This piece is part of a research series that will be released in five parts, over a period of 5 weeks. You can find parts one, two, three, and four here.

Photo from Lernazang Ensemble. This article was originally written as a thesis for the MA Program in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, and has been adapted for publication here.

What one does informs and responds to who one is. Many Armenians in the US find ways to participate in Armenianness that go beyond Bakalian’s idea of “symbolic ethnicity.” Beyond making paklava every Christmas and looking for surnames that end in “-ian” in film credits, those Armenians engage with their identities, acting on what they feel and considering what it means for them to truly be Armenian. Dancing with other Armenians is one such way to enact Armenianness. Natalie explains,

I think [dance] offers you know, like this embodied way to participate in this active process of identity, right? Like identity I don’t think is a static thing that you’re like, given at birth. I think it’s something that you have to participate in. You have to actively make it, do it, engage in it, think about it. Like it has to be something that you’re always working on. And that’s not just, you know, [it’s for] any identity, like even gender identity too. I think dance is, because it engages the body, it becomes like a very real and very palpable and very important way to kind of do that work.

The work of identity formation is a constant process. For Armenians in diaspora, the separation from homeland and the multitude of perspectives on Armenianness can be isolating and make one feel disconnected from their Armenian identity. Dance, then, is one action that people take to connect, or reconnect, with being Armenian. In a conversation with Alice and Lusineh, they both stressed the importance of this type of action:

ALICE: I’m Armenian, and I’m a part of this culture, but it’s like, what do you do with that culture? Like, how are you involved with it? So being like, “Oh, well, I’m part of a dance group,” it makes us that much stronger and more connected versus like, “Oh, I’m just a part of this culture.” But it’s like, how do you show it? How do you show people that you’re proud to be Armenian?… It’s like actions speak louder than words. So you can say all this stuff, you can support the diaspora, things like that. But actually coming to the studio every Friday, going downstairs, listening to the music, being immersed in that culture. I think that’s stronger. And being a part of dancing, that’s, like Lusineh said, a very tangible thing. It’s an action that you can do.

LUSINEH: And it’s noticed. It’s recognized, acknowledged, you know, in the performances, the picnics. We’re saying random Northwestern students are stopping and watching. They’re watching us express our Armenia, our identity. And I think that in the diaspora, it’s very important to have something like that, that you can implement.

For Alice, it is not enough to say that one is Armenian, but one must act as an Armenian. Dancing is how Alice and Lusineh act as Armenians. The way Gaïdz understands it,

As a people, as a community, we are deeply tied to our cultural heritage. And it’s a way of actually understanding ourselves as people, right? Whether that be understanding where we come from geographically, or it’s sort of understanding what it means to be a participant in this community, right? It, dance, is a mode of actually, not just internalizing, but then actually acting on this sort of identifier “Armenian.” Like, it’s one way in which we practice that, and we tell the world, “I’m Armenian.”

In this way, dancing Armenian dances is being Armenian, or creating one’s own particular Armenian identity. When dance is a part of everyday life, this process is not necessarily a conscious one, but it is consistent.

Dance works as a meaningful piece of identity because it is something that dancers do regularly and that they enjoy. People ultimately dance for fun, and the creation of identity and community that it facilitates is not its outward purpose. When asked why he thinks Armenians in diaspora continue to dance, Levon replies, “Because it’s fun. But I think it’s, I mean I think that is an important element of it. Like I think if people didn’t enjoy it, we wouldn’t be doing it, or there’d be much fewer people doing it. And like, you know, obviously, we’re looking for the meaning and all of that, but I think it’s important to remind ourselves, or to remember that it’s like, for enjoyment.” Of the dancers I spoke with, they all emphasized that they love dancing. All the other meanings and processes exist because they feel so strongly about their dance. This love of dance is shared by a significant amount of Armenians as evidenced by the dancing that always occurs at Armenian events. Van describes,

There are galas, dances, fundraisers, any event where it’s an Armenian organization hosting, you know there’s always a place to dance. I would say that’s the given setting, especially, I mean, there’s big events every Labor Day weekend, every President’s Day weekend. Just a lot of Armenian organizations do things where it’s kind of known that you’re gonna be dancing. You gotta put on your dance shoes.

At these parties, with the emotions so high, Armenians build their communities on the dance floor. Sevag mentions how he connects with people while dancing:

With those Armenian parties, right? Like, you know, in most cases you’ll be at like a banquet hall, and there’s a huge dance floor, and then once the music starts going, and usually it’s a lot of the guys in our group will start dancing right away, get the party started. But it’s cool to see how people all of a sudden kind of just gravitate towards that. And all of a sudden you look around, you’re like, “Whoa, this dance floor is so packed, everyone’s having a good time.” You’re dancing with people you don’t even know. But you know, he’s an Armenian. So you’re like, “Ah, you know what, why not? Let me dance with this guy!” But I think that that’s the beauty of it. I truly think that in terms of the Armenian community, dance can really bring people together, and it’s awesome to see.

Because people enjoy dancing in this way, they are brought closer to the people they dance with. Certainly, settings like parties are obvious places to dance, but Jirair also notes dancing on a regular day just for the fun of it:

I feel like we all love dancing. The amount of times we just meet up not even for practice, or after practice. It could be like a Wednesday. We just meet up with friends at a parking lot and we turn on our Armenian music, and we start dancing, and, like the workers come outside, they go, “What’s going on? What’s that? What’s this?” They ask us, you know, “Who are you guys? What is this?” Just like, I don’t know. It’s great being in a dance group where everyone is friends. Everyone loves dancing, and amen mart hayaser e.⁶³

Making dance an everyday occurrence ensures that dancers uphold their communities and strengthen their connections based on the positive emotions dancing elicits. Being part of a dance group is not necessary to bring dance into daily life, as seen with Van and Gaïdz, as well as most of the ensemble dancers who mentioned dancing outside of their practices and performances. As Armenians experience these strong feelings from dance, they are brought closer to each other and to the homeland.

Along with the emotions involved, dance inherently relies on physicality. The importance of physicality can be as simple as a young girl from Sardarabad almost falling during a kochari⁶⁴but catching her balance thanks to the dancers next to her holding her hands. It can also be as impressive as the popular berd⁶⁵dance, in which dancers stand on one another’s shoulders, using their bodies to create a symbolic fortress. After a long practice that ended with extra time spent perfecting their berd, Chris noted being physically connected with his fellow dancers:

That’s something that we actually made a point of today. When you’re performing, you’re also performing for the people you’re with. It’s not only for yourself, right? So if you mess up a step, that might throw off someone in front of you, and it has like a chain effect. So you’re dancing for your group, you’re dancing for these people that you love, right? You do have to focus on yourself, obviously. But you have to remember that you’re a unit, and it’s kind of like a table. If you have one leg off the table, it will collapse.

Of course dancers need to be cohesive, but Chris also mentions the love shared between dancers. Emotion and physicality are intertwined. Natalie experiences this dancing with her ensemble and while teaching:

The majority of the dances require you to be in very close proximity with others. Whether you’re holding hands, or like sometimes you’re also holding each other’s waist and you’re very close. Or you have a tight grip on each other’s hands, and you’re shoulder to shoulder. So all those formations, they require you to be very much in tune with others. And so, like through that, there is like, this very obvious kind of notion of, you know, beyond unity and things, but like actual strength because when you’re that connected to one another… I think that oftentimes, we’re like, kind of afraid of touch, and I notice that actually when I teach, like people have a really hard time getting that close to each other, which, I mean, especially kids, they’re like super grossed out. But you know, the people I dance with are actually some of my closest friends. And then you know, the people who come to my classes, I’m with them, I dance with them too. So that really kind of creates this very strong sense of connection and strength and unity… Especially these types of like, social dance forms that require you to touch and hold other people and require you to dance together. I think they can offer a lot. I mean, I think they function as like a type of morale. I think they make people feel less alone.

By touching each other and being close to one another, dancers grow closer as people. Their physical connection is both a sign and a creator of their emotional connection.

With heightened physical and emotional sensation, the ideas of homeland become palpable. It is easy to think about, and perhaps romanticize, the homeland when one feels this powerful, affective, embodied connection. By dancing, Armenians in diaspora can feel the homeland from a distance. Sevag explicitly imagines the homeland while dancing, as he explains, “Personally, I feel like I’m in the streets of Armenia dancing. I like to picture like, you know, Mount Ararat in the background, I like to picture Armenian villages, and it kind of… It makes things more relatable in terms of my identity and why I’m really doing this.” Similarly, Gaïdz mentions how he feels the homeland in dance, “In terms of a homeland, when I was dancing with others, my mind was going, like I was picturing the same group of people dancing in Western Armenia 150 years ago, 200 years ago, like my mind would sort of switch off, like my awareness of my immediate context, where I was physically would sort of turn off, and I would start, like, hallucinating.” Some are more romantic or imaginative than others in these feelings, but the important thing is that dancing facilitates this felt connection between diasporan and homeland. According to Lilit,

I feel like that’s one of the only things, that’s what keeps me doing Armenian dance is that physical connection. I think when you’re able to express our culture through like traditional dance moves and bodily movements, it feels like a direct connection. And I think it was really cool too, when I visited Armenia, to see that a lot of the same dance moves are happening there. So there was almost that, like, physical aspect of being able to dance the dance moves there, and then also being able to do it here. That’s that tie that’s not verbal that really connects you to the culture.

The physicality of dance is something shared among Armenians. For the diasporan, dancing is a physical act related to the physical acts of their ancestors and of those currently in Armenia, the people that represent closeness to the homeland. Part of what makes this connection so strong is that Armenians dance together. When this felt connection is experienced through community, the community is intrinsic to the connection. In this way, the community is linked to homeland.

As dance evokes strong emotion and a felt, embodied connection to the idea of Armenia, it thus reinforces the social community tied to it, ensuring its importance for Armenians in diaspora. For Van, dance “is what our ancestors treated it as, it’s our expression of joy. So our expression of like, could be something like victory, positive things. It could also be sorrowful. I guess it’s just an expression of emotion that’s very natural to let loose in a dance.” When Levon dances, “There’s people getting together, and you kind of feel this hope of, you know, there are this many Armenians, and everyone knows the dances, and everyone is excited and participating and doing all these things. It just kind of feels good.” Elen describes this feeling as “an out-of-body high. I don’t know how to explain it, because you’re part of the art that everyone is enjoying. You’re making people happy. That in itself is a cool feeling, but when you’re doing it for your own culture, I don’t know if I have a word. Magical, maybe.” Natalie dances and feels that “those moments are like creating joy and sustaining community connection with your body.” And for Gaïdz, ever the romantic, he cherishes “finding some semblance of a brother and a sister dancing together. That was the hole in my heart then, and dance became the sort of fix that I needed.” As emotional expression, as community activity, as physical creation, and as social healing, dance is a meaningful part of the Armenian experience. Armenian dance elicits powerful emotional and physical feelings, strengthening the bonds of community and creating a meaningful experience of homeland for diasporans.

Ultimately, in exploring and sharing this piece of Armenian culture, I hope to foreground the strong emotional ties that people have to Armenia. Public understanding of Armenian experience is dominated by tragedy, from the Genocide of 1915 to the current, on-going conflict in Artsakh. I want to emphasize the enjoyment of being Armenian, demonstrating that though tragedy is inseparable from Armenian identity, it is not all-encompassing. With dance, Armenians nourish their enjoyment of their lives as Armenians. In the words of Jirair,

We have a word in Armenian to sum up this passion, and it’s called hayaser.⁶⁶ Hay means Armenian, ser means love. Hayaser means the love of being Armenian. I really think this one word encapsulates what it means to be an Armenian dancer, what it means to dance Armenian dance. And like we do choreographed, there’s [also] folk dances, village dances, party dances, a lot of types. But at the end of the day, it’s like, if you are hayaser, if you have love for being Armenian, that’s, that’s all it is. You know, it’s all you need.

Through the medium of dance, Armenians engage in joy, pride, longing, sorrow, and other, perhaps unnameable, emotions. Armenians dance together, celebrating life, professing hope, and existing in their own cultural space. When we dance together, we embody the homeland in ourselves.

Մենք ենք մեր սարերը, մենք Հայկական Պար ենք:

Epilogue

At the last ASA meeting of the year, we all linked pinkies and stood in a circle. Van went to stand to the right of Gaïdz, forgetting that Gaïdz was leading the circle.

“What, do you want to lead?”

“Oh! No!” Van laughed and went to the other end of the circle.

 Gaïdz started teaching us the steps to the Armenian Shuffle. “Step with your right foot like this, kind of like, it’s called the Armenian Shuffle, so you like, shuffle. Then do the same with your left foot. Okay, let’s practice that…”

We went over the rest of the steps a few times, then Gaïdz pulled up some Armenian music from YouTube. I heard a woman singing accompanied by oud, clarinet, and dumbeg.

“Now we’ll show you what you do with the arms,” Gaïdz said as we danced. “Look at our hands, it’s like this.” Gaïdz and the student next to him swung their arms in time with their steps.

I got the hang of it pretty quickly. Shuffle, shuffle, step behind, step in front, cross your right foot back, and step to the left again. Clap in rhythm while you take three steps back, then rejoin pinkies and do it again! In our small room of ten or so Armenians (and a couple odar⁶⁷ friends), we danced together to celebrate our time as a community that year. I heard Gaïdz and someone else singing along. With my pinkies linked with my friends’, I shifted my weight through my feet and swung my arms in time as we moved in a circle together. I was so happy to finally be dancing with my Armenians.

Gaïdz tried to explain the history of the dance, but speaking while dancing proved difficult as he mixed up his words. He told us, through a few pauses, that this dance had evolved from what people had danced in Western Armenia. The Armenians who lived in the US in the 1910s and ‘20s mainly kept dancing what they had danced in the homeland. But by the ‘40s and ‘50s, Armenian-Americans innovated their dances and came up with something particular to their style of being Armenian, and dances like the Armenian Shuffle were created. Now, here we were, a small group of Armenians continuing to create Armenianness in 2023.

The music changed tempo, and some of us tripped up in our steps. We stopped dancing, for now. We kept talking, laughing, and eating the rest of the evening, just happy to be with each other in our own, tiny Armenia that we had created together.

⁶³Ամէն մարդ հայասէր է (Eng: Everyone loves Armenians/Armenian culture/Armenianness)
⁶⁴Քոչարի (a type of circle dance with unique variants from different regions throughout historical Armenia).
⁶⁵Բերդ (Eng: fortress).
⁶⁶Հայասէր (Eng: one who loves Armenians/Armenian culture/Armenianness)
⁶⁷Օտար (Eng: non-Armenian; literally “strange” or “foreign”)

Bibliography

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Video Examples

“Armenian Shuffle (Shourch Bar – Cross Bar).” Video. YouTube. Posted by Tomzara, May 22, 2006. https://youtu.be/RRoj1SW_7U4.

“Beeline & Mush parayin hamuyt BERD.” Video. YouTube. Posted by Stepan Khachatryan, December 28, 2016. https://youtu.be/I0jLr5AKbx4?t=180.

“Կարին – Կարնո Քոչարի | Karin – Karno Kochari.” Video. YouTube. Posted by Tigran Madoyan, December 6, 2017. https://youtu.be/j4H_yFmXDq8.

“Karin – Tamzara / Կարին – Թամզարա.” Video. YouTube. Posted by KARIN Folk Dance and Song Group, September 18, 2013. https://youtu.be/yrrRNgqImf0.

“Karin – Yarkhushta Armenian traditional dance / Կարին – Յարխուշտա.” Video. YouTube. Posted by KARIN Folk Dance and Song Group, October 26, 2013. https://youtu.be/b_DjLqYzDDg.

“Մուսալեռան և Կիլիկիո Տապկիներ.” [“Musaleran and Kilikio Dabki”]. Video. YouTube. Posted by Lernazang Ensemble, February 22, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YrbTlEICZQ&ab_channel=LernazangEnsemble.

TheScarmind. “In besieged Martuni region of #Artsakh, Armenian circle dance (Shurchbar) next to Avo’s (liberator of Martuni, Monte Melkonyan) statue. 06.01.2023 Our Unbreakable Spirit. #Armenia 🇦🇲.” Twitter. January 6, 2023. https://twitter.com/TheScarmind/status/1611325672621998080.