DEMO VERSION OF LOVE

Concert Hall of the Mugham Center. Musical and poetic performance. The hall is full of people. It is nice to see that the audience loves and understands poetry, knows the difference between genuine and imaginary values. They feel a spiritual and intellectual need to rethink relationships with the world today and its values. In a word, the hall is full of people of different ages and generations who gladly accepted the proposal of two authors—Rasmina Gurbatova and Ulviyya Akhundova, to be part of a dialogue called The Demo Version of Love. The event was held as part of information support of the Arts Council Azerbaijan to youth creativity.

The program of event included poems and songs that Rasmin and Ulviyya performed alternately. Each performance found a warm response from the audience.

Pursuit of the wind

The word demonstration comes from the Latin and means visual display of something. Demo version first originated as a computer term meaning preliminary version of software. But the most important thing is that both performers demonstrated not only their works, but also their feelings and thoughts in the surrounding world and their inner world.

Love is a multifaceted and comprehensive theme. Discussing love is not easy. After all, so much has already been said and written about it! How can one find the very words that, without repeating the predecessors, would reveal the inner world of the author as a person with deep and outstanding personality? A person whose feelings and thoughts are reflected in the words that humanity uses to identify themselves and establish contacts with each other? It is not easy. It requires responsibility. It makes you feel scared a bit: will they understand you, accept you, will they recognise the Poet? After all, what is love: a feeling of happiness, an evanescing moment, pursuit of the wind? Or something that does not have an exact definition? But everyone has the right to define the love in accordance with his own life experience and attitude.

Ulviyya Akhundova. A very fragile girl in a light dress, with a shock of reddish hair and a microphone in her hand, seemed a symbol of beauty and femininity. Her confident and somewhat confessional tone addressed to the audience was captured from the first line and remained so during the entire performance. But the sense of harmony would be incomplete if Rasmin Gurbatova did not enter the stage where Ulviya was defining her own perception of love. A shock of dark hair, a black suit, the appearance of an oriental beauty and the expressive performance of the first author song highlighted the artistic image of the program. Black and white, as a struggle and attraction of opposites, created a harmonious union of the artistic aspiration of thought and the artistic symbolism of a literary and poetic idea. Add to this picture Rasmin performing her own songs in English, Ulviyya performing her own songs in Russian, and both communicating with the audience, easily switching to Azerbaijani—what a proud and respectful feeling for this young duo. These two young ladies could demonstrate not only the deepest linguistic knowledge, but also their creative belonging to the art of poetry with ease of virtuosos. Their art is the result of a creative state of mind that has been living in them since childhood. But these were memorable times, when each of the girls composed something different, thus marking the area of their competence for the future creative environment.

Rasmina Gurbatova

She always loved to draw and sing. This love did not develop into a professional career, but retained an organic need for creative expression. English has become part of her life since childhood: first with the Beatles, then with textbooks and books. It so happened that she first began rhyming the words, and then thinking in English! Humble attempts became more confident and gained their melodic sound. Her songs gradually made their way to public, growing in them with sensual words, the mood and expressiveness of the performance, very similar to the style so popular among the jazz performers of the New Orleans school of the period 1900-1917. The jazz, which would enjoy the characters of Said Kurban’s Ali and Nino, sitting in the restaurant of the City Club (now the Philharmonic Hall). Rasmina’s first professional experiments in public began when she was studying at the Baku State University, where she met Ulviyya. Acquaintance grew into a duo of co-creation. The experiment fit well into their joint initiative of creating fashionable musicals, such as Arshin Mal Alan, then My Fair Lady. This is where their skills in composing melodies came in handy. At first, it seemed like a naive and presumptuous test of self-expression, but, without losing their presence of mind, they rushed headlong into new creative experiments. Years of study passed quickly, and life opened new perspectives for each of the girls. Today, Rasmina Gurbatova is the founder and creative director of one of the local companies, designer, poet, composer and mother of two charming daughters. He speaks Azerbaijani, Russian, English, a little Turkish and French.

Ulviyya Akhundova

She liked rhyming the words since childhood. She refers to writing poetry as a way of letting her heavy emotional experiences go. Poems are not born as a rhythmic poetic line, but as a melody that sounds in a certain way. It is the melody that dictates the size and rhythm of a poem. Her first public performance took place at the Ibrus Theater, where she was working as an actress playing the role of Maryam in Rustam Ibrahimbeyov's play Tartuffe. This was a period of invaluable practical experience in interacting with the audience, including in Russia and France. By that time, Ulviyya had already graduated from the Sorbonne, translated two books of Banine, Caucasian Days and Paris Days from French into Russian. But she has never stopped writing poetry and still treats this as a hobby. She never calls herself a writer or poet, confident that this status can only be attributed to special people. Nevertheless, one can hear the confident voice of the master gifted with poetic vision in her translated prose, stories and poems. Recently, Ulviyya has published a small collection of short stories and poems called Дыши (Breathe). She recalls with pleasure the first joint creative experience at BSU, wondering how they dared thento create a completely modern musical based on the classical operetta of Uzeyir Hajibeyov, Arshin Mal Alan. The process was so fascinating that by the time the project was completed, the number of people wishing to take part in the work of the student theatre had tripled. Today Ulviyya Akhundova is a poet, translator, writer, screenwriter and art manager, head of the public affairs department of the YARAT Centre for Contemporary Art. She speaks Azerbaijani, Russian, English and French. She is one of the authors of the Demo Version project.

Many years later

The question was a natural one: how and when did the idea of creating a project so necessary for the cultural life of Baku develop? They met by chance many years later. There is nothing strange about this. Because in such a large city as Baku, this phenomenon is common. But meetings after a long breakup bring pleasure, joy and, as in this case, positive results. So they, unexpectedly meeting at some event, realised that for the time, until they saw each other, nothing had changed in their interest in each other's work. On the contrary. The feeling was like they broke up only yesterday. The dialogue shaped out of nothing, interest in each other’s creativity and thoughts did not run out, and therefore for many years the idea of creating a joint evening program, soaring in the air, seemed not absurd, but quite real. The idea was born, crystallised and marealised. The meeting was not only significant, but also promising. Because the Demo Version just hit the mark, dropping a pleasantly emotional fleur on the souls and minds of the audience hungry for a confidential conversation. The audience wanted to continue such meetings, they wanted to hear these poems and songs again and again. And, finally, they just liked the work of authors who managed to create an atmosphere of confidential dialogue, giving a feeling of unity of souls, thoughts, emotions, moods.

“Do you consider yourself a self-made person?”

Rasmina: “I think that a person is different at each stage of his life. I like the current state of my personality, but there is no limit to perfection, there is still room to grow and I want this.”

Ulviyya: “To be honest, I rarely feel that I am complete as a person. Most often I feel the state of internal swing: the excitement, the joy of something made possible, and almost immediately after that—the fear of not having time to do something important...”

“What do you want from life at this stage of your life-way?”

Rasmina: “We owe the Earth as human beings. The more positive emotions we radiate into space, the better. To do this, we must remain ourselves under all circumstances. We need to live in a state of happiness and love. We have to be honest and uncompromising in relation to ourselves, to what we do in this life. When I do what I want and do what I like, I even look different to myself! I am a source of positive energy. I don’t want any compromises any more. I want to be a holistic person. And I want the people who are next to me to be like that too...”

Ulviyya: “I fully agree. I would just add that I would like to materialise a few items from my wish list. I think all of us had such wish lists once in a life time. But all of these wishes refer to the future tense, where everything is somewhat foggy, ambiguous. But once the fog dissipates, you wake up and realise that you are a long time adult and your ‘future’is already there... There will simply be no other time to make the dreams come true. Afterthirty (and everyone knows this), the desire to change something in this life overcomes us more and more often. In the past few years, I have noticed that a growing number of people around me that try to make radical changes around themselves. The example of friends is very inspiring. People share their stories with me. That is where the wish list from childhood pops up in your head with travels, sunset on the island of Corfu, and writing a play... Also, I really want to finally realise my a dream come true and visit Dublin.”

The event was a true success. Poems and songs of both authors were accompanied by a musical group led by Babir Babirli. The audience expressed the authors how much they love themand how pleased they were with their performance. Words of gratitude and wishes to hold similar events in the future wereaddressed from the audience to the director of the International Mugham Center, People’s Artist of Azerbaijan, Professor Murad Huseynov, as well as the project manager Babir Babirli, musicians Shamil Mammadov (guitar), Azad Yusubov (bass guitar), Elnur Huseynov (keyboards), Eyvaz Hashimov (drums).