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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 across the country and a cultural heritage of minority communities in the eastern Black Sea region. I investigate how environmental activists transregionally circulate this dance during their coordinated protests in the city of Istanbul and the Rize province in the Black Sea region 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to determine the perceptions about folk dance of a group of Physical Education and Sports teachers (males n=130; females n=37), working in primary and secondary schools in different cities in Turkey. Despite their positive perception of dance as a social activity, the teachers showed an impartial attitude towards dance as a sport. They considered, dance and sport as two different fields. The consensus among the Physical Education and Sports teacher participants was that dance teaching was not a duty they should fulfil at schools. The participants were not opposed to a separate dance course at schools. In terms of gender, the female Physical Education and Sports teachers had more positive attitudes towards dance than the male teachers. One of the interesting results of this study was the data obtained from the analysis according to the teachers' specialties. Subsequent to the teachers who specialised in folk dance, the teachers who had the most positive attitude towards folk dance were the teachers in the martial arts (wrestling, judo, boxing, taekwondo) group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Folk dance constitutes an extensive place in the term of dance. By the help of our fieldworks and collected works in Erzurum known as the 'bar' region among the kinds of Turkish Folk Dances, some kind of dances like 'halay' except bar were detected. In these dances, Garampet Bar which is in the form of 'halay' and showing some similarities to the Garabet Bar among the Bars of Erzurum emerges as an attractive dance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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