From the journal
On New Year’s Eve 2024 the Spring Festival Gala put three minority epics on one stage, and Manas was among them: an elder transmitter from Wuqia and an eight-year-old manaschi stood together. Staged Manas now adds instruments, and sometimes rock.
On New Year’s Eve 2024 the Spring Festival Gala put three of China’s minority epics on one stage, and Manas was among them. Jiangnuri Turganbai, a regional-level transmitter from Wuqia county in Kizilsu, said afterwards that it was the first time they had stood on that stage.
Beside him was Meiken Maimaititurgan, eight years old, also a manaschi. The pairing is the story: an epic normally sung by one person for hours became, for a few minutes, a national television number with a child in it.
Transmission starts younger and closer to home. In Wuqia, children hear manaschis in yurts and at festivals. In July 2022 a fourteen-year-old, Yumitanli Yetiku, performed Manas outside his home county for the first time, in Ürümqi, at the regional museum.
Behind that stands an apparatus: Kizilsu counts one world-level, four national and twenty-two regional intangible heritage items; the epic has been translated into Chinese and published; a manaschi association is being prepared; an opera with the Central Opera House has played more than sixty times, and the prefecture has held seven Manas festivals and five academic symposia.
The sound is changing. Bahetibiek Aikebai, born after 1995 and cast as Manas in the opera, says staged versions use more instruments and sometimes electronic music; the gala arrangement added rock. That is not the unaccompanied singing the epic is known for.
Both things are true at once, and this essay keeps them apart: the voice is the core of Manas, and the staged version is an arrangement of it. What the gala shows is how far an arrangement can travel; what the yurt shows is where it starts.