Mukarram Turgunbaeva

Mukarram Turgunbaeva was born in the spring of 1913 in Fergana, then called Skobelev. She did not know her exact birthday herself: the Great Soviet Encyclopedia gives 13 May (30 April Old Style), while for many years she celebrated her birthday on 31 May. Orphaned early, she was raised by relatives in Fergana.

After leaving school in 1927 she entered the Fergana Pedagogical Technical School and danced in an amateur circle. In 1928 she passed an audition for the concert and ethnographic ensemble led by Mukhitdin Qori-Yoqubov, and in 1929 she joined the company of the Uzbek Musical Theatre in Samarkand, which moved to Tashkent in 1931. Until 1933 she trained in the theatre's studio, learning Uzbek dance from Usta Olim Komilov, Yusufjon Qiziq Shakarjonov and Tamara Khanum and classical dance from Konstantin Bek, and also studied singing and acting. She played dramatic roles as well, among them Asiya and Zebo in Arshin Mal Alan and Asalkhon in Ichkarida. In 1929 she married the actor Nizom Kholdorov; their son Telman was born in 1934.

From 1931 she was a soloist and from 1937 ballet master of the theatre, which in 1939 became the Uzbek Opera and Ballet Theatre (today the Alisher Navoi Bolshoi Theatre). She staged the dances for the musical dramas Gulsara and Farhod and Shirin, performed at the Ten-Day Festival of Uzbek Art in Moscow in 1937 and that year became a People's Artist of the Uzbek SSR. Studying with the ballet masters Aleksandr Tomsky, Ilya Arbatov and Pavel Yorkin, she took part in creating the first Uzbek ballets: she danced the title role in F. Tal's Shakhida (1939), as well as Ak-Bilyak, Zarema in The Fountain of Bakhchisaray and Gulyandom, bringing techniques of classical ballet into national roles.

During the Second World War she performed with concert brigades on the Transcaucasian fronts and toured Iran in 1942. She received a Stalin Prize in 1946 for her performance of Uzbek dances and a second in 1951 for her part in staging Reinhold Glière and Talib Sodiqov's opera Gulsara. She created dozens of solo and group dances, including Tanovar, Jonon, Andijan Polka, Pilla, Waiting, The Brave Girl and Namangan Apples, and choreographed dances for operas. From 1945 to 1957 she taught at the Tashkent Choreographic School; her pupils included Galiya Izmaylova and Qunduz Mirkarimova.

In 1955 she selected twelve girls from the choreographic school where she taught, and in 1957 this group grew into the Bahor women's folk dance ensemble. That year it appeared at the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow, and in 1960 it became a state ensemble. Turgunbaeva remained its artistic director and chief ballet master for the rest of her life and created fifteen concert programmes for it; as a soloist and with the ensemble she toured almost thirty countries in Asia, Africa and Europe. She was made a People's Artist of the USSR in 1959 and received the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR in 1967 and the USSR State Prize in 1973 for Bahor's concert programmes. She was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbek SSR for three convocations (1951–1963).

Mukarram Turgunbaeva died in Tashkent on 26 November 1978 and was buried in the Chigatai cemetery. Since 1979 the Bahor ensemble has borne her name, as do the Uzbekraqs dance association and a street in Tashkent. In 1993 a museum devoted to her opened and a competition for young dancers in her name was founded. In 2001 she was posthumously awarded the Order “For Outstanding Merit” (Buyuk xizmatlari uchun). The documentaries “Salom, Bahor!” (1962) and “Mukarram-opa and the Forty Beauties” (1977) are devoted to her life.