Yesterday I went to a performance by the famous Erisioni dance company. It was a tremendous spectacle of traditional dance, songs and costumes from around Georgia. The colour, the energy, the athleticism, the sheer aggressiveness of it all is truly impressive. A great evening out. The mainly Georgian audience lapped it up with pride, a celebration of their country's rich culture and heritage, which makes such an impression on most foreign visitors. It was, it must be said, all highly choreographed. The moves all perfectly rehearsed. Traces of Riverdance. No doubt the costumes and the moves are, in their essentials, genuine. But this is a show. It is circus. A marvelous display of traditions that are slipping into the past.
Folklore turned to theatre, performed in a modern, cosmopolitan capital city. A nostalgic spectacle. When traditions become circus, they are no longer a living thing, any more than the pageantry of the changing of the guard in London. Georgians, aspiring to be a modern, prosperous, western country, like most of the world gladly yield to the homogenising influences of hamburgers and cappuccinos. And even shopping malls are on the way. And who could begrudge them the fruits of globilisation?
Yet I admit to a twinge of regret for a passing world. Six years ago I had a walking holiday in the Georgian mountains, in Khevsureti and Svaneti. Remote areas, lacking decent roads or hotels, where I was the only foreigner anywhere to be found, apart from a few international observers close to the border with Chechnya. With my Georgian guides, I had the privilege of meeting and talking with local people, sharing their food, khinkali in Shatili, and cheese and yogurt, seasoned with herbs, in the high pastures of Svaneti. Now I hear that the roads are better, that hotels are being built, that tourism is starting to take off. All well and good for the local population, of course. But I cannot help being dismayed by reports that Mestia, the biggest village in Svaneti, may go the way of Sighnaghi, in Kakheti, a Potemkin town, a Georgian Disney world of fancy facades, any charm scrubbed away.
Yet for now Georgian traditions are still alive. I remember a summer evening two years ago, beneath the trees at Pasanauri, north of Tbilisi, eating the best kinkhali I have tasted. And then some of the Georgians started to sing, and some of them started to dance. The energy that evening was spontaneous, in no way contrived, none of it choreographed. And there were those afternoons, walking down from the mountains in Svaneti, visiting grandmothers in their summer huts, where they spent a few months with their cows, making cheese and yogurt, which they shared with us, washed down with vodka. For all the march of modernity, Georgia remains a country that values and holds on to its traditions. It is one of the reasons foreigners find it so irresistible.
