“Her-reeeeeee!!!!”
At the height of excitment, when the music is so
frenetic you need quantum equations to describe all the things your feet are
doing, you shout this word if you’re a man. It means simply ‘Go!’ in Kurmanci. The
last syllable only fails when your breath does.
(If you’re a woman, you let loose with an
ululation that shatters glass.)
I am talking about the dance called ‘govend’—a
dance as vital to a Kurd’s identity as their language. For Kurds, in my
experience, dance at every opportunity—at festivals and protests, at home and
on the way home, in sickness and in health. Wherever music is played—and it’s
played everywhere—someone’s going to leap up, grab a few others and break into
a govend.
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| A govend in Ovacık, Dersim |
I used to run into it everywhere I went with
Delal and though I managed to learn the basic steps of the slower dances, it
knew it was imperative for me to take a course to catch up with what years
being in the middle of her own culture had taught my wife. I was not going to
be on the sidelines forever. But no course was forthcoming it seemed—none that
focused on the Kurdish dances of the Southeast at least. And then we saw the
poster in a cafe in Kadıköy—Kursa Govend—offered
at one of the culture centers that have popped up since the Gezi protests in
2013.
I have a “liberal” Turkish friend at
school—let’s call her Aleyna. Aleyna’s a middle-aged woman who seems more up to
speed than most on the issues of minorites in her country. And so when I
excitedly told her over lunch one day that I had started taking a course in the
‘halay’, the Turkish word for govend,
I was surprised to hear her laugh. ‘What in the world is there to learn? You
should take Salsa or Tango or something.’
I had assumed, drawing from my experience
among my inlaws, that absolutely everyone in this country were fanatical
dancers of the halay. But I found out rather quickly that most Western Turks at
least, look at it as, say, a Boston Harvard grad would look at mudslinging in a
pick-up truck (which is fun by the way). I was more surprised by the reaction
of my school’s service bus driver, Mehmet. Mehmet is a young Kurdish man from Kiğı,
the same region as my wife, a place where people wake and sleep dancing the govend. When I told him I was taking a class in
Kurdish folk dance, he furrowed his brow and said, “What in the world is there
to learn from our dance? You should
learn the Black Sea horon or something like that.”
Well Mehmet. This blog is for you. There’s a
lot to learn from Kurdish dance, the first thing of which is politics. Your
answer alone, in a nut shell, demonstrates the effects of a hundred years of
assimilation if you ask me. If it belongs to us, you’re saying, it must suck.
Try something Turkish—that’s real culture.
Enough politics.
The basic concept of the govend is this—at weddings, protests, and pretty much anywhere two
or more people gather, folks join hands in a line as someone plays a rhythm on
the davul (drum) and a zurna, an oboe-like wind instrument. A radio or iPhone
will do if davul and zurna are not handy. Everyone performs the same steps
which vary in complication and generally get faster and faster until all but
the best dancers drop out. The first in line is called the “head” and is the
leader. He or she commands what steps are done at what speed and when. The head
flourishes a handkerchief which is bright colored—among Kurds it tends to be
red or yellow. Sedat, the young teacher of our course, said that the
handkerchief was a symbol of a piece of flame taken from the fire people used
to dance around. The Kurds, eons ago, were Zoroasterian (possibly) and many of
your more nationalist Kurds seem to want to reclaim that heritage. And indeed
there seem to be a lot of Zoroasterian remnants in many areas of Kurdistan—prayers
to the rising sun and moon in Kiğı, for instance, also a reverance for fire.
Anyway, the head waves and brandishes the handkerchief just as the flame itself
would flicker from the embers.
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| A govend at a village wedding in Xiwek, Kiğı |
For my people in the American South, maybe it
would be easiest to say the govend is
essentially an ancient line dance of great variation and I have seen people
from all over the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Western Asian doing some
version of it—Armenians, Arabs, Israelis, Greeks, Turks, Turkmen and Kurds. In
Kurdish, the word for this dance is ‘govend.’ And Sedat insisted that we call
it the ‘govend’, for the dances he taught are specific to Kurdistan (he says)
and so it’s going to be ‘the govend’ from here on in. And if you are
non-Kurdish and want to argue over who owns the copyright to this dance, all I
have to say is, ever ask a Southerner who makes the best barbecue? To the
outsider Kansas City and North Carolina might all be meat with sauce on it, but
child please.
If any of you have any doubts as to how hard
this dance can be, I just want to give you a bit of a video introduction.
Here’s a video of the şewko—go on, y’all. Grab a friend and give it a whirl.
And here’s another type of govend from Iğdir—these girls are doing
the most basic of all versions. Think you can spin quickly from the şewko into this?
That basic dance step in the video of the
Iğdir girls is the Delîlo (Üç Ayak in Turkish which means ‘Three
Legs’ though I couldn’t begin to tell you why, as it’s done on a count of four
with two legs.) According to our teacher, the word Delîlo has no special meaning but is made up of three exclamations
heard in Kurdish dance and song—‘De!’ ‘Lê!’ ‘Lo!’ The best translation might be ‘Oh Hey! Hey!’.
It’s the easiest of all the dances and I’ve known the basic moves since the
first few weeks I met Delal. You can learn the footwork in a second (though the
finer subtleties are lost on most people) and it’s the one that laymen usually
think of when you say the word ‘halay’, which is probably why so many people
think the class I am taking must be so laughably easy.
Essentially, you link hands, often hooking
pinkies, and take four steps forward then four steps back and to the right, all
in synch with everyone else. That’s it. But one essential trick that I learned
while doing this basic step and that I had not known previously is—you’ve got
to bounce. Your legs should never be straight. Your body keeps the time by
spring-bouncing to an 8 count rhythm as you move through the main steps, so
that while your feet are going “1, 2, 3, 4” your knees are going “1 and 2 and 3
and 4 and”. Learning this bounce makes all the more complicated dances a lot
easier later on and ensures that your shoulders and hands bounce as well, an
essential component to the flair of any good govend dancer.
The Delîlo
is a good primer on why the govend is actually quite difficult—the synchronization
among a large group is hard. The difference in rhythms between the body and
feet is hard. Okay, in the Delîlo
your feet are moving to a count of four while your body is moving to a count of
eight—that’s rather easy, but later on feet can be going to a count of four
while the music is to a count of six or the music is a count of eight while
your feet move to a count of 6, or feet to a count of pi (3.1415...) while the
music is to a count of e (2.71828...). And then, of course, the coordination of
hand movements and feet movements can get tricky—like the old pat your head and
rub your stomach routine.
Here is a rather dorky video that explains the
footwork in zombie like monotone but still, it gives you an idea (Try to
imitate the Iğdir girls!). Notice how the woman bounces—critical, and yet the
instructor in the video does not mention it at all. We spent a good half hour
learning just to bounce to the rhythm in our class. It was a blast and
tremendously crucial to getting anything right later on.
There are tons of variations on the Delîlo. We learned a few easy ones.
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| Govend at a Germik (Hot Springs) in Bağin, Karakoçan |
You can turn the four step figure, for
example, into a two step where the missing steps are converted into a scooping
motion with the knees, or else instead of stepping forward you can flip your
knee back or else you can kick out as you step backward as if your foot were a
spatula flipping a burger. When you launch into each set of four you can skim
your foot across the floor instead of stepping fully or you can skip your right
foot across the left knee to give it a bit of a flourish. You usually do all of
this as a group and so the head has to give a signal of some sort and all must
follow. What’s fun, if you’re the head, is that you can break off and kind of
do your own thing as the others keep going—one basic step when you do this is
to walk just moving your heels. In other words, when you step, your toes stay
on the ground and your heels flip up. You can combine this with the skipping
motion mentioned early, or the flourish at the knees, or all at once to create
a really complicated movement. If you’re young and flexible, you might squat
down Cossack style and kick out. Like I said, tons of variations on the basic Delîlo.
The next dance we learned was called the Dûzo, Dizo or just Dûz. It’s based on a three step—in other words you bounce your
knees to the count of three. Your right foot moves right on the count of
one—that’s the easy part. But what about the left? It follows the right on a
half or quarter count at the end—which is an easy sentence to write but very
difficult to make your foot do with any kind of regularity. The best thing is
to surrender to the rhythm and pray, but God doesn’t always answer prayers and
it took my class hours to consistently find that rhythm—some of us still don’t have
a clue. The music we first practiced with was by an Iranian Kurdish group
called Sima Bina and this song named Sheftaluforush—the Peach Seller. We also
used the song Celil Ber Çela.
Here are some people running through the basicthree-count Dûz with variations as the video goes on.
As with the Delîlo, this basic step of course has tons of variations. Just
simply stepping forward and backward with the right foot is a good start. You
can also break off and do the heel tap that I mentioned in the Delîlo. The davul beat can eventually
speed up and then you break into the dance that our teacher called the
‘essential govend’, and which in Turkish
is called ‘Dik Halay’ or, roughly
translated, ‘Straight-Up Halay.’
This “essential govend” was the whole point of me joining this class. The Delîlo was a walk in the park. Every
visit to the village or every wedding that I was commandeered into, I could manage
that one and retain some dignity, but then the music would speed up and
suddenly people’s knees and bodies were doing something I couldn’t decipher and
so I would have to bow out and sit on the sidelines like a dork while everyone
else zipped through the rhythms, having an ecstatic blast. It looked simple but
every time I jumped in the fray, nothing worked. Delal had tried to teach me a
hundred times but to no avail. Well, now I’ve got it now, kids—but I doubt I
can explain it in words. It’s a body thing—you’ve got to get used to the
unusual rhythms and then just groove. It certainly ain’t the Salsa.
Here’s how it goes. You do the basic three
step of the Dûz, then you do a four
count to finish, bouncing twice on the right knee and twice on the left. Count-wise—it’s
a quick stacatto one-two-three
followed by a lackadaisacally slow, one
two three four. The trick is the first three steps are blurred together
into a count of two—something I never picked up from mere observation. What the
hell? Exactly. Let me break it down for the math impaired. If you are doing
this count--one, two, three, four, five, six—you will move three steps between
one and two and then normally for the other numbers. When you are going really
fast your feet don’t move at all. Just your legs and knees go through the
rhythm—a phenomenon which can be utterly baffling. People’s bodies are dancing
wildly but their feet never leave the ground. I used to think they were just
gyrating randomly but since everyone was absolutely in synch, my hypothesis was
never convincing. Now, at long last, I know that the knees were doing the dance
that the feet could not keep up with. Here is the footwork up close (video taken at a festival in Hasköy's hot springs)
And there are variations. The head dancer can
give a signal and off you go—we learned a variety of kicks and skips that
tangles up my legs as soon as I think about it. In one version, you kick your
left toe with your right heel, skim the floor and then do a heel tap before
skipping forward with your left foot—all to that bizarre three in two rhythm.
In another the initial heel tap takes place at the knee. Or else, it turns into
a triple tap on the floor in front of you.
Here is a video that kind of shows theessential govend. Give the people
time to wind up into it (around 40 seconds). I recommend watching from 4:44 to
about 6:10--take a look at what happens when the head breaks away.
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