Life & Work with Natalie Kamajian

Today we’d like to introduce you to Natalie Kamajian.

Hi Natalie, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I am an Armenian dancer and teacher born and raised in Los Angeles. I specialize in ազգագրական պարեր or azgagrakan dances, which are indigenous, communal dance practices of the Armenian people. I am also a Ph.D. student in Culture and Performance and a Teaching Associate at UCLA’s World Arts & Cultures Department, where I research and write about Armenian dance and its intersections with historical, political, and cultural realities.

In one way or another, dance has always played a major role in my life. As a diasporan Armenian and great-grand daughter of Armenian genocide survivors who does not live in either of her ancestral homelands (Jugha, Nakhchavan or Anteb, Western Armenia), deportation and displacement are narratives that my family and I know well. As a result, I was exposed to other dance forms far before I learned traditional Armenian dance. Growing up, I was obsessed with tap. I practiced the form for around twelve years. Given the choice between tap and ballet as a four years old, I chose the loud, percussive elements of tap, as its boldness and quickness were attractive to me–even as a small child. I think this early exposure to a highly rhythmic form of moving made my eventual study of Armenian dance and its percussive capacities all the more exhilarating.

After graduating with my bachelor’s degree in International Studies, I purchased a one-way ticket to Armenia where I lived for one year. My time spent in Armenia was transformational. As a young adult, it was my first time traveling to Armenia and it was also when my love affair with traditional Armenian dance began. Not only did I take weekly dance classes but I also participated in monthly outdoor dance gatherings that took place in the center of Yerevan–the capital city of Armenia. At the base of a giant outdoor limestone stairway, surrounded by a sculpture garden, hundreds of locals danced arm-in-arm, shoulder-to-shoulder, the sounds of traditional Armenian instruments like zurna (high-pitched woodwind) and dhol (barrel drum) reverberating in the air. The exuberance and communal strength that emanated from these dance gatherings was something that forever changed me. It was something that had been missing from my experience growing up Armenian in Los Angeles. From that point on, this dance practice became more than just a personal interest of mine, as it eventually transformed into my life passion and career.

Upon returning to Los Angeles, I co-founded an Armenian song and dance ensemble called “Lernazang” which directly translates to “call of the mountain.” We named our ensemble Lernazang not only because mountains are an important topographical element for Armenians both historically and in the present-day, but also because լեռնազանգված “lernazangvats” is the Armenian word for “massif,” which is a specific type of mountain that retains its internal structure despite displacement or shifts in the earth’s crust. This holds a special meaning for us as a group of diasporan youth who deeply understand displacement and cultural ruptures. Our family histories are plagued with not only separation from our ancestral lands and mountains but also from our ways of life–via genocide, dispossession and erasure and revisionism wielded by the Turkish and Azerbaijani states. This is what drives our cultural work and makes what we do very political. In practicing and promoting musical and choreographic forms which derive from oral traditions across various regions of the Armenian homeland, we intend to not only resist erasure but also further our mission which is to strengthen Armenian cultural heritage in Los Angeles.

Now, a few years later, after working in the nonprofit field for five years, I decided to commit more deeply to this cultural mission and in addition to teaching dance classes and public workshops and performing with my ensemble, I am now a dance scholar and researcher at UCLA focusing on the various genres of Armenian dance in both Yerevan and the diaspora.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
It has not been the smoothest of roads but what good road is smooth and easy to follow? I am lucky to have parents who are supportive of my passions and my career path–despite the more commonly accepted “successful” professions according to Armenians being either doctors or lawyers. My path is still in the making and it is hard to picture what my life will look like after I complete my PhD, but one of my major challenges is communicating to the Armenian community how the dances they most commonly see (both in Armenia and in diaspora) are primarily drawn from ballet. The national dance ensembles and many of the dance studios here in Los Angeles practice an entirely new, Soviet-era genre of dance, one that is completely dominated by ballet and does not engage with indigenous elements of Armenian dancing. So essentially, my dance practice and research asks Armenians to decolonize their ways of moving from that which has been Sovietized and balleticized by the state. As a dance scholar, I believe that these differentiated ways of moving do more than provide contrasting visuals for onlookers–but they also make significant impressions in our bodies and our ways of being in the world: the way we express, talk, and think about ourselves as “Armenian.” We have to ask ourselves: what does dancing “Armenian” really mean? If dancing in an Armenian context was around long before the Italian courts came up with ballet, then why are we filtering our dance heritage through those aesthetics? Especially when we claim to be “preserving” our “ancient” heritage–which is the language of much of these groups. The main point I want to get across is that culture is complicated, and doing cultural work is really about sitting in that stickiness and being willing to address things that are hard. This is a responsibility that I find myself taking on as I continue to do this work.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am a dance practitioner, scholar, and activist. Currently, I am a fourth-year PhD student in Culture and Performance at UCLA’s World Arts & Cultures department. I specialize in researching various genres of Armenian dance, including its vernacular, staged, and balleticized representations. As a practitioner, in addition to using my body as a medium for my research, I also teach classes and workshops and I co-lead a dance and music ensemble called Lernazang.

My scholarly work will be the first English-language study that analyzes various genres of Armenian dance while integrating Armenian-language texts and archival materials as primary sources, as well as insights drawn from my own ethnographic fieldwork. It will be the first critical investigation of the dance landscape in Armenia within the field of dance studies and will offer a new perspective to traditional conceptions of Armenian history and identity–with regard to the field of Armenian studies. In the coming Spring quarter at UCLA, I will also be the sole instructor for a Beginning Armenian Dance class which will be open to all UCLA students for university credit. This is the first-class offering of its kind in UCLA’s history and it also will be the first time that a university outside of Armenia is offering an Armenian dance class to its students.

Lernazang is also the only ensemble outside of Armenia that combines traditional dancing with traditional Armenian instruments and singing. Our greater mission is to decolonize Armenian aesthetics, and we work towards that by reconceptualizing Armenian dance and music heritage outside of Sovietized, Orientalized, and Eurocentric standards of practice and performance.

Ultimately, my work as a scholar, practitioner, and long-time activist in the Los Angeles area splits open the otherwise ossified boundaries that separate “theory” from “practice,” “arts” from “academia” or “culture” from “politics.” For me, these are not separated entities but are deeply intertwined and require more people thinking and working at these intersections in order to solve some of our most pressing problems as a society. As an Armenian, culture can never be devoid of politics. This is because promoting community-building work that intends to provide opportunities for people to engage with Armenian expressive culture can never be separated from our history of genocide and displacement and can never be extracted from Turkish and Azerbaijan state policies of cultural revisionism and cultural destruction. So to participate in our cultural heritage is not only about “preservation” but is also deeply about resistance and survival.

I also steer clear of putting “the” in from of “Armenian culture,” resisting the conceptualization of culture as some singular entity. Culture is always fluid, it is usually shared, and it is a dynamic phenomenon. Armenianness has been a decentralized identity marker for much of our history, and it has also experienced cultural flows with countless groups and regional powers: including Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Mongols, and Russians, to name a few. To think that our dances are more similar to Italian/French ballet than they are to Assyrian, Kurdish, and Arab dances is to assume that Armenians lived in a complete vacuum for over two thousand years.

My activism has also contributed to this approach of a more regional understanding of Armenian culture and politics. For me, Armenian liberation and political struggles cannot be isolated from the struggles of Kurds, Assyrians, Palestinians, Afghans and other regional groups. The SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African– a decolonial way to say “Middle East”) region has been subject to colonial “divide and conquer” strategy since time immemorial. For me, breaking that down includes also recognizing how our communities’ life and dance ways are more similar than they are different. This not only makes for richer dance practice and scholarship but also makes space for imagining a different political reality for subjugated peoples, one where we are not at constant war, where our lands are not being extracted for their resources, and where we can live in peace in our homelands.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/nataloush & www.instagram.com/lernazang
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lernazang
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/nataloush
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrkhJ5O7fCFtjkyv3tpW-NQ

Image Credits:
Photo #2- Photo Atelier Marashlyan, Yerevan Armenia