In 1947, when Ninette de Valois arrived in Turkey to assist in the creation of a school of ballet at the Ankara State Conservatory (itself only founded in 1935 thanks to Paul Hindemith), she found herself in a country literally without a ballet tradition. Years later, de Valois would remember, "People regarded my venture as an Arabian Nights tale; in fact, nobody took the matter very seriously but myself."
Until the first decades of this century, apart from occasional performances by visiting ballet companies attended by Levantine merchant princes and a few Europeanized Ottoman aristocrats in Constantinople, ballet was unknown in Turkey. There was no existing art form that encouraged combining ancient Turkish and Anatolian dance and melodic traditions - complex and very much alive among the people yet scorned or ignored by the Ottoman gentry - with what had evolved in Europe as classical ballet.
While the Ottoman court entertained itself with performances of stylized, "civilized" dancing and listened to royal music derived from Byzantine secular and liturgical traditions, the Anatolians were exploring dance in a variety of ways. As an expression of emotions and of social experience, ranging from martial valor to courtship, native dance continued as it had been for centuries, an absolutely essential element in the lives of the men and - despite the injunctions of Islam - the women in Turkey. Then as now, people celebrated with dance all the auspicious moments of life - the sunnet (circumcision), betrothal, marriage, sowing, and harvest. Peasant folk, with restrained or dynamic movements to a marvelously wide range of music, mimicked the sights and the moods of nature. They enacted with ritualized steps the various pursuits of their workaday hours.
Imitation of Nature
In Anatolia's far eastern province of Kars, up by the Russian border, the village dancer, with almost balletic movements, performs the Ceylani, becoming in spirit, to himself and to onlookers, a gazelle. Moving to the music of the Uzundere (Long River), dancers imitate the undulating waters of a stream. At Artvin, in northeast Anatolia, a single dancer moving to the melody of the Tesi (pronounced Teh-shee) mimes the twining and spinning of thread, making a village chore a thing of charm and grace. Peasants of Erzurum on the Turkish Black Sea coast, wielding daggers in a show of mock dueling, dance the hanker Bari or the Bicak Horunu, personifying the bravery of young manhood. Maidens chain dance the Ben bir kavak olaydim (If I Were a Poplar Tree) with rhythmic body movements, their arms extended like delicate branches, turning themselves into slim poplars.
Outside Turkey's big cities with their cabaret displays of the danse du ventre, literally "belly dancing," wrongly called "Turkish dancing" by foreigners, where men and women dance beneath the immense Anatolian sky, exists a world of dance as complex as life itself, rooted in measureless time.
In the west of Turkey, on the Aegean coast, village dancing a heritage that harks back to Greek, Roman, and even earlier times, perpetuates those Dionysian festivals predating the advent of Islam and Christianity in the land. Nomadic tribal people, the Yoruks, though Islamized now, repeat patterns of dance and instrumental music going back to yet another and very different kind of pagan past, when huge
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