Women's Repertoire?

The question of a women's repertoire – is it binding or mandatory, does it exist, and if it does exist, of what does it consist? – has some history among practitioners and scholars of Georgian folksong. Modern views on the subject are, unsurprisingly, conflicting: you get one answer if you ask a laywoman singer, another if you ask, say, the head of one of the all-male professional ensembles! Georgia is without doubt still a patriarchal society, with a gendered structure that reaches back into medieval times, the famous Queen or, as they called her tellingly, "King" (Mepe) Tamar notwithstanding, and beyond. In many patriarchal societies, the division between men and women's spheres is reflected in similarly divided or gendered art and music that each sex makes. (This division is also fodder for much anthropological and ethnomusicological writing, popular and academic, which as a liberal hippie feminist I am very conscious of.) I went to Georgia, therefore, with some expectation of encountering a special subset of Georgian folksong that was made only by women, that belonged to them, that perhaps was secret (as was the Nu Shu women's language and alphabet in China up until the mid-twentieth century, when its use began to decline). In fact, I went in the hopes of studying that hypothetical subset. What I found was a much more nuanced situation than I'd expected.

I had encountered songs before I went, mostly through Village Harmony, that were marked as "women's songs": a weather song, Gonja, and some of the nanas or lullabies. I'd listened intently to the albums of Mzetamze, an all-women vocal quintet. But when I started asking the women who I was recording and singing with and learning from if there were songs that only women sang, let alone a recognized genre of kalis simghera (women's song) similar to khalkhuri simghera (folk song) or kalakuri simghera (city song), the answers I got were emphatically in the negative. Most were somewhat bemused when I asked to hear these women's songs, or questioned them about a women's repertoire. Some gave a more qualified answer; Ek'a and Khatia agreed that mostly it was just women who sang the lullabies, but absolutely denied a more concrete division of folk music. After a few such answers, I realized that that was the wrong question to be asking. I began simply to ask for what songs my informants liked best to sing, thinking that it was better to focus on real practice than to chase an elusive theoretical genre that, in all probability, was a chimera stemming from my own assumptions.

In general, I observed women singing almost everything that men sang. Particularly among the Sighnaghi young folk, whoever happened to be present would join in a song; I could not discern any difference in knowledge or comfort in participation between the boys and the girls. Ketevan sings the most difficult of ornament songs with the greatest of talent, and chooses an extremely diverse range of repertoire for Zedashe to sing; Gvantsa and Shergil would sometimes switch off the bani or bass parts between songs; when Village Harmony learnt music in workshops from Georgian musicians, men and women were taught all of the same songs without hesitation by our teachers. However, in performance settings, shadings of the gender division did appear. For instance, at the Ethnographic Museum's festival, some of the all-male groups (both old and young) performed fighting or wrestling songs, many very famous; women never participated in these songs, but tended to sing quieter repertoire weighted towards lullabies and love songs. An amateur trio that I remember participating in a Village Harmony concert in Telavi, in October 2003, sang mostly nanas (lullabies) and religious songs, all of them very quiet. Every set that I recorded of my women informants (with the exception of the two songs from Maro Babo Zhuzhunashvili) included religious songs, often forming the bulk of the recorded material, while at the supra after the Sighnaghi dance troup Jleha's concert, the Alaverdi church choir (all male) spent the entire night singing secular songs. The ch'unir, an instrument from Svaneti, was traditionally not played by women because it is held between the knees. That said, although I did not see women playing ch'unir on either of my all-too-brief stays in Svaneti, Carl tells me that he's met plenty such; "I think, more women than men." There's a special crossed-legs "women's position" for playing the ch'unir that Shergil showed me, laughing, though he never suggested I play it sitting like that. The gender lines are not broadly drawn, in the performance of Georgian folksong, but they are sometimes perceptible as an undercurrent.

In dance music, the lines are stronger. Mixed dances certainly are common, but there are also inflexible groups of women-only and men-only dances. According to my friend Maia K'achk'achishvili, a translator and linguist who is based in Tbilisi and has come on many Village Harmony trips before, certain mixed dances (she did not specify which) went out of fashion for some time, and became almost taboo. But, she asserts that their reintroduction into the repertoire is widespread: many troupes like the Sighnaghi-based Jlekha are bringing them back into popularity. Certainly, when I saw a concert of folkdance at the Tbilisi Opera House, performed by Sukhishvili (the national dance troupe), many of the dances were danced by men and women together. Sukhishvili was founded as a "national folk ballet" by Iliko Sukhishvili and Nino Ramishvili together in 1954, and their work in the 40s and 50s together created what is now the standard spectacle of performed Georgian folkdance: a composite of traditional movements and others not so traditional, culled from ballet and modern dance and the inventiveness of individual choreographers. Few performers, or performances, of any "traditional" folkdances remain immune to the Sukhishvili influence; a few, such as the Svan Perkhuli round dances performed on feast days, survive in more isolated areas.

For the most part, thus, the gender division is entirely permeable when it comes to Georgian folksong. Maia told me that "of course, if you talk to someone like Anzor [Erkomaishvili, director of the (male) Rustavi Ensemble], or Malkhaz [Erkvanidze, director of the Anchiskhati Church Choir], or some older men around the country, they will say that yes, there are some songs women shouldn't sing. But really nobody minds." Since returning to Toronto, I have been given information that goes a long way towards explaining these conflicting answers to my questions about a women's repertoire. Nino Tsitsishvili, an ethnomusicologist now based out of the University of Melbourne, has written of an apparently state-sanctioned move in the 1940s and 50s, actively supported by the folklorist Grigol Chkhikvadze, to ban women from the State Ensemble, then the most well-known and lucrative and certainly the most official professional folksinging ensemble. The repercussions of this trend seem to have reverberated down the decades in the professional folksinging scene, as demonstrated by Maia K'achk'achishvili's statement above, though nowadays the restriction seems to have mellowed into prejudices against women performing certain repertoire rather than cloistering themselves entirely away from the professional scene. However, it is worth noting that in the major, internationally famous and subsidized ensembles (Mzetamze, Rustavi Ensemble, and the Anchiskhati/Mtiebi dyad head the list), mixed singing is almost totally absent. Women will perhaps never be entirely comfortable again performing, in a public or professional setting, traditionally male songs about the joys of battle and physical combat: it jars with the image, crafted by ages, of the retiring and gentle ideal Georgian woman of traditional, historical and romantic literature. And men, similarly, will continue to be unlikely to give concerts composed of lullabies and spinning songs. But in day-to-day practice, both are possible, and men and women share repertoire, knowledge and voices with pleasure and ease.