Stage and Sakhli
Women’s performance venues

Folk music in Georgia is made in a number of different ways and spaces. There is a strong national commitment to folklore, folk heritage, and folk art. Georgians have an extremely strong sense of national identity that is closely tied to their sense of history. This identity is composed of and manifested in the profound religiosity in their culture. Georgia was the second Caucasian country to adopt Christianity; it was brought to them by Saint Nino c. 320 A.D. (she died c.340) and made the official state religion in 327 by King Mirian. The Georgian Orthodox Patriarchate is independent of the Greek Orthodox church, though it is in communion with it. Georgians show and root their identity, cultural and religious, in their widely lauded and ubiquitous, open-handed hospitality to the guests they believe are gifts from God; and in their traditional music, art and dance. While I was in Tbilisi, the Ethnographic museum – a beautiful slope on one of the mountains ringing Tbilisi, where houses in each major regional style are displayed, fully furnished – hosted a week-long cultural festival, where crafts, music, dance, and the distinctive architecture from each province in Georgia were on display. Every night there was a concert of traditional music. On the next-to-last night, the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, attended the performance. Some of the performers that night were amateurs; most were professional.

President Mikheil Saakashvili, or "Misha", at the Ethnographic Museum; July 22nd, 2006

Georgian folksong is a traditional art, but like almost every traditional art in our world today, it is increasingly presented in professional and often commercial settings. Walk into any music shop on Rustaveli Avenue (the main street in Tbilisi) and you will find scores of cds, recorded by professional or semiprofessional ensembles, being enthusiastically sold alongside Eastern and Western pop, classical music, and every other genre. Folk music may have originated in the sakhli (house) and fields, but it is no longer exclusively contained in them.

The stage is an important modern venue for Georgian folksong, and women take enthusiastic part in performances on it. In the Ethnographic Museum’s concert series mentioned above, the male performers outnumbered the women, but not overpoweringly so. Women were sometimes integrated into mixed ensembles and sometimes performed in all-female ensembles, or solo. A very memorable moment occurred when a young girl dressed in a traditional man’s costume walked up onto the stage to sing a Kakhetian song. The style is very difficult to master; songs are chock-full of precise ornaments created with microtones, and can last for up to six minutes. A group of men were collected, volunteer-style, to come onstage and sing bani (bass) for her; she blew the crowd away. While touring with Village Harmony in former years, we gave joint concerts in many towns all over Georgia. Very often the local ensembles’ rosters included women, perhaps slightly less in the adult ensembles. (Dance ensembles, youth and adult, generally break down to about half male and half female.)

Women are, however, occasionally diffident about performing in public. The Georgian ideal female of romantic folk literature and dance is modest and retiring, with downcast eyes and small floating steps that never directly approach her partner; some of this apparent reluctance to perform must be understood as conforming with the traditional idealized image of a Georgian woman in public. (Some reference to the fetishized seclusion of women – especially upper-class women – in Turkish and Persian cultures is useful here; Kurban Said’s classic book Ali and Nino is an excellent read and beautifully articulates some of the challenges of a social world beginning to change shape at the turn of the 20th century.) Women sometimes, not invariably, perform less “flashy” music or dance moves; their demeanor onstage is generally more circumspect than that of the men, who will play broader humour and boldly demand more interaction from their audiences. An incredible children’s chorus at the Ethnographic Museum’s festival, Adio, featured a traditional dance song where one of the boys – the most dynamic performer of the group, and almost the shortest – donned an apron and kerchief to mime the old woman’s part of the drama, to the crowd’s delight. The women’s songs that I saw performed that night, and the next, were quieter, more lyrical, and generally of shorter duration than those of the men’s ensembles, and this holds true for many of the very talented performances I’ve seen all over Georgia in the past five years.

Be that as it may, mixed professional ensembles are on the rise and women are not shy about their participation in them. Women have less of a history of paid music-making in Georgia, though this is beginning to change, as are other arenas of professional and financial work for women. (Men were the sole wage-earners and providers for their family in most of Georgian history, as in other former Soviet republics. The U.S.S.R. forever changed that custom, and contemporary women are much more of a professional presence than were their grandmothers and great-grandmothers, but the ideal of man-as-provider will linger quite some time even as it fades.) Certainly there are more all-male professional ensembles than all-female, though with standout exceptions: the women of the group Mzetamze are famous both at home and abroad for their musicianship and knowledge. But women are making their mark as well. Zedashe, a growing ensemble of young singers based in Sighnaghi, is led by Ketevan Mindorashvili. The singers are about half-and-half men and women; women sing all of the material that the men do, including the Kakhetian ornamental endurance tests mentioned earlier. Ketevan leads the group musically and politically; she is shown enormous respect and love by the men and women who sing with her. Mzetamze is active in Georgia and beyond, and much sought out for their ethnomusicological work as well as their performances.

Women who sing beautifully do not always choose to become actively professionally, however. For them another venue is equally valued: sakhli, or the home, whether in day-to-day singing for their private enjoyment or with friends in a social afternoon or a supra setting. All through my trips to Georgia, one of the constant sources of joy for me has been how quickly and easily friends will burst into song (and dance!) together. Participation in music is truly a part of the fabric of daily life in Georgia in a way that the West does not perpetuate anymore. Georgians listen to tv and the radio just as Americans and Canadians do, but unlike us are not embarrassed to lift their voices outside of concert halls and stages. Shared repertoire is extensive and well-loved, and there are no bars to women’s knowledge or performance of it. At Ketevan’s birthday supra, I heard my friend Shmagi’s wife Tamuna, five months orsulad (pregnant, literally "with two souls") and new-come to Zedashe, match Ketevan verse for verse in a particularly lively dance song. Of the four internally displaced (IDP) women from Abkhazia whom I met, only one is a professional musician, and she teaches classical voice at the Conservatory; the rest do it for fun. Such social singing is not confined to indoor spaces; nights on the boulevard, as Sighnaghelebi term their main square, were filled with impromptu songs proposed, organized and sung by the girls as well as the boys of my acquaintance, and when I came to record the Abkhaz ladies, they "practiced" in full voice for three hours in the yard outside, to the enjoyment and occasional interruption of their neighbous.

A third space for women’s singing, the church, is a mixture of the public and the private. Georgian orthodox services are shaped by chants, some sung by the priest, but mostly by volunteer members of the congregation. Women take a very active part in these musical episodes. Sopo and Teona sing at nearly every service in Sighnaghi; Tamuna, who used to sing with Zedashe, is there as often, and she brings chant books that they all work from. Women’s voices are not considered distracting; rather they take equal part in the ceremonies as they take equal part in religious life. Bodbe Monastery, where St. Nino lies buried, is a fifteen-minute walk from Sighnaghi. Some of the nuns there, including the Mother Superior, have formed a group that chants and sings folksongs regularly, though they do not perform outside of the monastery.

Georgian women have access to the same performance spaces that men do, in the making of their traditional music. They are not yet present in the paid professional scene in the same numbers as men; men’s groups, such as the Rustavi Choir (led by Anzor Erkomaishvili), or the Kolkheti Choir, are still the iconic image presented by the record companies to the commercial performing world. In parallel, all-male groups with a less smoothed and more "traditional" or "authentic" sound, such as the Anchiskhati Church Choir (led by Malkhaz Erkvanidze) or Mtiebi, with a more home-produced, word-of-mouth market, are presented to the ethnomusicologically inclined world as the real heart of Georgian traditional folksong. But women's voices are present everywhere, and as they continue to integrate into other areas of the professional world, I believe their presence and recognition in the music business world will simultaneously grow stronger. Georgian culture does not divide its artistic heritage down gender lines. There are no limits to what and where their voices can reach.