Performance and cultural memory: Social meanings in horon practices

Traditional folk dances have a position that directs scientific processes aimed at understanding local, national and global representations from many different disciplines. With this position, folk dances, which constitute one of the basic materials of cultural studies, enable the understanding of the social dimensions of performance in the contexts of tradition, memory and identity, together with the ethnographic elements they contain. These opportunities of folk dances are important in terms of the possibility of contributing to interdisciplinary studies that can be conducted in the field of musicology. Horon is a folk dance that emphasizes social integration with the idea of "dancing together" in all geographies where it finds a performance area and constitutes the basic material of this study in terms of being a sample. While it represents the northeast of the country locally, it has an active area of use in urban life on a national scale. In addition, horon also includes different ethnic representations in certain geographies outside the country's borders. This study aims to make a cultural analysis by focusing on the performative dynamics of horon practices. The main subject of the research is the social meanings of horon practice in line with tradition, modernity and media components. In the first part of the study, the problematic situation was determined. The views on the purpose and importance of the thesis study are conveyed in this section. The second section includes information on the methods used in the research. Accordingly, it is explained why the study was carried out in a qualitative context and the fieldwork process was initiated. The definitions and evaluations within the framework of performance research and memory theories are included in the third section. The details in this section focus on the effects of performance in folkloric and sociological contexts, as well as the problematic of what representations memory mechanisms contain in terms of social performance and cultural continuity. In the fourth section, the dynamics of horon practice and performance tools are discussed together with their local, theatrical and media mediations. In the fifth and sixth sections, the integration of the data obtained in the findings with the theory is ensured, and the conclusion is reached with the new propositions developed. While the obtained results include features related to the production of knowledge regarding the social meanings of horon practice, they also include propositions on the axis of memory, performance and context that can contribute to dance theory from the field of musicology. The results that emerge within this framework emphasize the differences in the ways in which horon performances are handled academically.