Meyrick Kaminski
Folklore & Artistic Troupe of Dhalaristan
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Rabbinical Studies Ancestor -
2008
My artistic practice is fundamentally concerned with questioning notions of authenticity. How?
questioning the way in which audiences respond to notions of authenticity;
cultural authenticity arrived at through a process of repetition of arbitrary acts and motions.
The Folklore & Artistic Troupe of Dhalaristan
Mission Statement
"The Folklore & Artistic Troupe of Dhalaristan is a small group of pledged individuals, interested in a reinvestigation of the rituals and folk traditions of the Dhalar, an ethnic minority who initially trace their origins to the north Caucasus region (Dagestan, Ossetia, Kalmykia, Sakartvelo, the locale of Sochi in Russia, etc.). At present a stateless (4th world) people, the political and cultural plight of the Dhalar was not aided by Soviet-era policies of cultural assimilation and enforced deportation in the Caucasus. Nor was it helped by the fact that the Dhalar have long existed on a cultural fault-line between East and West. Long notorious for trade and sometime brigandry with their volatile neighbours, the Dhalar were scattered to the six winds in the Tsarist era, setting up scattered enclaves in urban centres: Erevan, Tiflis, Constantinople, Saloniki, Belgrad, Alexandria, as far afield as Bukhara, Buda....
In much of this diaspora situation, the Dhalar were ghettoised, living in atrocious conditions. The people forgot much of their traditional culture, and in its place there arose new, syncretic forms, bastardisations of earlier forms that now fused with the culture of the Others they intermingled with.
As a result, the people of Dhalaristan suffered a kind of collective cultural amnesia, being in the unfortunate position of forgetting themselves and their culture. Being a stateless people cannot but complicate the situation; nonetheless, The Folklore & Artistic Troupe of Dhalaristan has played, and will continue to play an integral role in rectifying this situation."
