With its latest show, the Boston-based Armenian folk-dance ensemble, Sayat Nova, might well surprise those who think of folk dancing as grinning villagers prancing in lederhosen. The first half of the show called Journey Through Time depicts Armenia’s 4,000-year history of early paganism, defiant Christian faith, bloody battles and indomitable survival. One tableau showing a massacre of Armenians by Turks comes with a parental advisory notice.
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Sayat Nova performs Apo Ashjian’s Journey Through Time.
Photograph by: Viken Karaguesian , .
MONTREAL - With its latest show, the Boston-based
Armenian folk-dance ensemble, Sayat Nova, might well surprise those who think
of folk dancing as grinning villagers prancing in lederhosen. The first half of
the show called Journey Through Time depicts Armenia’s 4,000-year history of
early paganism, defiant Christian faith, bloody battles and indomitable
survival. One tableau showing a massacre of Armenians by Turks comes with a
parental advisory notice.
Company founder and chief choreographer Apo Ashjian has
heavily stylized the violence, of course, to make it palatable on stage. But
his decision to tackle the harshest moments of Armenia’s history shows how
seriously he takes the company’s aim of “preserving and promoting Armenian
culture.” Spectators will get some inkling of Armenia’s role as a cradle of
Western civilization.
“Ashjian starts with a strong dance showing pagan
Armenian symbols, then through important points of Armenian history, accepting
Christianity, the battle of Vartanantz against the Persian empire, then to (the
massacres of) 1915,” said Raffi Migdesyan, a Montrealer who in 1986 regularly
travelled to Boston with three other local dancers to rehearse and dance with
the newly formed Sayat Nova.
One number uses a love song by the 18th century
troubadour, Sayat Nova, after whom the company was named, who wrote about his
forbidden love for a princess and his consequent banishment.
The show’s second half is a medley of vigorous and
lyrical Armenian folk dances along the lines of the entertaining show that
Sayat Nova performed in Montreal in 2004. These include the highland Kochari,
and the Yarkhoushda, a militant dance with clapping and stomping.
“Sayat Nova was a community dance group when we started,”
recalled Migdesyan. “Now it’s much larger, younger and more professional. When
I first came, three dancers were pregnant. Now their kids are dancing in the
group!”
The troupe’s dancers were trained at Ashjian’s own
school, Abaka, where more than 100 students age 3 to 16 are enrolled. Ashjian’s
three grown children will be among those performing in Montreal.
A self-supporting troupe aided by volunteers and donors,
the company produces its own brilliant array of costumes.
“You can be entertained and at the same time learn
something about the history and music of one of the world’s oldest cultures,”
Migdesyan said.
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