Discuss the Afsaneh Art and Cultural Society, which celebrates Central Asian art in the Bay Area
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:Okay. [inaudible]
Speaker 2:essentially, Asia is the crossroads of the world and for many centuries was the main trade route between Europe and Asia because of the influences of so many cultures. The art that was emanated from that region is astounding. From dance to music, [00:00:30] to science, to literature, poetry. There's a long and rich tradition of essential Asian art today with us. We have Charlene Sawyer, the founder of Asana Arts and Cultural Society, a nonprofit that has been celebrating Central Asian culture in the bay area for over 30 years. Stay with us.
Speaker 3:So Charlene, first, um, tell us a little,
Speaker 4:what about kind of your background [00:01:00] and how you came to, um, the appreciation of central Asian culture.
Speaker 3:Wow. It's a, it's kind of a, you, you can't predict where you're going to fall in love. And I fell in love with Central Asian, uh, specifically Persian music when I was quite young. And in fact my parents were here, uh, in Berkeley. I grew up mostly in Berkeley and we had friends that were from that part of the world. [00:01:30] Uh, we're just, we're just so lucky here in the bay area. I mean really we are so lucky. And it, you know, in my early childhood we had friends, we'd go over to dinner and someone would whip out a Centaur and a violin and everybody would be singing, taking turns singing their favorite songs. And I was just enamored of the music and it followed me. It was just that was it. I was smitten. So from an early age [00:02:00] you were exposed and it was love. It was just for the love of, yeah, love at first, listen. And then as a dance artist, which is what I, that was my path in life, I became more immersed in dances of this region and more immersed in the culture and the history and being kind of a history buff, I really got excited about the inner reaction, the interactions of cultures along this enormous area of your Asia, [00:02:30] which had informed, you know, so much of your, our European culture. And it was just a lifelong learning experience that continues to this day.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it is. It's such the crossroads of the world. And so amazing when you see the people from that part of the world, the features that they have, the really, really come from all four corners of the globe. They can, you know, these incredible green eyes you can have is Yannick features are just, it's so incredible. And people see the Buddhist statues in that part of the world.
Speaker 3:They [00:03:00] look different from other parts of, you know, eastern Asia, Buddhist type statues. They have all these different features just to make, take the makeup of the gene pool. That's the incredible, that's their other constantly, it's like somebody described it like the roundabout of your Asia that like Afghanistan and bacteria was Becca's Don Tajikistan, uh, parts of Iran. We're, we're kind of like where all of the traffic came together and started to circle and it was this incredible diversity [00:03:30] of, of cultures and peoples that makes it in that area. Very, very a multiethnic. Yeah. Yeah. So you had a love for it and you have a dance background. Tell us a little bit about that. Well, like every, every good young girl pretty much. And in America, I was able to take ballet and modern dance and just all the advantages as far as dance goes.
Speaker 3:And also world dance, which was offered here by various people who were from various parts of the [00:04:00] world. And that took African dance and Flamenco and uh, Middle Eastern dance and uh, folk dance of Bulgaria, the Balkans, you just everything. I was just soaking it up like a sponge. Uh, I started performing as a performing artist when I was maybe 12 years old and then started directing dance companies at about the age of 18. So ballet of Sauna. The grew out of that experience and my deep love for [00:04:30] this particular region of the world. And uh, I formed that company in 1986 in, uh, in a very interesting time as far as, you know, the politics of that part of the world went and my friends who are in the Persian community, it's a very, you know, Post Revolutionary Post Islamic revolution and a lot of, uh, a lot of people in the community were very, uh, there was a lot of profiling that was going on at that time.
Speaker 3:And it was very [00:05:00] important to have some kind of, uh, self-expression that could also be a universal language for, for others in, you know, the general population to know more about their culture rather than, you know, what's behind the headlines. Interesting. But it's the Berkeley girl that started and not a lot of Iranian, well, you know, it was interesting. We, there were several Iranians who, who have, uh, been in the dance world and were here either in Los Angeles [00:05:30] or in California or would pass through. But there are other concerns, you know, when you're a recent immigrant who's coming to terms with, oh, well, I guess we're staying here for a while. Perhaps dance and the arts are not the first thing on your mind. Uh, so we were able to work with some of those dancers that were from, from Iran and had, you know, had learning that they had brought with them and also musicians who are here in the area and to start [00:06:00] to save and reconstruct and preserve and also to innovate, uh, in that genre.
Speaker 3:And then became quickly aware that it was impossible to separate along national borders. The dance traditions or the music traditions or the cultural traditions of literature of this region, because the borders are really arbitrary. Yes. And relatively [00:06:30] recent politically speaking of we're, we see that there's some unifying factors. You know, you see Persian poetry in north India and you see Persian poetry in Istanbul, you see in Asia minor, you see Persian poetry and in Cairo, I mean these are, these are unifying forces. You see McCombs systems that are very similar in western China or what is called western China now, which [00:07:00] could be called Turkistan depending on which, which aspect you're, you're looking at. Uh, but those MACOM systems are fairly similar all the way through the entire Eurasian area that we're, we're interested in.
Speaker 4:And it's so interesting that you said that you started it in somewhat in response to the revolutionary times of the 80s, but it's almost more even more relevant now with the beat of drum [00:07:30] going on. The, the, the war drums beating Iran, Afghanistan has been in chaos for over 30 years. Um, and you know, it's, it's so relevant to bring the beauty of that part of the world to this part of the world so that people can understand that there's more to those people than what you see on CNN or you know, the kind of the gory headlines that we,
Speaker 3:right. It's hard to vilify someone whose music moves you or whose dance [00:08:00] is you're responding to the art and the culture and the history. It's a little hard to vilify that, that other as the other. Uh, and that's been kind of my subversive nature, you know, being at Berkeley, a good Berkeley girl, and having grown up with a family that it was all about social justice and civil rights and that this just tended to be my path.
Speaker 4:You're listening to k a l x Berkeley 90.7 FM. This is method to the madness, a 30 minutes [00:08:30] show by the innovative spirit of the bay area. And I'm your host Ali Nasar. Thanks for listening. Today we're visiting with Charlene Sawyer, the founder and director of ballet off Santa and the off center arts and Cultural Society. We've been talking about Central Asian art and the beauty of it. I'm a big fan. My family's from there, have heritage there.
Speaker 3:It's been a wonderful journey and I don't think I could have chosen to do anything else. It was almost [00:09:00] like, you know, the hand of fate grabbed you by the collar and pulls you along.
Speaker 4:So let's talk about a little bit about, um, the performances that you guys do. And so you have yearly performances, you have a schedule. How many of you performances on your a year on average do you, do you do?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we average about 18 to 20 public performances a year. Some of those are very small. Might be one, one solo, uh, artists at, uh, a community gathering or it might be [00:09:30] a 30 artists at of a large festival event or I think we went and did a New York, uh, parade out in New York for the awry, the Persian New Year parade. And we brought 30 dancers out for that. And it's a collaborating through the year. We do university performances. We've gone to the British Museum in London, so we're traveling quite a bit as well, uh, with the professional ensemble. [00:10:00] And then we have more of a community participatory group. Uh, ethnic dance festival has been a mainstay of our year for, for many, many years. I think I was performing myself and the first festival and uh,
Speaker 4:yeah, I attended that a couple of years ago. Tell the audience a little bit about the ethnic dance festival. It's a really wonderful event.
Speaker 3:Oh my God. There's nothing like it anywhere in the world. This is a festival that brings the enormous wealth of multicultural bay area ethnicities [00:10:30] that have all of these amazing groups that are either PR professional, pre-professional, or just folks getting together very high caliber work that's being turned out. And these are local northern California groups or specifically bay area. There are over, there are over 150 artists, most festivals. And it goes for three or four weekends in San Francisco. Uh, usually the palace of [00:11:00] fine arts, but they've started doing performances in other locations here. But Bueno, uh, at this point this year. And that takes place in June. And it's just, it's been a, a huge asset for San Francisco to help develop these diverse dance groups, specifically focused on dance. Interestingly enough, the media here has taken notice and it's very popular, but it took somebody from New York [00:11:30] doing a review of it to finally wake people up. You know, he was, uh, McCauley did this wonderful reviews, like where else, but San Francisco could you find this? And it's just, it's really not to be missed.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's breathtaking. I mean, you literally, it's every part of the world seems to be, you know, represented. So you'll be sitting there and you'll see a dance from Africa and you'll see one from China. [inaudible]
Speaker 3:Korea. Yeah. Tycho I all over Asia. I mean, it's just the entire [00:12:00] world. And I, I like to think of San Francisco barrier is kind of kind of like a, uh, a city on the Silk Road and the old, the old historic Silk Road. It's, it's almost that this is now, you know, one of those cities, one of those diverse cities where the exchange of ideas and the, the fantastic sparking of new new culture and new flavor becomes, becomes possible with that diversity.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's [00:12:30] very much what my show is about is about the innovative spirit of the bay. And I think a lot of it is because of that, you know, the melting pot that we have here and, and there's so many different cultures represented and that's the promise of America. But I think the bay area being a very progressive place and more accepting, I think that there's a lot more celebration of those differences here or there might be in other parts of the country.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I, I start to get that feeling as we travel, you know, and we oftentimes we're asked and you know, [00:13:00] in the old days it used to be asked here in the bay area, well, Joan, you're, you're doing dances from Iran and dances from Afghanistan. How come you guys aren't, you know, covered up when some kind of Burka situation, you know, I was like, well, you know, all these places are not all like that. You know, it's a very diverse area and there's a process of education that goes on and we still get those questions in, in many areas. Oh really? They play music is very interesting.
Speaker 4:Yeah. [00:13:30] I'm not just music, beautiful music, a long history, a long tradition of music.
Speaker 3:Amazing and, and very eclectic. You, you have everything from these very rough sounding, very rural, uh, rural pieces to this highly refined, highly developed, very, uh, ambitious compositionally. Uh, the, the mathematics, the sciences, the what, what we don't know about as a, as general American speaking as a general American [00:14:00] about the history and the contribution of that particular region of the world to world science, culture, religion, art. It's beyond, it's beyond measure. We, we know so little and it's high time that we know.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, I always tell people about, um, then, you know, during the dark ages of, of Europe, this is, this is the part of the world I'd kept [00:14:30] the, the light of flame, a lot of the Greek knowledge came through, was transferred over and a Persian because that's, that's, those were the people who were interested at that time or in Arabic. And that's how it was preserved. Absolutely. Well, um, you know, I wanted to ask about, you talked about the Silk Road is I've always loved the Silk Road too, and that, um, just the, the romance
Speaker 3:of it. Now this is huge. We've told total, tell listeners about the Silk Road. What, what is it? Okay. The basic facts, uh, 7,000 miles [00:15:00] of intersecting trade routes by land and by sea. Various points in history when it was in its heyday, I'd say one was, you know, 200 BC was, uh, a big, uh, big marker for, for the Silk Road Trade. And then we go into the, like you say, the medieval period from Europe when your Europe languished through the Dark Ages. And yet this enormous flourishing of art culture or science ideas was, was [00:15:30] it, you know, emanating from those regions in Eurasia, the Central Asia in particular. And then we move into the renaissance period, which were, was the benefit to Europe from that, that particular time on the Silk Road. That was the trade. It was coming straight out of China coming all the way through and meandering through with, by land, by sea, and eventually ending up in Venice, ending up in Istanbul [00:16:00] menace.
Speaker 3:And that's where a lot of that, that knowledge sparked the renaissance in Europe and then was able to go on from there. So, uh, the link, it represented like the metaphorical, what it was actually a physical link between east and west. And this was, uh, this was a series of trade routes, various ways. He, I have a, a map that we bring to our festival that shows all of these intersecting routes. And it's, it's so much fun because we'll have an audience, oh, [00:16:30] we haven't even talked about the festival. Yeah, we'll get there. Yeah, we'll get there. But we'll have people in our audiences come up and point to where their family was from or you know, here's where, you know, this happened or, you know, and then at a certain point, all of the, the trade routes started to go by way of the sea.
Speaker 3:You know, so the overland trade routes started to die out as a, as a conduit. And that was an interesting point in history. 1492, [00:17:00] Magellan and his crew young of all remember that that's when they were trying to find a way to circumvent those overland routes into China. And a lot of it had to do with the silk trade. A lot of it had to do with the fact that Rome and every empire after that, and Damascus as in Damask cloth as in Venice, uh, merchants who are hungry for silk and brocade, [00:17:30] which was controlled by the overland trade routes and all going through some Arakan Bukhara, uh, parts of parts of Iran, parts of the various countries. And those that we now know is countries in those areas and discovering a sea route and spices of course, discovering a sea route was imperative. It was like, we don't want to have to pay this high price for this stuff. Sure.
Speaker 4:You're listening to k a LX, Berkeley [00:18:00] 90.7 FM university community sponsored radio. This is method to the madness, a 30 minutes show that celebrates the innovative spirit of the bay area. I'm your host. Tallinn is r and today we've had with us Sharlin Sawyer, the founder of Asana Arts and Culture Society and Belly Offs Center, a local dance troupe that celebrates central Asian culture here in the bay area. Yeah. So, um, you've built the, the kind of jewel of the belly off sauna. Um, season is the festival of the Silk Road. [00:18:30] It's going to be a celebration of this romantic time. So tell us a little bit about that. It's coming up soon, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's coming up on May 6th down in San Jose at the Mexican Heritage Plaza, which is a fabulous theater and a great garden venue. It's just this wonderful place to have this festival. And we started this as a home season back in 2001 for ballet off Sony and we had a great uh, several years where we were just doing it as an exclusively [00:19:00] ballet of Sana with our collaborators. And about 2008 we realized that this was getting prohibitively expensive for everybody involved. Production costs were going way up. Most of our sister companies in the bay area, the people that we were collaborating with and that we would often see at various performances, we're starting to feel the pinch and it was just a great idea. It's like, okay, let's just get together and do this all at the same [00:19:30] time and share the cost, share the work and be able to bring this in as a community.
Speaker 3:Bring us together, celebrate and it's not exclusively traditional anymore. We have this, we're talking about self representation of peoples and communities who are not preserved in amber. I mean we're, we're innovating all the time and being able to innovate is part of what the Silk Road in my, [00:20:00] you know, in my opinion was about, it's like, what is it about, you know, bringing together different cultures and sparking some kind of creativity together. It doesn't just leave you as one thing. You're now being able to work with each other and create new ideas based on that input. So we look at the Silk Road is a metaphor for cultures in collaboration. So there's, there's these wonderful, they're wonderful innovative pieces [00:20:30] that are performed in the concert at the festival, the Silk Road. There's wonderful innovative goods and delicious food that are, you know, that are made that are there at the, at the bazaar we call the Silk Road Bazar there for the asking you. So it's this become wonderful community event.
Speaker 4:So it's one evening May, is that what you said?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's actually, we're starting the at in the afternoon. Okay. Now this is something we remember, we started this during the crash of, you know, after the crash of 2008 [00:21:00] yeah. When everybody was, oh gee, can we really bring, even even bring in an audience, will our audience have the gas money to get to let alone buy a ticket? So we reduced the ticket prices to half. We brought in everybody and we started with an extended evening with a Silk Road, bizarre and the concert and just kept yearning to do an afternoon component to be able to bring in more folk dance and participatory [00:21:30] dances and more participation during the afternoon for kids and families. And this is the first year we're taking the plunge this year. So we're really excited about that. Not only is there a concert with master artists and performing next to young talent, but we're also going as the afternoon with some Turkish folklore dancing. You know, they're bringing in the big bagpipes and the dark hole. And we were just taking over the garden in the afternoon with the bazaar and the, [00:22:00] the various activities.
Speaker 4:Wow, that sounds exciting. So that's may six,
Speaker 3:May 6th, uh, we start at three o'clock in the afternoon and go, the concert gets done. We're starting the concert early because it's a Sunday night. And you know, the kids and the older folks have to get home at some point. So we'll probably be ending between nine 30, 10 o'clock and stay open another little bit, which is okay.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And for the um, uh, listeners haven't been in the Mexican Mexican heritage hall, it is a really beautiful,
Speaker 3:yeah, [00:22:30] that's [inaudible] Mexican Heritage Plaza Theater. Uh, it's, it's actually pretty convenient to east bay. I don't know how many of your listeners are from the East Bay, but it's, you just go straight down eight 80 and right where highway one oh one and eight 80 collide. That's the, that's the exit.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We'll put it on our website, methods of the metastatic or you'll get a link to that if you want to go check it out and we'll put a link to, um, to Charlene's website as well. So give us a little bit, I always end my interviews with asking about the [00:23:00] future, the vision. So you've been doing this for a long time, but it's also, it seems to, in the recent time, the Silk Road Festival, you've, you've innovated and come to any place. So what, what does it look like in the future? What's your, your vision for the, uh, the arts and Culture Society?
Speaker 3:Well, we fully expect to keep going. And the reason that I'm hopeful and excited about that right now is that we have a younger generation of artists who are now starting to, you know, [00:23:30] really go full full bore. They're really starting to take the reins of the administrative side of it and grapple with the, with the organizational side and the, the various ramifications of that. And you know, not only as artists but as you know, vital members of a community that forms a platform that can be a platform that lasts for, do the ages for people to either get their start or support their projects. So [00:24:00] that's what we, where we see our role at this point. Uh, yes, we still have our professional performance ensemble and yes, that's a big, uh, big flagship program for us. But we're looking, we also innovate in that we've got projects and various, uh, fiscal sponsored projects. [inaudible]
Speaker 3:excuse me. The fiscally sponsored projects that we help bring to fruit and collaborate with our younger artists and our younger people who are in the community. [00:24:30] So it's starting to really, there's some changes afoot that are really getting exciting and as much more, uh, the community trust, uh, trust aspect of this is starting to emerge in a big way. That's great because that's the goal I think of. I've interviewed a lot of founders and been part of organizations and their founding, and that's almost always the goal is to create something that outlasts you. LSU, your participation absolutely indoors and it sounds like you're on the path. So congratulations. And thanks for coming in today. [00:25:00] Hey, thank you Ali. It's been great to be here
Speaker 2:to learn more about the festival, the Silk Road, or the arts and arts and cultural society. Check out the links from our website, [inaudible] dot org you've been listening to minutes commanders on k eight LX, perfectly happy Friday. Everybody.
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