Last week, after I finished my pilates class with Margot, one of our colleagues (Sibel) invited us to go with her and her husband to see the university's folk dance competition. Of course, my sweatiness and exhaustion was no match for the excitement of being able to see a FOLK DANCE COMPETITION, so Margot and I hurried home, we changed and then went straight to Yalova's cool, modern cultural center (near Kipa). :-)
It was a long performance--by the time Yalova University's group got up there, we'd sat through almost 2.5 hours of loud (often electrified) folk music, dancing and a lengthy fashion show. It was great though! I learned a lot about both Turkish dance and music. 
Each school had both male and female performers, who mostly danced independently of one another. The schools performed the traditional dances from that school's region, and by the end of the night, I felt a lot more confident about my ability to categorize the folk dances of Turkey than I had before it. Central Anatolia has tons of ring dances; the Black Sea has almost spaztically-fast line dances; in Afyon they do fun, clicking wooden spoon dances. There are a lot of dances with complicated patterns of walk/marching. The men's dances are incredibly militaristic, with lots of high jumps, speed, and stomping...unless they are the lyrical dances from the Aegean. In that case, the men's dances are slow, graceful and each tells a different story of an explorer or farmer-turned soldier-turned explorer. 
The fashion show was great...though honestly a bit long. Each girl walked the perimeter of the stage twice, and there were a lot of fashions to see! My favorite one was this black velvet robe covered with intricate sliver embroidery, topped with a sexy little "harem hat" of sorts dangling with tinkling silver coins. Outside of the fashion show, though, I was so impressed by the costumes that the dancers were wearing. They were so complicated, and rich! ...and so similar! Everyone looked perfect! (Except for one sad chubby kid who almost lost his pants during one of the militaristic jumping dances of Anatolia... --The will they? Won't they?? drama of his pants created so many giggles, but when they stayed on, he probably got more cheers than any single dancer the whole night.)
Anyway, by and large, the dancers costumes and precision indicated a level of professionalism a bit higher than the VASA Rosebuds usually display...and arguably even higher than that of the Norwegians. I'm not saying that these kids could hold a candle to the sweetness of the Rosebuds doing the Happy Circle, but I am saying that they were really good. You could tell that folk dance was not a silly, side-extracurricular for them. It's big time in Turkey! Want proof?? Check out this video that I took of the end of Yalova's team's performance. Be prepared, though, it might just be the best video on YouTube. :-) Enjoy!
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