Dance Lessons--How to Dance the Govend, part 2

Sorry for the long delay--it was a busy Spring.

The govend at our wedding

So let's begin with another dance essential to know, the şemamê. This is a relatively new dance cooked up by youngsters and based on an older traditional dance. Here’s how our teacher Sedat explains it.

“The ‘şemamê’ comes from the ‘şêxanî’ govend. Over time, the rhythms of popular music, in particular hip hop and disco, were added to the şêxanî as its rhythms were particular amenable to this. In Van this dance is called the  ‘hêjirokê’, but the song is different. There is a general terminology problem with these dances—each one is named according to the song they are danced to it seems, instead of according to the steps, so that the same dance can have several different names just because one region chooses a different song to perform them too.”

The handwork in the şemamê is tricky—your feet are doing one thing and your hands another and the synchronization is a bitch to master and make look natural. The fancier versions of the şemamê involve all sorts of little half-steps and change-steps and tricks with the feet and legs. And everyone comes up with new variations all the time that you kind of half to catch whenever you join a dance with people you don’t know. The dance also is unique because it starts on the left foot while most govends start on the right.

Here’s the şemamê. Watch the boys on the left, at the head of the line. 

Learn it here, in Turkish, but she shows you step  by step so it's easy if you don't speak the language.

And here’s the şêxanî from which it sprung.

Now let’s get naughty. Close the curtains, switch off the phone taps. You just cannot ignore the existence of what’s casually known as the “guerilla halay”—you’ll see some of the kids at rallies dancing this one. Let me again refer to Sedat Hoca to explain this one.

The guerilla halay (or govenda şoreşgeran as I think it should be more properly known) is actually a slower version of the steps of the govend. Since mostly guerillas danced this govend or, since people saw guerillas while they were dancing this govend, it was referred to with a sentence like ‘the dance that they do’ or the ‘the dance the guerilla’s perform’ and eventually was shortened to ‘guerilla halay.’ In other words, under the most basic of circumstances, it’s just called the govend, but due to different factors and in different regions more ‘interesting’ names might be used. Typically it just takes the name of the song it’s danced to. We danced it to the song ‘Keleşo’ so some would call it ‘keleşo.’

Supposedly, once the public starts doing the dance that the guerillas do and starts copying them, the guerillas quickly drop it and invent a new one to be the next ‘guerilla halay.’ The one we learned has been public for a while now and the steps are symbolic. It starts off slow with simple bounce-steps but eventually builds into huge leaps. You take two double hops forward symbolizing an advance. Then with your left foot you come forward and down hard, then move back two double steps. The govenda şoreşgeran can be done with music but is more often done without, the dancers singing one song or another.

We learned to a ditty called Keleşo. Just before Delal’s Dad was released, as we waited in front of the prison gates, a group of young boys built a bonfire and started dancing the guerilla halay to Keleşo around the flames. They were then quickly shown up by two young girls from Hakkari who busted into moves so quick and furious, no one else could follow. They couldn’t have been more than twelve but they knew how to cut a rug.

I’ll introduce just one last dance—although there are lots more. It’s called the çepkî which means ‘lefty’—a name it sports because the line moves left instead of the usual right. It has a three step count starting with the left foot—on the second step you kind of crick your knee and then hop back on the fourth step as your right foot goes out. You repeat this three times, then do two side steps to the right before you launch into another hop. The hand work on this is tricky, too—completely different than what the feet are doing—circles, forward thrusts, back swings to various counts of one, two and three. You can also kick instead of step in a kind of Riverdance version. Here’s a video of what a really young and wild (and possibly drunk) çepkî might look like.

This video shows you the steps—though the dancers are not very animated.

These are just a few of the dances we learned. There are several other rather slow and dignified ones that resemble something out of the Aegean region. Sedat Hoca feels there is a basic problem with the nomenclature and has devised an alternative classification system based on the speed of the dance and the speed of the music. The slow dances are called granî (which means heavy in Kurdish). Each category after that grows greater in speed. Normally, you’ll see each dance classified according to region but then that leads to someone from Hakkari insisting that such and such is her dance while someone from Dersim, dancing the exact same steps, will call it by a different name, and argue that it is a Dersim tradition. Why not, Sedat says, classify them all more systematically according to speed and form?

Sedat, a professional dancer with the Kardeş Türkler who also performed in the über professional Anatolian Fire, sees the govend as a very political thing. His is the first class of its kind—in America or in Japan, there’d be hundreds of these dance classes all across the country. I think of the Cambridge Dance Complex in Boston or the Middle East dance studios all over Tokyo and Osaka. And though I have seen ‘Folk Dance’ courses here and there, nothing focuses on the dances of the Southeast. 

Apparently, he met a lot of resistance when he decided to start a course—his friends in the dance world resented the idea of a “Kurdish” dance class. They gave the usual arguments—these dances belong to everyone. How can you classify them as “Kurdish”? Of course no one gets their panties in a tangle when someone calls the horon a Black Sea dance or the Zeybek an Aegean dance. In my opinion, hell yeah these dances belong to everyone. I can take a ‘Black Sea’ dance course and not cry about how the name ‘Black Sea’ makes me feel uncomfortable. Why should the name ‘Kurdish’ be a problem?

Ah, well, we all know why. Call anything ‘Kurdish’ and it’s like you’re declaring war here—a mindset reinforced by the media and years in an education system created by a fascist military coup.

Sedat is definitely a nationalist young man. In his view, the assimilation policies of the last one hundred years have affected folk dance as well. Kurdish folk dances not recognized by the Turks were ignored, many lost, while dances similar to Turkish ones but with some different steps or flourishes were assimilated to get rid of the differences and make the dance exclusively Turkish. The same with songs. A lot of the Kurdish songs have been translated into Turkish and the Kurdish versions lost or forgotten.

Recently, Delal has been watching ‘Eyes on the Prize’ in preparation for our trip to Alabama. She couldn’t help but notice that as the young protesters were attacked with fire hoses or dragged off to prison or attacked by dogs they always responded with songs. Black people faced their aggressors with music. One man in Arkansas actually danced in the water of the firehouse. Music as defiance, as an integral part of a people and their struggle for justice.

‘That’s us, too,’ Delal says. ‘No matter what is happening, we are going to find a way to do the govend. We did it at Gezi. We did it at the hunger strike protests. Everywhere for every reason, the govend.’

DANCE LESSONS--HOW TO DANCE THE GOVEND: PART 1 DELİLO, DUZ, GOVEND

“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.

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.

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.

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.  

The West Virginian Halay---

The other night, Delal and I strolled down İstiklal Avenue for the first time in months—unprecedentedly relaxed among the ever-present crowds and hullaballoo that usually sends us both into the fetal position, shivering in a ball right there in the middle of the promenade. We were feeling so good that we popped into a türkü bar and after a few melancholy songs from the East, the singer broke into something much jauntier and we leapt up and let loose with a spirited halay.

                It reminded me of West Virginia.

                That’s right.  Of our Kurdish square dance in Helvetia.    

Helvetia, West Virginia is a small village up in the mountains, an hour’s drive from my mother’s hometown of Buckhannon, which is already up in the mountains by virtue of being in West Virginia. The tiny two lane road winds and curves up through forest and farmland—past barns, deer, wild turkeys, lazy cows and a small tavern in the woods that should be located anywhere but this twisty road lined with dangers. We were heading to Helvetia for a festival celebrating Swiss National Day.

The Creek--leads into the Buckhannon River eventually

                Some random facts about Helvetia. First of all, it’s smaller than most villages in Turkey—a fact I like to flaunt because it always silences people here who see all of America as an urban Frankenstein consisting of CSI teams in Miami and New York. ‘In Turkey, we have rural places…’  Oh yeah? Try this-- according to the US Census of 2010, Helvetia sports a population of 59 people. A flip through the year book revealed a graduating class of 2—the whole high school had a total of nine kids and that’s only if you count from the ninth grade. The village was settled after the Civil War by intrepid Swiss immigrants including the ancestors of my Uncle Keith (not really my uncle, but the husband of my mother’s first cousin which in Turkish or Kurdish I’m sure has a specific word, but we just say Uncle.) Uncle Keith has a book published for one of his family reunions that describe the journey across the mountains. Harrowing is the word. They walked up through the forests without roads or signposts—dragging all their worldly goods along with them.  And, yes, maybe to people who frolic among the Alps, the old, worn-down Alleghenies didn’t seem like much more than pleasant hills--but moving a home on foot in this country would not be the easiest task in the world for anyone. It would involve scaling large boulders and small cliffs, forging straight up hill for years through blackberry briar and poison ivy, and no doubt fighting bears.

                In the dance hall there are yellowed pictures of these early days--of men with enormous two-person saws cutting lumber in the forest, and of a rather robust woman in a Sunday dress holding up an enormous tom turkey whose plumage looked like the hoop of a giant skirt (In fact, at first I assumed she was holding up a young woman by her braids—turned out to be the Turkey’s neck). The community has kept alive a lot of Swiss traditions which is what today’s festival is all about.

                I say festival—this word undoubtedly conjured up images of game stalls, dunking booths and perhaps even midway rides in my American family’s minds. For my Kurdish family, I suppose that there were teeming crowds of people milling about several music pavilions. But when we pulled into the village we found that ‘festival’ in the Helvetian dialect meant a line of 4 tables, a grill, and about fifteen people in a meadow—20 if you count the folks manning said tables and grill. To be fair, that’s over a third of the population. Not that more weren’t on their way—a guy pulled up in a truck shortly after we did and the taciturn guy cooking the Bratwurst said that he was sure their yodeler was coming, though no one had heard from him in months.

                We got a plate of Swiss National Day food—which included a bratwurst, sauerkraut, and spinach dip with corn chips. Delal loved the sauerkraut. She had already fallen in love with hot dogs, so the idea of pairing them with this wonderful new pickled cabbage was magical. We ate our dinner in the meadow—the village’s answer to Taksim Square.  Now Helvetia is a very green place in summer. The color is electric—it sparks off the trees and grass. The forests surrounding the village are so thick with foliage it looks like an emerald fog hangs over the hills. There’s a brook that winds through the village sporting one pensive duck who peers fiercely into the water as if seeking enlightenment (Note to visitors: the duck really hates to be disturbed, even with bits of bread, and will use violence) They even have a log cabin library, which amazed our Kurdish visitors who come from a city of over 15 million people where I can think of not one genuine public library that anyone uses.

                The woman at the cash register promised that the music and dance program start at six, so we took our places on some benches lain out in front of a little stage set up in the middle of the meadow, ate and waited. Soon a troupe of men and women in red Swiss National Day shirts separated from the ‘crowd’ and climbed the steps together with a guitarist (and in doing so, halved the potential audience). The emcee was a thin woman named Sandy with hair down to the back of her legs that she kept wound on the back of her head like a failed attempt at a cinnamon bun.  ‘Unfortunately,’ Sandy the emcee announced, ‘The yodeler doesn’t seem to be coming this year so we will have to make do with this modest little chorus.’ She asked where we were all from. Someone shouted ‘Clarksburg!’, another ‘Pittsburg!’. I shouted Turkey, and helpfully pointed to Delal and her sister.  Sandy threw up her hands and gave a cheer for Turkey.

What followed was an hour of Swiss folk music in German with a lot of wisecracks bandied about between songs. One of the songs was a melancholy melody about a Swiss immigrant longing for the mountains of home. I think this one moved my wife quite a bit. The performers apologized for not being in traditional costumes, but it was just ‘too dang hot!’ At the end of the concert, two men brought out a pair of alphorns the length of a mammoth’s trunk and created what passed rather well for a melody by spit-blowing into something the size of a rocket ship. Next came the folk dancers—I think the entire high school participated—but needing more people to make the various reels work, they rounded out the group with some of the older folk and a man forced into labor as soon as he climbed out of his pick-up (summoned there, no doubt, five minutes before by an emergency phone call). Before his arrival, Sandy had shouted in an ominous voice, ‘Let’s make the Turk dance!’ Meaning me.

Now since coming back to Istanbul—among the 21 mosques surrounding our house screaming the ezan into our windows at 120 decibels five time a day, the car horns that never ever stop, the tens of thousands of buildings that spread out in all direction—the dancing and singing on the quiet Helvetian meadow is a pleasant memory that wafts like green smoke drifting in from another world—the sunlight, the people, the smell of grilled wurst and mountains.

After the dancers had finished, it was dusk. Fire flies had started blinking along the creek, the duck broke his silence and let loose some frantic quacking, and the sky had turned a bright flamingo pink. We were invited to the square dance at 8 o’clock up at the dance hall, and when that didn’t seem to capture our interest sufficiently, the locals added that there would be some polka and waltz as well. ‘And maybe,’ said the Emcee who had suggested they make the Turk dance, ‘You all could teach us some of your dances!’

The dance hall was an old wooden building just up the road—it had the look of a barn or church. A huge ornate spider web covered the entire south section of the small picnic area. The little arachnid clearly had some free time and my wife and her sister spent a long while snapping pictures of its handiwork. The band had already assembled inside—a piano player, a fiddler, and a guitarist.

 

The night started with ‘round dancing’—a term used for single couple dancing, I guess as a counterpoint to square. Our round dance was the polka. Now that word, to my mind, always conjured images of a busty girl with a beer stein doing kicks as a boy in lederhosen went to town on an accordion—but all the old folks of Helvetia--and my mother--could cut quite a rug with the polka. (‘Oh yes,’ she would say, tossing aside the cane which she used to accentuate her pained cries of I just can’t walk anymore at all! as she struggled to cross the ten feet from , for example, the car door to the Walmart entrance.) ‘We used to dance the polka all the time in high school!’  Who knew? The German influence round these parts is thick and sneaky—it pops up in the random memories of family members all the time but no one outright says or even seems to know that this comes straight out of Deutchland. My mother polkaed me up and down the hall for song after song. (This polka trick of my mom’s was rather curious. All day she had been hobbling around on her cane worrying frantically about how in the world she was going to, say, make it from the car door to the picnic table which was a frightening twenty feet away, and now she was swirling round and round the dance hall clearly having forgotten the cane existed)

After the polka came the square dance.

Now you Americans out there have to push the image of elementary school PE classes out of your minds—where teachers who had run out of ideas made kids dosey do till they dropped to a caller from a cassette tape.  Folk culture is far more alive in Turkey. At my wedding, hundreds of people spent literally hours dancing the halay, and I am constantly being asked if there were any folk dances in the United States (with everyone secretly and smugly confident that I’ll be forced to say no). Heck, sometimes they answer ‘No’ for me. I even catch other Americans saying the same thing. And yet, I would dare say that by high school, a higher percentage of American kids have square danced than kids in Turkey have done the halay. I had to teach my middle school students the halay for God’s sake, so I was excited for Delal to take part in a square dance and finally see that yes, Virginia, there is an American folk dance. And by the way, according to an article I unearthed, the square dance is uniquely American if only because it combines a European style of dancing with modifications by African Americans (supposedly the caller might have popped out of African call and response music traditions.) So there’s another thing we owe to black folk.

Now apparently there is an ‘Appalachian’ style of square dance, which we were doing that night. One distinguishing characteristic was live music. Another was that we danced in a giant circle of couples as opposed to small sets of couples. This involved a lot of confusing ‘going round the ring’ where you had to make your way through every last person in the room all while doing some fancy step or another—and since many of us had either no idea what we were doing or else had been outside with the man at the house next door sampling the moonshine, this proved no easy task. One result of this sort of thing is that you almost never spent time with your original partner. Another distinguishing characteristic probably contributed to the chaos of the second—namely, the dance is very informal and ‘lessons’ are often given on the spot. There are some unique figures as well like ‘dive for the oyster’ where one couple raised their arms and the rest of us dove through in an effort to tangle up in a hopeless mass. (Actually once—after several disastrous attempts--we were able to completely reverse our positions and then dive for the oyster a second time to set them right again.)

At the end of the dance set, the woman from earlier asked Delal is she would teach the crowd a dance from Turkey.  ‘Our musicians are pretty good,’ she said. ‘They’ll pick up a tune.’ So up went my wife to teach the trio the music to ‘Oy naze naze’ by Siwan Perwer. What ensued was perhaps the most improbable melting pot of cultures I have ever seen—here were these Swiss descendants in a circle, holding hands as my Kurdish wife took stage next to the Appalachian fiddle player. She launched into song, and did it in an improvised call and response style—like the old Africans—so that we dancers sang the chorus (Oy Naze Naze!) after every line. Meanwhile, some of the men in the group stumbled a bit due to their imbibing of moonshine. One of the participants turned out to be a Japanese woman—either married to a local or else teaching at the college, I can’t remember which, who I bet never thought she would be buzzed on moonshine while dancing to a fiddle and singing in Kurdish the lyrics of a man exiled from Turkey.

Afterwards, they taught us one of their Swiss folk dances—the Weggis, which I thought perfectly captured the spirit of the US. The Weggis was created not in Switzerland, but in the States, by nostalgiac immigrants who put together in one dance all their favorite moves from the ones they remembered from back home.  The nostalgia of immigrants creating something new out of culture brought from the homeland—quintessential USA. Our teachers were very patient and kind and by the end we could do all 5 figures competently enough, perhaps, to perform next year.

West Virginia felt like home to our Kurdish visitors—the tightness of community there, the sense of family and tradition, and the way the best news agency is a nosy neighbor. A few days after our night in Helvetia, we were at a birthday party and a man I had never met before came up to me and said, ‘You must be the folks from Turkey who taught that naze naze dance up in Helvetia’

‘How in the world do you know?’ I ask. ‘We’re you there?’

‘Naw, I got a friend who lives up there and his wife told him about some people from Turkey who taught them all a folk dance.’

‘News travels fast.’

‘Round these parts it does.’

Now if all of this seems unrelated to what I've been writing about--it's not entirely.  Nevermind those little human similarities that kept making us smile over and over--the way news travels by gossip so quickly, the dancing in a circle, the warmth of the Helvetians.  Imagine, also, two Kurdish women from Turkey coming to a country and watching a group of people have a national festival that celebrates a different nation than the one they live in.  They wave the flag of that nation, feel proud of their heritage in relation to that other country, and sing songs in another language other than the main language of the State (I would write 'official' but there is no officially mandated language--not yet).  And yet no one arrests them. No one calls them splittists. In fact, people just come to watch out of curiosity.

All in a region of the country traditionally isolated by its mountains and historically often at odds with the government because of it.