Guzaliayi Abudukelimu

Guzaliayi came out of the rehearsal hall of the Acrobatic Troupe of Xinjiang Art Theatre. Her signature act is The Grapes Are Ripe: a yellow costume in atlas pattern, a peacock-feather headdress, a whole sheet of drifting purple-green gauze, and the prop grapevine tree standing at the corner of the stage. The heart of the act is a single word, ‘ripe’: fruit baskets appear from nowhere, green grapes turn purple, bunch after bunch, until the whole stage is filled with vines bending under their weight. She took the most everyday thing about her homeland and made it into a piece of magic that needs only eyes to understand.

The act was created by the Acrobatic Troupe of Xinjiang Art Theatre together with Ruxianguli. Through those days of repetition in the training hall, her master was right there: how to walk the dance beneath the grape trellis, how to flick the flying cards, how to gather up the green cards once they had covered the floor, all polished pass after pass. Card throwing is her master’s signature skill; now she has taken it up too.

From Shanghai to Shenzhen, from Hainan to Hong Kong, the act has carried her along the way. She is still young, and the competitions she enters mostly carry words like ‘newcomer’ and ’youth’; but The Grapes Are Ripe has already made her case for her: the grapes of Xinjiang can ripen in any theatre.