Sevi Bayraktar (University of California, Los Angeles)

Contested Choreographies: Women Claiming Traditional Dances in Turkey

In her doctoral fieldwork research Sevi Bayraktar explores discrete practices of the Sufi whirling tradition by focusing on its contemporary practices in Turkey. She applies choreographic analysis and uses qualified ethnographic, visual, and archival data to understand how such spiritual practices have come to mobilize women particularly through movement workshops, Sufi camps, and healing circles. Her larger dissertation project pursues two questions: (1) why traditional practices such as dervish whirling and folk dancing are recently revitalized and create new sociabilities in Turkey, and (2) how we can analyze political premises of these groups by looking at their choreographic negotiations and contestations with(in) the dominant movement systems. Since the 1990s, ethnic and religious communities marginalized over the past century are reclaiming to be political actors, which they foster through bodily implications such as reconstituting their movement systems, attributing new meanings to previous kinesthetic configurations, and performing in alternative spaces. As part of a larger historical context from a multi-ethnic and multi-religious Ottoman Empire to the Turkish nation state, dance has always been a highly regulated field. Today, we are witnessing that religious movement systems such as dervish whirling and traditional social dances of various ethnic communities from Anatolia become tools to constitute new identities and alternative communities in the public space. Bayraktar’s analyses elucidate ways dissenting women from diverse ethnic, economic, and political backgrounds embody a variety of secular and spiritual choreographies as modes of resistance through which to achieve political momentum in Turkey and to create a potential for social transformation.