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Politics of National Dance in Turkey: A Historical Reappraisal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Arzu Öztürkmen
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Extract

In the winter of 1991, ballerinas of the State Ballet Ensemble of Turkey found a traditional davul (drum) player in their rehearsals. It was the idea of the Minister of Cultural Affairs that the state-sponsored ballet dancers should learn “our national rhythms”! The following day's newspapers gave a broad coverage to the event, displaying on their front page ballerinas crying in shock, despair and humiliation. This was a war of territory between tradition and modernity, a confrontation between different approaches to dance. It was about nationalism, and the definition of what was national, taking the art of dance at its centre.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 33 , 2001 , pp. 139 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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References

1 During my research in TFK, a well-known folk dance club in Istanbul, 1 recorded a certain scene that illustrated this point: during the intermission, one of the male dancers imitated an arm/hand movement of the women's dance. Whereas the original movement represented the long minaret of a mosque, with both arms raised toward the sky, the male dancer repeated the same movement with his hands forward, assigning to it a wholly new meaning, interpreting it as the magic movement (the “abracadabra”) of a magician.Google Scholar