Nari Shelekpayev
Making Opera in the Steppe. A Political History of Musical Theatre in Kazakhstan, 1930–2015
Nari Shelekpayev explores the invention and usage of opera in Kazakhstan as a political and nation-building tool, and its evolution between 1930 and 2015. Using archival materials from the Almaty Convervatory of Music and the Abai Opera and Ballet Theatre, he looks at the ways in which opera served to translate between the local and universal languages of music, and between highbrow and lowbrow genres of performance. He also discusses how, in creating opera, political ideas and practices were appropriated and circulated at national and transnational levels.
Lecture in English. Free entrance, no registration required.
Nari Shelekpayev is the 2018 Einstein Fellow and Associate Doctoral Fellow (2016-2019) at the International Research Group Diversity, co-funded by the federal governments of Germany and Canada. His doctoral research focused on the creation of new capital cities between 1850s and 2000s in Brazil, Canada, and Kazakhstan in transnational and comparative perspectives. He graduated from the Karaganda Regional Conversavatory in 2005 and was a professional concert pianist for ten years.
Dr Robert Kindler is associate professor of East European history at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His award-winning book Stalin’s Nomads. Power and Famine in Kazakhstan (2014) is forthcoming in an English translation.
A collaboration between the Einstein Forum and the
