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By Karen Bennett[Written between March 22 and 29, 2009 for publication in the May 1, 2009 issue of the Folk Dancer, the magazine of the Ontario Folk Dance Association. The photos used below and many others may also be viewed, caption-free, on Flickr.]
Fethi told me he came up with the idea of our performance as he "wanted to have a group from IFDC because it is an international folk dance club. I wanted to perform with many people in the group who didn't know how good they are. I wanted to share my knowledge and perform on the stage for my own community or any Canadian event. Part of teaching is giving an opportunity to your friends or students to perform and enjoy what they are doing." One of the persons "who didn’t know how good they are"—not only as a dancer but how well she wore a costume—was Elizabeth Lumley. Newroz was Elizabeth's second opportunity within a few months to don an ethnic outfit; in January, I'd drafted her to wear one of my original Bulgarian costumes at the OFDA-sponsored Bulgarian workshop and café, and she'd enjoyed her first costume-wearing experience so much that she was game to impersonate a Kurd as well. (Anyone in the group whose name wasn't in this paragraph—that is, everybody else: "Please to not take offence" at my slothfulness.) Back in November of 2008, Fethi had said to me that he'd like to get a group together from IFDC to show his fellow Kurds, most of whom didn’t know their own dances, what non-Kurds could do. Rehearsals, held at IFDC on Friday nights before the regular class started, began very soon after this brainstorm of his, and went on till the night before Newroz. What is Newroz, you ask? Cribbed from a Kurdish website: "For Kurdish people, March 21 holds a special place in their hearts.... In Kurdish, New Year's Day is called Newroz, which means 'a new day.' Newroz has been celebrated as a national holiday since 612 B.C. It is important to the Kurds not only because it is the beginning of their new year, but also because it marks the day that their national existence was first recognized. It was on this day in 612 B.C. that the ancestors of the Kurds united to rebel against the Assyrian empire. Their victory resulted in liberation for the people of this region. This is the reason why the people of Kurdistan, Iran and Afghanistan all celebrate Newroz, but in their own different ways."
Our preparations on The Big Day began with assembling at Judith Cohen's house to don our costumes, excepting the shoes and hats, before walking en masse to the nearby Ukrainian Cultural Centre to perform. Our opening dance had no name but it's a common one done by women with scarves to welcome guests; the music was a song called "Xhimse." Then we formed a line and the men joined us to do three dances from eastern Turkey: Govend (from Van region), Delilo (from Diyarbakir) and Kelekvan (from Van). During our set, some audience members encouraged us by ululating (which is called by the Kurds, in a fine example of onomatopoeia, "tilili"), a sound I found very energizing and one we occasionally mustered up when our dry throats permitted. (Aside: I learned to "tilili" from a 1975 movie called The Wind and the Lion, in which Sean Connery played a Berber chieftain who abducts an American woman [Candice Bergen] and her children in Morocco in 1904. The Berber women made this exotic high-pitched noise that I really liked, so I practised until I could do it too. "Everything I know, I learned at the movies...") When the music ended, we moved downstage to say to the audience "Happy New Year" in Kurdish: "Newroz Piroz Be." It was enthusiastically received. The food we were treated to after our performance, all home-made, was outstandingly delicious. Bev Sidney voiced great praise for the salad, made with lemon vinaigrette, and the desserts, made with specially-prepared nuts. Following us on stage were singers as well as children (all boys; incredibly cute) and teenagers in their own dance troupes. Eventually, Fethi managed to get the community up and dancing too. And one of the numbers was the Kurdish national dance, Delilo, which by no coincidence at all had been part of our performance. The Kurds consistently joined the lines by cutting into the middle (in order to dance beside their friends, naturally), which had the disconcerting effect of marooning some of us in a bunch at the ends of lines. However, this didn't denote unusual or discourteous behaviour by the Kurds towards the "outsiders"; cutting into lines is normal practice in numerous cultures (Serbs do it, for example), rather than joining at the end as international folk dancers are taught to do. We danced till almost midnight.
Our interaction with the Kurdish community bore some resemblance to what dozens of ethnic groups had provided during the heyday of Caravan in Toronto for nine days every summer in the 1970s and '80s—where, for example, international folk dancers would go to a Macedonian "pavilion" and an ensemble would sing and dance for us on the stage while we ate their fabulous food, and later we did some simple Macedonian dances with them. (Um. During Caravan, I was a shameless impostor of a Croatian on stage. Methinks I see a pattern.) Or we'd go to the Ukrainian pavilions; there were five of them one year, I remember. The Ukrainian Cultural Centre in which the Kurds nowadays celebrated Newroz had hosted a Caravan pavilion.
And many Kurds took Marylyn to be a Kurd herself, as her face so resembled someone who hailed from Diyarbakir, the city whose costume she was wearing. Fethi later sent the group an e-mail saying, "I can’t thank you enough for your hard work and performance. It was a pleasure to work with you. You did a great job.... I will be happy if we can continue and add some more dances to our repertoire. My goal to show people that folk dancing is not just fun; it is also artistic achievement for all ages." So it is. |
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In the Kurdish and Persian languages, the word "Newroz" or "Nowruz," respectively, means not only "New Day" but "New Sun": the rebirth of spring on the equinox, usually on or about March 21st. Hence the celebration to which we were invited on March 21st, which was a Saturday.
(Although I love getting into costume, walking around on the streets of Toronto wearing an odd and jingling headdress is more than I'm prepared to do.) Many were the exclamations of "How does this go on?" and many were the adjustments that Fethi made to those of us who thought we knew how things went on. Fethi provided eight of the costumes;
I furnished two women's outfits I'd recently bought from the defunct international dance group VillageFolk (which had a Turkish suite in their repertoire, with costumes ordered from Turkey by the suite's choreographer, Ahmet Lüleci); and Walter produced his own—also a relic of VillageFolk. Speaking of VillageFolk, one of its former leaders, Judy Silver, from whom I'd acquired the costumes, came with us as our groupie/cheerleader/comforting presence/photographer/general factotum, and very glad I was that she was with us. Helen's daughter, Rita, was our other groupie.
During supper, Goran (whose background is Serbian) had remarked that he wished the same kind of cross-cultural "interface" we'd just provided—whereby mainstream Canucks said to immigrants, in effect, "Hi; we appreciate your dances, your costumes, your culture; welcome"—had existed when he immigrated from Yugoslavia in 1988. The "two solitudes" of Canadians and Serbians had been quite isolated from one another.
The rehearsals, the dressing, the performance, the meal, the community dancing—all were a great bonding experience for us. For example, I had barely known Marylyn or Goran before we began this adventure, despite dancing with them on Fridays. Once we were off the stage—and some of us, such as Bev and I, had not been entirely happy with our performance, in part because glitches in the music played havoc with our momentum—we were gratified when so many Kurds came up to us to say thank-you. Fethi told us later, "Many people from the Kurdish community were surprised, and they loved your performance. They said you were better than their own groups."
When we later looked at the photographs that had been taken, Terri Taggart and I marvelled at how photogenic Marylyn was: just amazingly beautiful. Marylyn herself pronounced the entire experience to be "wonderful," while Elizabeth said that despite initial nervousness, she’d really enjoyed performing and had loved the challenge of the Kurdish dances Fethi had chosen.