Armenian Dance: Shaping Individuals and Communities

Komitas Vardapet expressed a profound idea, a deeper understanding of which may have a significant impact on our spiritual life. When speaking about dance he underlined it as a “phenomenon of fundamental importance” through which “all arts” find expression. The great musician viewed movement as the primary common element unifying every artistic discipline. Among all the arts, the Vardapet gives dance in particular the supreme role, completing the other arts. “Every art—music, sculpture, architecture—is movement,” he wrote. His conclusion is even more striking: “There is dance in every form of life. Isn’t the life of the entire universe a dance?” (Komitas, 1912).

“Artistic movement” of child development

In his 1912 lecture at the Yesayan School titled “Dance and the child,” Komitas notes that “dance, as a form of movement, plays an important role in the artistic movement of future school life.” In his view, the teaching of song and dance nurtures the child’s inner life. And it is highly significant that Komitas called the development of a child in school an “artistic movement,” although he was not talking about specialized art education, but rather about general education school.

The purpose of education, according to Komitas, is to provide children with “a moral philosophy and an understanding of life that children do not yet possess”. Yet Komitas believed this goal could not be achieved through “moralizing, edifying” words that the child “does not understand and is not affected by,” but by “providing a balanced upbringing for his feelings.” Komitas sees a direct connection between emotions and their expression through movement. “Whatever direction feelings take, song and dance will appear with the same expression,” he says and suggests shaping the emotional lives of children through singing and dancing. Moreover, specifically through Armenian song and dance, since Komitas also saw a connection between a nation’s civilization and its dances, akin to the link between “the level of intellectual development and movements” (Komitas, 1912).

At the end of the lecture, Komitas urges teachers to approach the responsible task of upbringing “with caution and reverence,” for they have been entrusted with a generation—and thus the future, the future of an entire nation. Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher who lived during the same period, also approached the personality of the developing child with reverence, and argued that “the developing human being is that precious material which we can approach correctly only by being true artists” (Steiner, 1920). Steiner considered it necessary to include various forms of art in the university curriculum in order to train teachers to be sensitive and creative regarding the child’s individuality.

We can look for the reason in the pragmatic educational approaches of the Soviet system itself. When defining the primary objectives of the educational system, its founders placed the emphasis on shaping a collective consciousness. As a result of upbringing and education, the child’s individuality was simply subordinated to the interests of the prevailing system. The art included in the educational curriculum was also systemic in nature.

More than a century has passed, yet we still actively discuss “the method of collective learning and the concept of shaping collective consciousness” — an approach aimed at transitioning from producing numerous individuals with a minimal level of education to universal higher education” (Mkrtchyan, 2012). Thus, the system once again aims to harness the student’s individuality to the interests of society, or, alternatively, sets individuality and society in opposition to each other. As for art, its inclusion in the educational curriculum is justified by its impact on the development of students’ higher-order cognitive abilities, rather than as a means of fostering a creative personality” (Coopman, 2005).

“A nation is, above all, a rhythm”

Deep knowledge of the human being is essential so that our choice of pedagogical direction is not superficial, but rather serves the fundamental goal: to bring up an individual, Armenian. A person who, on the one hand, embodies both a unique creative individuality and the Armenian national spirit, coming from the unfathomable depths of history, and, on the other, is capable of being an actively collaborating participant in the contemporary events shaping the nation and humanity. Thus, let us aim to restore the concept of the human being as an individual and a spiritual being—one that does not conflict with his social identity, including national affiliation—and, based on these anthropological principles, let us reconsider our approach to the education of future generations.

Discussing the concept of “tribe”—and, in the context of historical development, “nation”—the renowned Armenian writer and philosopher Kostan Zarian states that it is “pre-eminently a rhythm—a rhythmic autonomy,” the origins of which he sees in our physicality, “wedded to the land and soil of a given country.” It is precisely this rhythm that, in Zarian’s view, “preserves that enduring, immediate, and distinctive quality which constitutes the spiritual portrait of a human being or a tribe/nation.” Let us emphasize that Zaryan speaks both about the rhythm of an entire nation, and about the individual rhythm that is noticeable and developing in a separate representative of the nation. We can conclude that if we want a developing child to connect with and embody the national spirit, we must guide them toward the rhythm of national identity hidden within the body. “It is precisely that rhythm,” Zaryan believes, “that will bring the spirit to the point of formation, guide it, and harmonize it.”

And here, we must assert that it is precisely the national dance that embodies the rhythm of the Armenian nation—a rhythm formed over millennia, preserved through dance, and handed down to us as the guardian of our national identity.

Armenian national dance

First, let us emphasize that when we say “Armenian national dances,” we are not talking about artificially stylized folk dances, but ethnographic or ethnic dances. The etymology of “ethnic” traces back to pre-Christian pagan times. Interestingly, both the words ethos and ethnos derive from the same Indo-European root s(w)e, a third-person pronoun, “which can be used to refer to a socially distinct group.” While ethos pertains to “moral character, habit, custom, manner of behavior,” ethnos refers to “the genius of the folk, the characteristic spirit of the time and place”. It already directs us to study the factors of the formation of individual nations, first of all, our own nation, including the place of residence, development in historical time, and, of course, the spirit of the people itself, the “genius,” the recognition of which forms an integral part of our self-knowledge (1,2).

To sum up, the genius of a people, an ethnos, finds expression in its ethos: its moral value system. Moreover, anthropologist Geertz observed that every value system emerges in a specific environment, and “requires time for formation and development,” while any “morality is the result of learning.”

We can conclude that a people with a certain moral value system had a definite place, means, and historical time to learn and teach those values. From this it becomes clear the purpose of ethnography, which extends beyond merely describing an ethnic group’s traits; it seeks to uncover the group’s underlying value system — specifically, “the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood; it is the underlying attitude toward themselves and their world that life reflects. Their world-view is their picture of the way things in sheer reality are, their concept of nature, of self, of society. It contains their most comprehensive ideas of order.” (Geertz, 1973).

Geertz is convinced that one of the cornerstones of ethnography is cultural knowledge that is embodied in one way or another in movement, especially in the coded movement that we call ethnic dance. This assertion is based on the assumption that dance movement itself encapsulates a nation’s cultural history, beliefs, values, and emotions (Geertz, 1973). Dance scholar Sklar is also convinced that it is movement that gives us the key to understanding people’s thoughts and feelings. As a form of bodily language, dance functions as a key through which culture becomes intelligible (Sklar, 2000). As it turns out, Komitas expressed this very idea as early as the beginning of the 20th century, while in the 1940s Kostan Zarian articulated it artistically in these words: “Culture is created when the spirit of a people weds the country, the land.”

In that sense, Armenian dances are unique specimens, characterized not only by their preservation over time and amazing diversity, but also by the depth of research surrounding them and the accessibility of those findings. Armenian national dance provides a rich repository of knowledge about the Armenian ethnos. Research work in this field was carried out at the end of the 19th century by Komitas Vardapet, and already in the 20th century, under the initiative of academician of the USSR Srbuhi Lisitsyan, then later, folk musician Hayrik Muradyan, choreographer Rudik Haroyan, choreographer, teacher Gagik Ginosyan, and others. Thus, by analyzing the structural patterns, movement characteristics, and varied forms of Armenian ethnic dance, we can form an idea of the unique characteristics of the Armenian nation, on the one hand, and the influence of the movement of dance, and therefore its formative and educational power, on the other.