Paper short abstract:

In 2013 a protest movement was spawned in Yerevan by the transformation of a monumental market hall into an oligarch-owned shopping mall. As protesters performed folk dances in public space calling for heritage protection, counterprotesters staged controversial sounds in support of the oligarch.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the uses of music and dance in a protest movement for the protection of cultural heritage in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. In particular, it deals with the transformation of the city's central covered market, a listed monument from the Soviet era, into a shopping mall after it had been acquired by a multi-millionaire and member of parliament. After a few weeks of daily protest marches, participants in the movement 'Let's Liberate the Monument from an Oligarch' started performing folk dances to draw attention to the rapid destruction of historical monuments in Yerevan's public space. At the same time, a group of counter-protesters, supporting the monument's transformation as modernization, began to play a controversial yet highly popular genre of music, rabiz, during their gatherings. Whereas the folk dances of the former are widely thought to embody Armenia's national character unproblematically, the latter, lower-class and nouveau riche genre is the more popular music today, but widely accused of being spoilt by foreign musical influences and considered a symbol of postsocialist cutural decay.

In my analysis, I seek to disentangle the aesthetics of political contention in contemporary Yerevan by outlining how different conceptions of the nation's heritage are translated into practice in urban protests. I conclude that civil society attempts to mobilize the masses for heritage protection with an appeal to music and dance failed because of the discrepancies between elitist conceptions of Armenian culture and the popular cultural forms embedded in the everyday urban infrastructure of Yerevan.