Maral Yessayan’s Dance Journey

Dabke is thought to have its origins in ancient Phoenician dances. The Armenians in Lebanon also have a version of dabke that is sometimes performed in Armenia.

Dabkah (Dabkeh, Dabke etc) is traditionally associated with the practices of the folk or peasant communities residing in the region historically known as Greater Syria, which today includes Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, the Palestinian occupied territories, and Israel. It is not surprising that Lebanese Armenians have adopted the form and brought it to Armenia. The adoption of dances and their circulation globally is not new or unique to this case. Historically, dances have been adopted from one practicing community to another. In the process of a dance’s transmission, its meanings also change. So for Lebanese Armenians dabkah takes a whole new meaning. Through movement, Lebanese Armenians nostalgically celebrate their past and connection to Lebanon, the land they left behind, and to have a sense of community on new soil in Armenia. At the same time, they demarcate their difference from other Armenian settling communities as well as local Armenians. At once Dabkah becomes a way for Lebanese Armenians in Armenia to mark their belonging and separation.

In your dance performance “Here and There” you examine intercultural dialogue through improvisational art. How is this dialogue possible?

“Here and There” is an attempt to East-West fusion approaches to dancing making. Some scholars would call this “hybridity,” others would call it “fusion art.” Despite the nomenclature, the idea is to mix things together to create something new. So my goal in creating this work was to bring together different forms of movement that have different histories and geographically different origins and meanings and trace them through my body. Sometimes, I moved between different dance genres distinctively but mostly my interest was to blur the lines between the forms. The intent was to showcase how our bodies are multilingual, multicultural, and multifunctional, in an increasingly demanding and interconnected globalized world where at once we can be “here” and “there.”

You created your special choreographic tribute to the memory of the victims and survivors of the Armenian Genocide.

My performance “Hearing the Dead” is a tribute to and commemoration of the countless victims and survivors of the genocide. I created this piece while residing in Los Angeles in 2007 to raise awareness about the Armenian Genocide. It’s a multi-media performance that combines movement, speech, and the screen. The piece explores the connection between corporeal memory and oral history and shines light on the suffering of the ‘remembering’ body. One of the things I wanted to accomplish through this piece is the often unspoken and understudied effects the Armenian genocide inflicted on it survivors. Grief, PTSD, anxiety and depression are all expressed and embodied forms of survival lived out and performed through this piece.

Among Middle East Armenian communities, the Jordanian one seems less known. How was the community life in Jordan and how it is now?

Growing up in the 1980s, most Armenians in Jordan were centered in the old part of the city of Amman. The Armenian community was vibrant and alive. The Armenian community’s activities and social life revolved around the Armenian Orthodox Church, The Yuzbashian Gulbenkian Armenian Orthodox School, and the two Armenian Party clubs (Tashnag and Ramgavar) — all of which were all adjacent to one another on a hillside street in Ashrafiyyeh. In the 1990s, Silva Hairabedian was advocating for Armenian drama and the arts. She directed, produced, and wrote a beautiful play in which I starred. By the 2010s, the compounding effect of students studying abroad and the exceeding number of families leaving Jordan thinned out the Armenian community in Jordan. The small number of students and low funding with the added stress of the pandemic resulted in the unfortunate shut down of the one and only Armenian school in 2020.

How did your family end up in Jordan?

My grandfather Iskandar was 3 years old in 1915 with a twin brother. His family lived in Dortyol, a city in southern Turkey today. When the deportation plan of Ottoman Armenians was set into motion, they were forcefully aborted from their home, deported into the wilderness and driven further south on a march to face an almost certain death. The men were separated from the women and children on these death marches – with the men leading at the front and the women and children at the back. Weeks of walking went by with no water, no food, just marching south across the Syrian desert.

My great grandmother, Serpouhi, had an eight-month old infant, three-year old twins in her arms, a six and an eight-year-old daughter and son between her skirts. She was hungry, thirsty, and could no longer carry the weight of her three youngest children. She had to make a choice. In agony and tears, and arguably the hardest decision of her life, she placed one of the twins under a shaded rock and left him behind. It was not my grandfather. Their story unfolds unexpectedly. My great-grandfather Tatios was a smart man who had just lost all his fortune — except one. He carried a cane made out of carved wood for support. The cane was not just any cane. It was filled with gold coins. When my great-grandfather Tatios heard what Serpouhi had done, he gave up all his coins to an Ottoman soldier in exchange for his horse and rode four hours up north to find the child. Call it a miracle, Misag was untouched and still alive. The twin brothers were united and the family survived its way to Jordan where Bedouins provided them safety, shelter and protection.

A touching story, indeed! Maral, now you live in Arizona. Are there any Middle Eastern or Armenian activities?

Unlike cities like Glendale, which holds the greatest concentration of Armenians who make up a demographic majority of the city, the Armenian community in Arizona is relatively small and spread out. There is the St. Apkar Armenian Apostolic Church where we carried out my daughter’s dedication service. The church is the main institution that serves families with Armenian heritage to preserve the language, culture and traditions. I see much potential for growth and togetherness for the Armenian community in post-pandemic Arizona.

Here in Arizona, my priority has been my family. I’ve been raising my daughter who attends a ballet school and has much of myself in her. I exercise and practice Yoga and continue to cultivate my body into a higher level of physique.

After a long sabbatical and now that my daughter is older, I’ve been considering getting more involved in the arts scene in Phoenix, or maybe even travel as a guest speaker, or pivot into acting. I have not taken up a new project yet but the sky is the limit as they say, so wish me luck!

Good luck, Maral! And welcome back to Armenia again!