Sevi Bayraktar

Im Teilen verbirgt sich eine Doppelbedeutung: mitteilen und teilhaben, aber auch zerteilen, Differenzen erfahren. Welche Bedeutung hat das Teilen für die tänzerische Praxis? Welche Formen des Tanzes treten dabei hervor? Und welche Zugänge des Teilens wurden in Online-Formaten entwickelt? Pandemien und Kriege verdeutlichen, wie Gesellschaften mit eingeschränktem körperlichem Miteinander und verringertem Bewegungsradius starre Formen des Teilens aufzeigen. Die Beitragenden des Bandes betrachten Ausschlusspraktiken und untersuchen das Teilen aus intersektionalen Perspektiven, um (Un-)Möglichkeiten des In-Kontakt-Tretens von Kunstschaffenden, Forschenden und Zuschauenden zu entwerfen.

This article examines how folk dance is deployed as an innovative tool of urban and rural contemporary protests in Turkey. It specifically focuses on horon, a popular folk dance genre characterised by the eastern Black Sea region and popular across the country. I investigate how environmental activists transregionally circulate the genre during their coordinated protests in the city of Istanbul and the Rize province against a massive infrastructural project called the Green Road in the summer of 2015. The project has become a symbol of the state’s forced developmentalism,
violent histories of ethnic and religious minorities and capitalist dispossession, against which multiple iterations of horon seek to create solidarity, social mobilization and political participation. Ethnographic and choreographic methods guide this study to explore the dance as a complex space of physical and social interactions. Its varying aesthetics, contested meanings, and forms of reproduction and circulation provide a lens through which to discuss how protesters negotiate their identities both in horon circles and protests. The improvisational quality of horon helps merge dance, music and chanted poetry together into political action and enables urban and rural protesters to find flexible ways of resistance across the Black Sea.

The article explores a recent period of dissenting activism in Istanbul during the state of emergency declared following a military coup attempt against the current Turkish government (2016-2018). Combining choreographic research and analysis with ethnography, and foregrounding interviews with activists in feminist and LGBTQI+ demonstrations, anti-emergency decree vigils, and the 2017 Presidential Referendum protests, the study discusses how dissenters undermine mobilization of violence through converting hegemonic choreographies of repression into tactical acts for resistance. Hannah Arendt’s concepts of “isolation” and “politics” are employed to examine how dissenters recast the exigent circumstances of dispersal produced by the authorities to creatively reorganize themselves and craft alternative forms of relational politics and peripheral public assemblies at times of political vulnerability. The transience of folk dance facilitates the creation of ephemeral political assemblies and fosters activists' ability to move collectively. Whenever protesters depart from folk dance groups to create new ones, they perpetually re-configure the area and initiate novel actions contingent upon their temporal and positional assessments during the dance. Such tactical applications of dispersal characterized by the smaller scale and transitory gatherings with ever-changing combinations of bodies manifest a great potential for collective agency and plural politics.

The term “neoliberal” has come to define our current global age, yet de- finitive understandings of what “neoliberal” means remains a contested terrain. In the past three decades, neoliberal economic/political/social ideology has created a world governed by free-market principles. The authors of this edited collection explore the meanings and reveal the of- ten detrimental effects of neoliberalism from the perspective of mothers. Neoliberal policies and austerity measures have unequivocally al- tered the landscape of women’s rights globally, placing increasing pressure and responsibility on mothers with decreasing resources. However, while “neoliberalism” may be a global phenomenon, the particular ways in which neoliberal policies become instituted are lo- cal and contingent upon specific social/political/economic/histori- cal processes. Whether the discussion is about mothers from India using existent maternalist narratives to fight environmental deg- radation, or mothers in rural Canada struggling to find affordable, quality daycare within a gendered de-industrializing “flexible” em- ployment framework, there must be active acknowledgement for the positionality of mothers within the global neoliberal narrative. Diverse works from an assortment of geographical areas including Ni- geria, France, Turkey, Trinidad and Tobago, the United States, India, the UK, Australia, Canada and South Korea are represented. This col- lection provides a crucial starting point. By identifying the sources of neoliberal failure toward mothers, we can begin to collectively formu- late an alternative paradigm in which mothers voices are no longer rendered invisible, but rather predominate in the global landscape.

For over a decade, Turkey has witnessed a growth in its number of contemporary Sufi communities. Some of them follow traditional religious practices held in convents. Some others detach the whirling practice from the traditional sema ceremony and perform it in cultural centres, associations and dance studios, giving new meanings to the movement and to the social and political relations tied to this practice, and constituting alternative communities based on a kinaesthetic experience of whirling. Among these, Ziya Azazi’s movement technique discerns with the performer’s emphasis on the body’s constant research in a repetitive act of spinning to find deep emotions towards the potential for trance. This article focuses on Azazi’s solo performance, Dervish-In-Progress (D.I.P.), in two different instances: The Ankara State Opera and Ballet concert in 2012 and Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park resistance in 2013. By investigating his movement technique through workshops, media footage and individual interviews, this article examines how whirling has the potential to mobilize both performer and audience towards individual and social transformation.

, torture, and deaths, the dislocation and relocation of dispossessed populations, and the re-establishment of authoritarianism with the rise of right-wing politics not only in this region but also globally. Under these circumstances, how can dance and performance studies help us understand and analyze embodied negotiations between (trans)national forces of domination and individual and collective bodies who deploy multiple means of political protest? How do people mobilize, inspire and affect each other through their bodily interactions? When are people reduced to "wasted" bodies that are considered disposable and without value by regimes of power? How do resisting bodies manifest their vulnerability yet resilience at the same time? What are the potentials of performance and choreography as aesthetic and social practices to create transgression and transformation? This course aims to excavate such questions, which involves a rethinking of human movement and social mobilizations as choreographic tactics against the maneuvers of institutional power. We will focus on vulnerability as a frame to examine embodied acts of individual and collective agencies such as deliberate expositions of female bodies, improvisational acts of stillness, disciplined movements of self-defense groups in conflict areas, hunger strikes, suicide bombings, and other forms of political intervention in public spaces. We will then seek to untangle key concepts such as the body politic, agency, dissent, intimacy, sociability, precarity, resistance, and refusal using an interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological perspective. We will be also discussing how to apply fundamental methodological tools in dance and performance studies to analyze social movements. Students will be challenged to articulate their own critical perspectives through discussions, presentations, and written assignments.

This course focuses on the ways in which our bodies move towards, gather together, separate, and disperse in individual and collective action. It explores intersections between aesthetics of politics, philosophy of non-violence, and technologies of improvisation, aiming to work on artistic research while questioning the conventions of the 'artistic.' We would offer meetings in which we can discuss and put in motion terms such as violence, art of cruelty, (passive) resistance, refusal, consent, and coerced consent. Drawing on feminist scholarship, we approach non-violence as a "process, strategy, and philosophy" and a "stubborn noncooperation." We will explore questions such as, how do our bodies compete, resist, and non-cooperate and also practice forms of non-violence? The concept of "satyagraha" ("soul force"), a strength found in nonviolent embodied act, and the conceptualization of nonviolence as political and ethical power primarily inspire our questions and artistic explorations in this seminar.

Accepting up to 8 submissions This Hub invites artists, scholars and activists to explore approaches, experiences, and limitations as well as utopias of moving within and through diaspora. We invite participants to discuss their perspectives through the lens of dance practice, scholarship, and/or pedagogy and focus on examining diaspora and migration as: network, adaptation and location. Whether our understanding of diaspora is a homeland left behind (Fortier 2001), a "host" country alternately welcoming or hostile, or includes "shifting formations of diaspora and hybridity" (Chatterjea, Wilcox and Williams 2022), we admit that diaspora is not only about a certain relationship with the past but a critical argument about the present and a collective claim about the future.

How can dance reveal the potential of sharing and of interweaving physical, theoretical, political, and social realms? How can dance help to develop new forms of dialogues between different perspectives, contexts, and periods? What forms of sharing are served to exploit rather than support the precarious labor, therefore creating forms of exploitative sharing?

We are seeking contributions for this volume in varying forms to discuss Sharing / Dancing from interdisciplinary and global perspectives. We would like to consider research as a collaborative practice where the question of sharing negotiated among researchers, artists, and other participants of the research process. Alongside articles and essays, contributors are encouraged to discuss their ideas in an experimental form in order to make Tanzen / Teilen. Sharing / Dancing comprehensible as a physical, material and/or political act.