"Ecstasy with the Pomegranate" a sprawling, exotic work

"Ecstasy with the Pomegranate," the second offering in ACT Theatre's Ilkhom Theatre Festival, is a sprawling work: part erotic-exotic pipe dream, part tragic Russian novella and part Uzbeki historical excavation.

A detailed yet elusive, swirling brief on the confluence of art, sexual ambiguity and colonial politics in a crossroads Central Asian outpost, the production is not half as compact and distilled as "White White Black Stork," the first piece performed at ACT by the visiting Ilkhom performing troupe of Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

Here, "Ecstasy with the Pomegranate" plays a much shorter engagement than "Stork" — through this weekend only. And it demands much more time, concentration and commitment from an audience.

If one can agree to that, and be prepared for a sometimes slow-moving epic that requires at least the patience it takes to scoop out and eat the tiny beads of scarlet fruit inside a pomegranate, the Ilkhom piece is rewarding on several levels.

Co-written and staged by Ilkhom's late director, Mark Weil (a part-time Seattle resident who was murdered in Tashkent last year), and choreographed by the American dance maker David Roussève, "Ecstasy" gazes behind the veil at a fascinating subculture, its habitués and some characters on the fringes of it.

Our guide, after a fashion, is loosely based on a real-life painter: the diffident, keenly observant artist Aleksandr Nikolaev, who was posted with the Russian military in Tashkent during the 1917 Communist revolution in Russia.

Captivated by the city's hybrid East-West culture (he soon converted to Islam), Nikolaev was also drawn to the Bacha — a venerable Uzbeki folk dance, similar to Sufi dancing, performed by young men in the guise of women, in semi-illicit tea houses.

Nikolaev's enchanting paintings of the dancing Bacha boys have the vivid gouache coloring and timeless beauty of Turkish and Indian miniatures. They are an important aspect of the show's design, which makes use of Nikolaev's canvases and vintage photographs, back-projected onto a folding, rolling screen ingeniously throughout the three-hour show.

But this is a complex, often ambiguous tale, and not only the story of Nikolaev (renamed Nezhdanov, in this "fantasia"). Rippling through the text by Weil and D. Tikhomirov (in Russian and Uzbeki, with English supertitles) are profiles of other foreigners and misfits mingling in "old" and "new" Tashkent.

Among them is an ambitious Russian colonel, curious about and repelled by the homoerotic allure of the Bacha milieu. Another is his junior Russian officer, a clandestine homosexual and furtive devotee of the Bacha.

A vivacious, paternal teahouse-owner offers another perspective. So do several of the boy dancers, driven into their strange sanctuary by poverty and abandonment.

Also spotlighted is a sole, aspiring girl dancer, another misfit in a society where women covered up every inch of their being when on the street — and faced stoning if they broke the orthodox Muslim rules about female "propriety."

Roussève's simple, recurring dance motifs here are effective, if limited: undulating belly dance moves, Russian boot-stomps, tender lifts and holds. More varied is Artyom Kim's music score, a pastiche of martial melodies, clustered marimba sounds, Turkish-Uzbeki folk rhythms.

"Pomegranate" can slow to a crawl at times, and could be more palatable if half an hour shorter. But as in "White White Black Stork," Ilkhom's ensemble acting is admirably fluid, nimble and unshowy throughout. Among those players making strong impressions: Boris Gafurov as the imperious colonel, Denis Boyko as one of the more beautiful, sought-after Bacha dancers and, as the painter Nezhdanov, Anton Pakhomov.

Pakhomov's pale, haunted face quietly registers the strange jolts of politics and history that will alter the fates of all the play's characters. He is the witness whose art ensures that even as a pipe dream is shattered, it will not be obliterated.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com