Barsakelmes, or its direct translation “If one goes there, one won’t return,” takes on a different meaning in contemporary Central Asian intellectual thought and political experience. It is the name of the forgotten island in the Aral Sea and a type of colonial memory that one might think is hard to heal or undo. But that is exactly what this performance is trying to do by asking the question — can we leave behind the traumas of colonization and leave it in the place of no return, Barsakelmes?

Perhaps one of the most enigmatic islands in the history of the Aral Sea, Barsakelmes is now a lost hill in the sands of the steppe or the desert — the remains of the Sea that dried up. Barsakelmes is the remnant of the tragic colonial past. Barsakelmes is a reminder of the man-made catastrophe and a residual memory of the whole region. As descendants of the people who first witnessed the signs of the sea’s disappearance, we, contemporary Central Asians, have to deal with what is left in the wake of this catastrophe. Salty dunes swallowing whole villages of ex-fishermen, sandstorms that leave cars and travelers lost in the unfamiliar terrain, the phantom pains of the vanished livelihoods. 

Can one undo the detrimental effects of coloniality that still live in these bare hills and sea trenches? Can one undo the chilling meaning behind Barsakelmes’ name? This collective performance and experience presents an attempt to answer these questions. It invites us to the mysterious world of tales and legends, centuries-long challenges and immense hope for better conclusions. Through this experience, it poses the question whether one can return from the colonial past? This performance is a bold contemporary reinterpretation of ancient myths and sounds but also a hopeful tale of laying to rest haunting ghosts and evil forces to peace, in Barsakelmes.

How do we cope with the aftermath of the catastrophe? How do we collectively build resilience to deal with desertification, the destruction of whole communities and ways of living? Many local authors and artists have been mesmerised by the phenomenon of the Aral Sea and its degradation, and focused not only on the tragedies but also on the local resilience and community-building, on finding new ways to live in the steppes and deserts that remain now on the horizon and in close vicinity — in old fishermen’s villages and lost cartographies of the old Sea’s bottom. But Barsakelmes is not just a place that is hard to locate on GPS while driving or walking at the bottom of the disappeared Aral Sea; it is also a depiction of a certain experience, a postcolonial moment in present-day history. 

In this performance and artistic exploration, Barsakelmes, similarly, is not just an apocalyptic nightmarish tale nor a tragic reminder of the Soviet colonial experiment that destroyed the entire ecosystem of the Aral Sea, at least not in this contemporary reading of the artist and musician SAMRATTAMA, spoken-word project Балхаш снится (Balkhash snitsya), singer dudeontheguitar, folk band  Steppe Sons, singer Zere, sound artist Lovozero, and vocal experimental artist Saadet Türköz collective performance, supported visually by the artworks and installations of Gulnur Mukazhanova and Darya Temirkhan. The performance was envisioned and directed by SAMRATTAMA and produced by qazaq indie with special support and in collaboration with the Tselinny Centre of Contemporary Culture. 

Rather, it is a hopeful singing and ritualistic exposé of the type of decolonial (or no-longer-colonial) future that lies ahead of us. There is a way to salvation, and it comes in a collective effort to lay the bad spirits at the bottom of the Sea once again, to mesmerise them on their journey back to where they belong. 

Barsakelmes, in this performance, is a tale of hope, full of magic that transcends old cosmologies and knowledge into a new form, a new, contemporary interpretation that adapts to the conditions it has at hand in this present moment. Salty deserts, instead of the once-thriving Sea, become places where new life has adapted, where new fish thrive in the salty waters of what remains from the small Aral now, and postcolonial Kazakhstan finds ways to heal its traumatic past. Languages and experiences weave together the hopeful tale of living in the wake of disaster. Solemn steppe vistas and sounds remind us that life goes on even at the bottom of the disappeared Sea. 

Barsakelmes is about all these adaptive techniques and learning to live through coloniality, through ancestral knowledge, erasure and recovery. Barsakelmes is a performance about how knowledge and knowing can be gathered from each particle of the sand, from each sound, from the echoes of the steppe. A lone artist finds himself on a spiritual journey to the sacred bottom of the Sea and suddenly the knowledge he thought was forgotten resurrects in the singing of a local shaman  — baqsy, shyraqshy, akku. The songs of the land, the memory of the water, the call for healing. The journey is worth taking because one returns from it, against all odds of its ominous namesake, as a new person. 

Many Central Asian contemporary artists and intellectuals have experimented with spiritual journeys and shamanistic collaborations throughout the Soviet period and, more actively, after 1991 and independence. The notable works of Kazakh culturologist Murat Auezov and his personal diaries about a spiritual journey to Mangystau during a time of personal crisis in the 1960s or his meticulously researched manuscripts on the role of baqsy, the shamans, the steppe mythologies are the case in point. 

The works of Serikbol Kondybai, a notable geographer, ethnographer and scientist who collected the genealogies of Kazakh steppe mythologies, are another notable example. The works of writer, musician, composer and philosopher Talasbek Asemkulov and culturologist, writer and researcher Zira Nauryzbai are also notable in this regard. Through knowledge, sound, and topographies that have survived colonization, these authors bring to the fore what we were told to forget, erase, and leave behind in the long aftermath of colonialism.  

In different points throughout the history of contemporary (and post-independent) Kazakhstani art, numerous artists went on spiritual trips to the sacred places or to specific baqsy for artistic inspiration or to deal with personal crises. Many have developed iconic works based on this experience including Almagul Menlibayeva, the Kyzyl Traktor (Red Tractor) collective, Said Atabekov, Rustam Khalfin, and many others. 

The act of spiritual journey or visiting sacred places is by no means an act of self-exoticization but a lived practice that many people (well beyond the artistic field) choose to experience in Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Central Asia. It is seen as an integral part of local culture and for many, the trip to baqsy or a small pilgrimage to the sacred place (it can be a mausoleum, a sufi shrine, or simply a sacred natural site such as a canyon) is part of the spiritual healing process they cannot find in other more conventional places. So, it is a very lived experience, something anyone can do, not just an artistic expression. 

To take a spiritual journey is to venture on a trip to find your true self. Many contemporary intellectuals, writers, musicians, and artists continue this practice to search for new meaning in their oeuvre.

The Barsakelmes performance is the contemporary rethinking of the old Central Asian legend where the power of the divine music takes away the evils and saves the people from numerous disasters. 

As the legend describes, a thousand years ago, horrifying large snakes that spat fire and burned down the yurts and dwellings of the people in the villages brought chaos to the earth. Led by the enormous dragon, they violently uprooted and killed whole communities of people who prayed to gods to send them salvation. 

When their prayers were finally answered, the skies opened up and brought them a little boy, Nurtole, who sat on the back of the camel and played kobyz – a mystic and sacred instrument. As the camel started walking to the unknown destination, Nurtole sat on it backwards, facing the evil snakes who were hypnotised by the sounds of his music and obediently followed him. 

The music did not stop for a second, and even when they reached the bottom of the deep Sea, Nurtole continued to play the kobyz, soothing and disempowering the snakes and dragons who could no longer terrify the people. According to the legend, the evils stayed deep down under the water, and the music did not stop for a moment, hypnotising them further and keeping everyone above the water safe. Sometimes, the snakes tried to free themselves from the mesmerising music and moved violently, causing sea storms. But in these instances, Nurtole played even stronger, chaining the snakes deeper under the Sea. 

Some legends also say that sometimes one could hear the music of the sacred kobyz when they sailed across the Sea or when they stopped at the faraway islands. It is not known which sea Nurtole used to tame the evil forces but if we can re-interpret the legend, it could be the Aral Sea which makes the name Barsakelmes ever more mysterious. And perhaps the name of the island comes from the mythical origins of the legend, meaning that if one goes there, one won’t return. 

In this re-interpretation of the legend, the deep Sea kept evil snakes and dragons and their violence away from people for many centuries, but when the water started disappearing, the evils managed to find their way back to the world where they once again could terrorise the people. 

The devastation of the Aral Sea brings far more important connotations to the region as old evils are awakened and freed. In terms of symbolic and mythical interpretation, the death of the Aral Sea brings new spiritual challenges and opens up the space for new crises that we need to face in the twenty-first century. Perhaps for these new crises and new dragons and snakes, we need to make greater collective efforts to help Nurtole tame the evils yet again and reach the bottom of the new Sea. This is the pretext for the Barsakelmes performance, where the old legend is reimagined and reconceptualised as a contemporary critique of what we understand as “crises” and evil spirits. 

According to the Kazakh ethnographer, geographer and myths-collector Serikbol Kondybay, the snakes and dragons in this myth about Nurtole represent the spirits of ancestors, aruakhs, who challenge their descendants with the most difficult crises and who, according to the nomadic traditions have to be commemorated and respected. There are many rituals in which even contemporary Central Asians commemorate and “feed” the spirits of ancestors on special occasions and remembrance days. Songs and music can form part of these rituals and remembrances. 

Every participant of the performance — its authors, a collective of contemporary artists and singers, composers, poets and musicians — Samrattama, Steppe Sons, Zere, Балхаш снится (Balkash snitsya), Saadet Türköz, dudeontheguitar, Lovozero, with Gulnur Mukazhanova and Darya Temirkhan – as well as the spectators take part in this performance. 

When talking about natural catastrophes like the devastation of the Aral Sea including secret Soviet operations on its islands, including a testing site for rare diseases on the Renaissance Island in the Aral Sea and the remnants of the nuclear bombs testing sites, do we take into consideration non-human actors – animals, plants, but also soil, water, and air? All of these questions are up for interpretation through this immersive experience of being inside the performance and inside the ritual where at least five key groups of actors can be identified: baqsy (shamans), akyns (poets), zhyrau (steppe singers), sal-sery (multimedia virtuoso artists), and the spectators, who take an active role in shaping the outcome of this performance by bringing our spiritual forces together. 

The conceptual and practical base of the Barsakelmes performance is working with the assumption – anyone can become powerful and knowledgeable; all it takes is to be willing to do so. This way, the invitation to Barsakelmes is not a frightening experience of “no return” but an invitation for spiritual awakening that will change you to the extent you are willing to change. 

Each participant in this performance is simultaneously a protagonist, a messenger, an interpreter, and a receiver.

The instruction

To embark on this journey requires letting go of the preconceptions, many of which are perhaps infiltrated with colonialities that were unknown to our predecessors; letting go of linear and structured approaches; forgetting the canons of established performances and artistic critique, personal judgement; giving up the expectations that inevitably surge in your mind; to forget about the place you are entering for its origins and its histories will be washed away during this immersive experience. 

To embark on this journey requires a different pair of eyes, the ones that are not tired of all “conventional” or classical arts that require you to think of anything musical as a concert and of anything pictorial as fine art.  

To embark on this journey is asking you to let go and unlearn everything you know about decolonial and decoloniality, for the things you will experience shortly do not fit into any framework or mould, nor should they. 

To embark on this journey requires the most experienced, the most knowledgeable of us, the historians, the theatre critics, the art curators, and the writers, to forget all the vocabularies our bodies hold to imprison our minds. 

Forget what baqsy means. 

Forget what you (think) you know about zhyrau. 

Erase the colourful pictures of people in ornamented traditional clothes you’ve seen in your Kazakh language books. 

Become a clean slate. 

Allow yourself and your mind to float without hanging or clinging to the known words, temporalities and prior experiences. 

You are embarking on a magical journey. Be prepared to feel what you have never felt before.

The Protagonists 

Who is baqsy? The term “shaman” is too contaminated with new-age references that are too far from the original meaning, but true shamans are transcendent. All at once – dancers, performers, the holders of the ancient knowledge, the knowers and translators, the channels and the keepers.

Baqsy are the transmitters between our world and the world of the mystical, sacred and unknown. As they dance and sing ritualistically, they enter a state of transcendent, trance-like, where they are able to work with the mysterious and unknown world of spirits — the spirits of the guardian ancestors. In this state, they often don’t remember afterwards, they transform into completely different beings — being themselves and not being themselves at the same time. 

In the ritual, they take on an important role as transmitters but also as spiritual guides – the in-betweeners who exist in this world but also have the keys to explore other worlds, often unknown to ordinary people. Baqsy is the first group, the first element of the performance that serves as a map and as a mapping device leading us to the tropes of the new sea we are yet to create.

The second group forms around akyns or the poets. Akyn played a key role in the nomadic society, they resolved conflicts with the singing words and improvisations, they were called upon to serve justice and alleviate the bitterness of conflicts. Through aitys, the improvised poetic and singing competition between different akyns who represented different tribes and communities, big problems and great conflicts were resolved in a play-like but also artistic way. By signing the problem out, akyns had the powers to bring together conflicting sides and heal the burgeoning hurts and offences, and above all, sing through justice. 

The third group represented in the performance are zhyrau. Zhyrau are musicians, poets, wisemen (and wisewomen), historians who write out histories of whole communities in the form of an epic — zhyr (жыр). Every zhyr was remembered and brought together by the collective memory in the oral history of whole communities. Often performed in a semi-ritualistic way, the words of each zhyr were transmitted from generation to generation, holding the healing power of singing out the verses. 

The fourth group is made up of sal-sery, mystic brotherhoods of batyrs, warriors, and singers. Dressed in colourful clothes with beautiful feathers and gorgeous fabrics, they stand out from the crowds and inspire warriors to the epic battles. Sal-sery also took part in the battles as a class of fearless warriors and musicians. Their legacy was both mystic and mysterious. People believed sal-sery had magical capacities and were unbeatable because of their lack of fear in the face of death and because of their talents. 

The final group is the spectators who take an active role, as they do not merely watch but make sense of the ritual and fully participate in it with the key actors. The spectators made the sal-sery, baqsy, akyns and zhyrau and gave them the meaning they have even today. Spectators in this performance equally play the role of enacting subjects — they enact and give meaning to other key players, and they give meaning to the performance itself. 

Each spectator can also take on the role of other key players. Will they become baqsy, akyn, zhyrau or sal-sery? Which group will they choose to belong to? How do we collectively, as participants, make sense of this performance, and what textuality will we give it in the future? 

The performance is structured in such a way that the spectators on each day will shape the final meaning of the whole performative practice.

Each actor is carefully selected since their participation is key to the successful implementation of the ritual. Each artist has kasiet (the spiritual power) that allows them to open this ancient knowledge, to delve into the magical structures of music and rituals. 

Collectively, you are not only inventing the new Sea and helping Nurtole to tame the spirits, but you are also giving meaning to the ritual itself. 

The magic cannot happen without true belief.

The practice is not enacted without participation, and the meaning cannot be produced without an equal part of each participant. 

No one is a simple spectator but an actor who takes an active part in the performance itself. Through this togetherness, we produce the text of the performance, each time differently because the actors change every time. The success of implementing the new sea and giving the role to music to do its magic to tame evil spirits is in our collective hands. 

Music equally plays an important role in this ritual. Far from just presenting a background or a text to the practice, it plays a healing role. Music is a teacher, says Samrat, the driving intellectual force behind this performance; music is a healer and a meaning, the power that is able to construct the new sea and to heal the traumas of the colonial past. 

Music is also the enabler that cohesively brings together each actor in a combination rather than a stand-alone act; it binds the key players and makes us the collective force that challenges the snakes and dragons. 

Music serves as a base for the creation of the new alternative futurity where the good forces take over the bad ones and turn them into something else. Music, above and beyond Nurtole and the magic he is able to practice, serves as a key component to tame the figurative and real snakes and challenges. Music becomes the history-maker, the healing force and the combining narrative that connects each zhyr, each kasiet and each verse that is pronounced and is written throughout this performance.

What made Barsakelmes possible

The artistic narration of this performance started long before the actual event happening in September 2025. Set on the journey to find alternative truths and on an attempt to re-remember something that was erased and forcefully forgotten, Barsakelmes haunted its creators for some time. Emerging on social media pages as a cryptic message Barsakelmes sign next to the photos of major crises — floods, violence, rampant inequality and conflicts — it highlighted all the evils and bad spirits that continue to haunt Kazakhstani society. 

Each member of the performance has been on a long journey of self-discovery to come up with the type of music, text and ritualistic component to contribute to the performance. Whether they got lost on the bottom of the real Aral Sea, wandering without an internet connection and on the last reserves of gas and energy, or whether they participated in shamanistic rituals and recorded the sounds of the steppe where the Sea — or perhaps an ancient ocean — once lay (in Mangystau) or whether they jotted their verses en route across Central Asia, old and new roads, every single one of them participated in some sort of journey of searching. 

Inevitably, the hybridity of contemporary Central Asia required rethinking and adaptation of the old and often forgotten ways of performing the sacred texts, making and playing traditional instruments and learning and re-learning to produce music from the sacred sounds. It also required dealing with the challenging questions of who has a place and a position to play, perform, write and activate these codes. Some of our key players even went on a spiritual pilgrimage to request an “opening” from shyraqshy, the traditional spiritual transmitters. In these journeys and self-explorations, each actor collected experiences and knowledge to combine in the making of the performance. 

“If you want to engage with the message creatively, you should do it,” says Samrat. The road, Ak Zhol, is open. For each generation, especially the one dealing with the persistent coloniality and the ghosts of colonial times, the challenging questions of the aftermath of the disaster will continue to haunt us, and the only way to lay them to peace is to face them fully. Interpretation plays an important role here where every participant is engaging with a different materiality and performing act. Whether it is music, dance, or felt as a portal of self-liberation, sounds, verses, and rethinking of the sacred rituals — all play a key feature in this journey that the performance asks everyone to take on. All of these components will allow us to recreate and re-interpret different imaginative worlds and critically rethink traditions and myths, often pre-colonial myths and open up to the pre-colonial surviving knowledge and cosmologies.

Barsakelmes Futurism

In this re-interpretation of the legend of the Central Asian myth, the new generation of artists is saving Nurtole and giving him new value and new meaning for the time and challenges that he finds himself in this new contemporaneity. Even if the Sea he knew is gone, the new artistic forces can succeed in creating a new Sea where Nurtole’s music and magic will continue to live and where the snakes and dragons will still be mesmerised by his music. 

So, the aim of this performance is not to undo something or return to the point of initiation since neither that temporality nor space are any more available. Similar to the idea of decoloniality, where the aim is not to undo coloniality or return to Barsakelmes in pre-colonial terms, ex nihilo, the Barsakelmes performance is not about undoing nor about lamenting on something that can no longer be returned. 

The Aral Sea cannot be fully filled in with water again; the colonial times cannot be undone in their physical or ideological legacies. But a new future can be imagined, and this new future can serve as a point of new departure. So, in this sense, the Barsakelmes performance  is not about negative emotions or negative outcomes. On the contrary, even the crises and challenges represented by the snakes and dragons are seen as events and issues full of hope and more positive foundations — collectively, we have a choice to overcome them and learn positively from this experience rather than see them pessimistically only as fully negative occurrences. 

The performance’s futuristic approach is also practical. Barsakelmes aims to archive, remember, rethink and re-create new art and, with it, new knowledge based on the ancient knowledge and traditions. Yet it is not an archaic appropriation of the old practices to serve as a hologram of the new “national awakening” campaign — the experience that many of the attributes of the performance (zhyrau, aitys, akyn) have gone through after 1991. These practices do not serve as a meaningless street name (Bukhar zhyrau) or a candy wrap for the new “banal national” product. 

Instead, it aims to rethink the practicality of this knowledge and these cosmologies in contemporary reading. What can we learn from the old and traditional way of remembering our ancestors? What can we do to the sacred musical instrument to give it a different sound in postcolonial, today’s Kazakhstan? These are the questions that guided the creators of the performance on their long journey of preparation that required immense research but also practical field-work — visiting sacred places, travelling to the bottom of the Sea, recording the steppe sounds, playing with the space and wind to create new music, rhyming the shamanistic songs and transcribing the transcendent experiences to create a new world for the old and known protagonists. 

The power of the local baqsy is in his/her/their ability to continue the sacred practice and to thrive in the storms and turbulent times. Baqsy continued their practice during colonial rule (Russian and Soviet), continued to sing out the old verses, mixing them up with the new language that was emerging — a hybrid between the people’s friendship and gulagization, revived poems by rehabilitated Qazaq poets who perished under Stalinist Terror in the 1930s and were brought back from the oblivion in 1989, a hybrid between the sounds of the nuclear bombs tested in the sacred steppe and the petrifying sounds of its abandoned aftermaths. Baqsy is always futuristic; they move already in the future, breaking away from everything that might hold them back — old legacies, heavy burdens of traumas and anxieties, and the haunting ghosts of coloniality. In their trans-state, baqsy already traverses simple temporalities between the past, present and future or even between the old-old past and new-new future (because in the Qazaq language, there are many temporalities). Similar to this experience, Barsakelmes performance exists on different levels of temporalities using rituals, music, dances and spoken word movements as a portal to the futuristic state that does not require multiple “post- or de-” to define itself. 

The preparation for the performance required each actor to take a long journey of learning and unlearning, reading but also listening and practising these rituals with the contemporary practitioners — traditional music instrument players, musicians, historians, culturologists, practising baqsy, and many more practitioners. The preparation took a long time, negotiating existing knowledge and practice and unlearning the constructed mythology that many of the performers have critiqued in their works in the past. 

In the words of Anuar Duisenbinov, one of the performers, Barsakelmes, even as a place on the map, once an island in the Aral Sea and now a national park in the Central Asian steppes stretched from southern Kazakhstan to north-eastern Uzbekistan, is the “uber-new” desert. He described his experience of getting lost at the bottom of the Aral Sea in his poem Barsakelmes:

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uber-new-us drive through the uber-new desert

and even here, at the bottom of the plundered water

where death itself smiles wide open

with its seashell mouth under our feet

life refuses to stop

finds new forms, new solutions

everything breathes, moves, rushes by

crawls, flies away, leaving behind traces and bones 

even here, even here, dazhe zdes’

BARSAKELMES 

it is a space transcending space

tires leave deep furrows as if 

we plow the earth, and re-traumatising memory

we sow the hope of returning, worries about the rain and gas

carelessness that seems like freedom to us

carelessness that we cannot afford 

carelessness that is more like mirage, eles

BARSAKELMES 

did the island that mysteriously sat on the waters

know that one day we will reach it at the bottom of the sea

that we will walk on its hot soil and will return

that the spells scattered by the wind — that’s why their remains

are collected in whirlwinds, and bewildered walk around 

as disintegrated wind melody in what used to be the sea

forgotten whom they protect, forgotten from whom they protect

let it never be erased from your memory, never be erased from your
memory, never be erased from your memory, jadyñnan öşpes

BARSAKELMES

İt ölgen jerde (the place where dogs die) only the whole sea died here

and many more things (died here) — we took a long time studying

the map of dwellings on ex-shore 

listening to the quiet storms of the life of the uber-new desert

you stand at the sea bottom feeling bare naked 

defenceless. (you feel like an) algae in existential horror

watching your home creeping to the horizon, and disappear, unable to move 

as a deserted ship in the middle of desert 

as an emptied seashell in the crumbling glaze of colourful sea blue

as the food for the wind and the body of sand 

as an abandoned child of the earth

as a broken colour of the sky, nebes 

BARSAKELMES

we are searching for the way out, circling and circling at this sea bottom

sometimes running across our own tracks 

mesmerised by the anxious calmness 

you want to leave this place as soon as possible 

and to remain here forever

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In the Barsakelmes performance, the artists invite us to take part in a special ritual of healing where every word and every ritual has a renewed meaning and interpretation.

Be attentive to each component of this happening. Do we need to move collectively in a gesture of ancient prayer now re-adapted to contemporary language? Do we need to create new forms to echo our embodiments and experiences? How do we collectively create a new reading of the old rituals? 

Every new performance brings new meanings and creates the living, moving archive of our rethinking, reviving, reliving, and re-constructing the temporality, space-ness, as well as challenges and monsters. 

With each new challenge, there is a solution — a healing experience of going through it. The Barsakelmes performance inspires us to think differently of the past, of the present and of the future. It inspires us to find new ways and new genres, to question our curious minds and to shake up our habitual knowledge and experiences. 

The question remains of how this performance will influence all of its participants and what will remain after the performance ends. Each will go home with a new sense of self, with new knowledge and experience. But Barsakelmes will never be the same again —“You want to leave this place as soon as possible and remain here forever.”