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Scenes From Turkey: Oriental Dance, Part 3

© Shira

This third and final installment of Scenes From Turkey: Oriental Dance shows the dancers that I saw on my trip to Turkey in July 2000 who didn't appear in Parts 1 and 2 published over the past few weeks.

One of the things I enjoyed about watching dancers in Turkey is that many of them use finger cymbals. If you look carefully at the pictures in this article, you'll see several of the dancers using them. In contrast, Egyptian dancers often don't--instead, they hire someone to play cymbals for them in the band.

Parts 1 and 2 focused on dancers that our group saw on three consecutive evenings in Istanbul at high-quality nightclubs. Each of those clubs served a complete meal as well as presenting a show that included both traditional Turkish folk dances and Oriental dancers.

After spending several days in Istanbul, we then went on a bus tour in central and eastern Turkey. Shows like the ones we saw in Istanbul are not as easy to find out in the countryside, but we still got some good entertainment along the way.

One interesting thing I noticed was that the use of cutouts in costuming that was so common in Istanbul seemed to be unknown out in the countryside. None of the dancers we saw in the countryside seemed to have costumes in that style.

Our first stop after leaving Istanbul was the Cappadocia region in central Turkey. We went to an evening show at a club called Yasar Baba.

Like the Istanbul clubs, Yasar Baba also had a folk dance troupe performing. But at Yasar Baba, it was apparent that the folk dancers were the prestigious act, whereas the Oriental dancer was just thrown into the show because tourists expected to see one. The folk dancers wore a variety of eye-catching costumes over the course of the evening and did several sets. Their performance was very elaborate, complete with a horse brought indoors into the club with a woman playing the role of bride riding on it. They led the audience outdoors to where a bonfire had been set, and danced around the bonfire in an enactment of a wedding celebration while the audience gathered.

In contrast, I found the Oriental dancer at Yasar Baba to be disappointing. As you can see from looking at her costume in the picture below, it's very, very plain. Although the fabric is interesting, the rest of the costume looks rather bland--not a bead or sequin in sight!

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