dance specialist, dance-ethnographer, the founder and Artistic Director of the Karin Folk Song and Dance Ensemble, Honored Worker of Culture of RA, Honored Figure of Culture of the City of Yerevan. He was awarded the Knight of Golden Medal of the Ministry of Culture of RA. Ginosyan is the founder and artistic director of the Karin and Tsovak Folk Song and Dance Ensembles (since 2001). Since 2005, he has been organizing the publically accessible We and Our Dance monthly dance classes (with Karin Ensemble). He is the author of the first Armenian DVD-dance tutorial entitled Armenian Dance, released in the framework of the Armenian Knight TV program (2008). Since 2014, he has been working on incorporating the National Song and Dance discipline into the curricula of ordinary schools in Armenia. In 2015, in collaboration with the Ayb Foundation, Ginosyan founded the Academy of National Song and Dance, where the newly opened Dance Studies Center is now making its first steps. Ginosyan works on the research and theoretical studies of Armenian dances.

KOMITAS’S ARMENIAN FOLK DANCE HERITAGE

This paper refers to the less known part of Komitas’s heritage. When starting my explorations nn Komitas’s dances, I was initially astonished two of his articles – the Armenian Peasant Dance and the Dance and the Child, which inform us of how deep the author’s knowledge of the field was. Later, I found Komitas’s handwritings of transcriptions of eight Armenian dances in the Komitas Archive at the E. Charents Museum of Literature and Art (published in 2005, Komitas Vardapet, Studies and Articles, V. 1). Since then, I started purposefully working on those dances to introduce them also to the public as well as to confirm that discussing Komitas’s work in ethnomusicology would be incomplete without considering his work on dances. The next stage of my work led to a number of challenges. First of all, Komitas described the dances without pointing out the exact melody to accompany the dance. Each tine referring to this work, I was becoming more and more confident in the dance steps. However, a collaboration with a musicologist in Komitas’s studies would be necessary. To my advantage was my previous two-decade experience of fieldwork in national dances and experience in reconstructing other dances transcribed by other dance-ethnomusicologists. Moreover, my experience in working with the system of Cynetograph (a system for recording dances, created by Srbuhi Lisitsyan, XX century) and the promotion of the Instigate computer programming company were helpful in my work.
We succeeded in reconstructing two of Komitas’s eight dances. In the case of Dances N1 and N6, we found the description of the dance in V. 10 of Komitas’s Works, entitled Dance of the Pathway and Shoror. We found the corresponding melodies according to the descriptions of the dances. Those dances are now included in the repertoire of the Karin Folk Song and Dance Ensemble. Hopefully, the remaining samples of Komitas’s dances will be reconstructed in the future as well.