920s and 1930s. On stage today you see that inheritance in motion: bright costumes, intricate choreography, dancers and musicians celebrating the country's heritage together.