A couple of weeks ago, I went to a friend’s wedding. As she married a nice Turkmen boy she met while serving in the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan, there was a decent-sized Turkmen contingent at the wedding.
Man, those Turkmens did some interesting dancing. It had several influences that I could pick out: some of the hand motions looked a bit like some stuff my Kazakh roomie used to do, in which one could see the influence of Indian classical dance (or maybe the influence was the other way around; I have no idea). But the delicate hand movements seemed confined to the ladies; the moves the guys had were much more, umm, energetic. (It’s hard to describe this without seeing it; hopefully someone will know what I mean.)
They reminded me a lot of the Georgian/North Caucasian dances I’ve seen, which have arm movements and lots of diving and swooping and are meant, I’ve been told, to imitate the movement of an eagle in flight. (That’s before the guys get drunk enough that they start throwing their knives into the ground, but there was no knife-throwing this time, as I think the owner of the restaurant where the reception was held wouldn’t have been too crazy about that.) And given the migration history of Turkic peoples across Eurasia, I can certainly see there being a logical relationship. However, my friend’s Turkmen host mom discounted this idea, saying that people pick up dances from all over the place anyway (and she did have a point, because just then another one of the Turkmen guys launched into some helicopter breakdancing stuff, and hey, the bride is from Alaska but is a salsa-dancing maniac).
So does anyone have any thoughts on whether this style of dance might have traveled with nomadic Turkic tribes tot he Caucasus?