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Siberia at the Centre of the World: Music, Dance and Ritual in Sakha (Yakutia) and Buryatia

The research context was framed by visits to Britain of three musicians from Sakha-Yakutia (Stepanida, Chyskyyrai, Spiridon) as part of a research project within the AHRC Research Centre for Cross-Cultural Music and Dance Performance. This led to experimental improvisation-based audio recordings (SOASIS CD17/CD18, both 2008) but importantly alerted me to the heavily mediated way in which accounts of Siberia reach us. There had been no previous attempt to film and document music, dance and ritual in Sakha-Yakutia and Buryatia. I first collected materials published in Russia and abroad since 1990, and planned what I might study in Siberia. Three fieldtrips were undertaken, to Buryatia in 2001, and with Misha Maltsev as co-researcher to Sakha-Yakutia and Buryatia in 2006. The first two were timed to coincide with important festivals (an international celebration associated with the International Organization of Folk Art (IOV) in Buryatia and the Ysykh summer solstice in Yakutsk), while the third took in a more nationalistic celebration of Buryat identity (Altagarna). We wanted to create a film that would give primacy to the voices of Siberians, so framed this material by interviews collected by tracking scholars, officials, and participants. We researched aspects of preservation, revival and sustainability by interrogating local perceptions of the olonkho epic and Semeskie cultural space, both of which had recently been declared ‘UNESCO Masterpieces’. To do so involved travel to rural areas. We interviewed key musicians (including a 105-year-old singer and algys blessing specialist) and instrument makers (including expert khomus jew’s harps blacksmiths). We also, following negotiations, documented contemporary shamanic practices, recording remarkable footage of a shamanic initiation. In all, we recorded 80 hours of footage. In editing, having problematized existing mediated stories, we limited voice-over commentary but judiciously added researched archive material to both validate footage and illustrate interviews.