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| Bactria Cultural Centre, as a contemporary artistic space, serves as a catalyst by providing opportunities to local artists to express their creativity in an entirely free and experimental way. At present it is the only venue in Dushanbe that encourages artists to apply innovative approaches to manifest their artistic visions. |
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| Bactria Cultural Centre, as the cultural actor of ACTED’s activities, is fully devoted to provide access to information and to vocational training. Educational activities aimed at artists and art professionals are organized with the firm belief that an understanding of national identity as well as social changes and development can originate from active participants of society. The role of an artist is, and always has been, the observer, the analyzer, and the initiator. |
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| One of the main information points in Bactria is its library, which has a collection of books in Tajik, Russian, English, German and French, focusing on mostly culture and history. Art books on the works of Michelangelo, Levitan, Vrubel, Aivazovsky, Theophanes the Greek, movies of Russian and Western avant-garde, and Italian Renaissance are the most valued pieces of the collection. |
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"You missed jazz, didn’t you?"
On May 2, Mayakovskiy Theatre hosted a jazz music concert by Swiss band ZOOM and Tajik band “Mizrob”.
- How could anyone miss this? We hardly ever have such events!
- What? No tickets left? Did you sell them out in one day?
- Can we at least listen at the doors?
- Many thanks to the organizers of the show! I think, was it BACTRIA who invited the musicians, right?
- I had to give a negative answer to another ticket-beggar who wished to get to the jazz concert, which was to start in a few minutes in the main hall of Mayakovskiy Theatre.
It was the office of Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) who invited the musicians from Switzerland and dedicated the concert to the 10th Anniversary of SDC in Tajikistan. Bactria Cultural Centre was the organizer of the event. Both bands took part at the International Jazz Festival “Jazz-Bishkek-Spring” in April 25-27, which embraced eminent musicians from Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, France, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, and Kyrgyzstan.
To the joy of Tajik jazz-lovers, which turned out to be more numerous than we expected, SDC, headed by Mr. Rudolf Schoch did invite a very well-known and popular in Switzerland and abroad alike, Swiss-German jazz trio, ZOOM. The band members are: Nils Wogram (trombone), Philipp Schaufelberger (guitar), and band leader Lucas Niggli (percussions). It was Lucas, who found the way for the band to follow and creep through the forests of various music trends and especially of contemporary jazz.
The main peculiarity of Lucas Niggli’s music is lightness. Thanks to the professional unison with two tenor instruments (trombone and guitar), percussions and the performance of outstanding musicians like Schaufelberger (a great tonal esthete) and Vogram (a perfect trombone player) even the most knotty passages sounded as light as a feather. ZOOM plays contemporary jazz, mixing all kinds of music possible; an approach that is very hard for an unprepared audience to comprehend. That is why we were a little apprehensive while waiting for the reactions with our hearts sinking, looking into the eyes of listeners. The storm of applauses brought us relief – the audience appreciated the skillfulness of the musicians. Could it be that Tajik audience was indeed starving for jazz…?
As for the Tajik band “Mizrob”, we were not worry at all, for its music is a junction of wisdom, profound philosophy of the East, and freedom and heat of the West. The band includes renowned Tajik musicians like the leader of the band “Novoi Darvoz”, playing traditional music, Honoured Artist of Tajikistan Davlat Nazri, and members of a popular Tajik band “Shams”, Iqbol Zavkibekov and Zarif Pulodov. Tajik folk music has always been the main source of inspiration for local musicians. Meanwhile the spirit and improvisation make this music nothing but jazz. “Mizrob” has proved itself on the highest level, at the third International Jazz Festival “Jazz-Bishkek-Spring”. Their show was claimed to be one of the best ones.
The most interesting part of the concert was a joint performance at the end – a jam session by two bands and a percussion show. It was a wonderful, fascinating music full of fancy flight and improvisation performed by Swiss and Tajik jazz musicians. The audience was delighted and the ovations seemed to never end. And we “Bactrians” forgot about our anxiety before the concert, and about sleepless nights, and about exhaustion as we saw results of our work!
(Amal-Khanum Gajieva – BCC culture coordinator * Asia Plus #21(435) /May 21 2008)
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Fête de la Musique
“It Rocked!”
FOLK-ФАЛАК
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| Bactria Cultural Centre is engaged in projects that further capacity building and development of music industry in Tajikistan. First of all, it offers a venue to musicians through the organization of regular concerts where they can freely practice their creativity. We impose no limitation in the direction of musical genres, but we do promote world music and experiments based on the combination of traditional and contemporary music. |
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| If the context allows, Bactria Cultural Centre uner the auspices of ACTED, carries out heritage conservation and rehabilitation activities, if the heritage in question has been damaged or suffers from a lack of maintenance due to the difficulties facing the communities. |
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As a result of the continuous degradation of Tajik educational structure, from a unified primary and secondary education under the Soviets, barely 60 percent of Tajikistan’s current school-age population is receiving educational opportunities. Through opportunities for learning and vocational training BACTRIA aims at democratizing access to information and education. |
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Artistic Vision 
