Turkish Theater Research Articles

Integration, Turkish Theatre, and Cultural-Political Interventions in West Berlin: Vasıf Öngören's Kollektiv Theater (1980–82)

Integration, Turkish Theatre, and Cultural-Political Interventions in West Berlin:Vasıf Öngören's Kollektiv Theater (1980–82) Ela Gezen (bio) Introduction The mid-1970s and early 1980s witnessed the development of a very active Turkish art scene in West Berlin.1 Various cultural institutions were integral to this process, especially the Kunstamt Kreuzberg and Neukölln (Arts Council for the districts of Kreuzberg and Neukölln), the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Artists' House Bethanien, a center for arts and social affairs), the Deutsch-Türkische Gesellschaft e.V. (German-Turkish Society), and the Türkischer Akademiker- und Künstlerverein (Turkish Academics and Artists Association). Frequently collaborating with one another, these organizations sponsored recurring cultural events, such as ausländischer Berliner (foreign Berliner), the Fest auf dem Mariannenplatz (Festival on the Mariannenplatz), and the Türkische Kulturwochen (Turkish Cultural Weeks). Financially supported by the Berlin Senate, these public events showcased a variety of genres and media, including music, visual arts, theatre, and film; participants and organizers alike aimed to promote Turkish culture beyond folklorization, Orientalization, and essentialization. Particularly prominent among the rosters of participants were Turkish theatre ensembles. A majority of these ensembles, such as the Berlin Oyuncular (Berlin Actors, 1976), the Kreuzberger Türkische Volksbühne (Kreuzberg Turkish People's Theatre, 1978), the Türkisches Arbeitertheater [End Page 301] (Turkish Workers' Theatre, 1979) and the Kollektiv Theater (Collective Theatre, 1968) included professional theatre practitioners who had left Turkey for political reasons.2 In this essay, I will focus on the Kollektiv Theater, an ensemble that was founded by dramatist Vasıf Öngören3 in Turkey. Re-established in West Berlin after his emigration from Turkey in 1980, the Kollektiv Theater contributed to political debates on integration in West Germany through theatre. Rather than analyze specific productions, I will instead situate Öngören's ensemble's theatre practice with respect to efforts by Turkish artists and intellectuals during the late 1970s and early 1980s, discussing the project both as an early manifestation of Turkish self-presentation in West Germany, and, more specifically, as a key part of the formation of a Turkish public sphere in West Berlin. First, I will examine the founding of—and interactions between—the institutions mentioned above, which were designed to promote cultural events. As I will show, cultural practices, and specifically theatre, were understood as crucial factors within discourses on integration (as opposed to assimilation). The Kollektiv Theater's programming and contributions will be read as a current within broader efforts to represent Turkish culture as multi-layered and as essential to political debates on integration. This essay concludes by asking how we may relate Turkish theatrical activities in the early phase of Turkish migration to theatre practices today, such as the postmigrant theatre movement. Cultural-Political Interventions and Collaborations Turkish artists, intellectuals, and academics founded associations in West Berlin throughout the 1970s and 1980s in order to establish institutional settings for the planning of cultural activities, with collaborative efforts presenting a particular priority. Two institutions which I would like to highlight specifically are the Türkischer Akademiker- und Künstlerverein (Turkish Academics and Artists Association) and the Deutsch-Türkische Gesellschaft (German-Turkish Society), which were crucial for self-advocacy and self-representation through culture as well as for collaborations with local and district authorities charged with sponsoring cultural programming such as the Kunstamt Kreuzberg and Kunstamt Neukölln. Established in 1980, the Deutsch-Türkische [End Page 302] Gesellschaft aimed to foster "mutual understanding between the Turkish and German population" while promoting the "integration of the foreign population by maintaining their cultural identity."4 This entailed efforts to foster the necessary conditions for an understanding of "differing historical, social, political, and cultural conditions, and the awareness of their changeability."5 Integration, here, was understood as realizing and implementing political and social equality while also increasing the willingness of Germans to actively participate in this process. The Deutsch-Türkische Gesellschaft underlined the bidirectionality of such processes of integration by involving Turks and Germans equally, while foregrounding as a premise the familiarity with changing societal conditions in both countries. In addition to organizing cultural events, its objectives included taking positions on current issues...

Palimpsests of Violence: Urban Dispossession and Political Theatre in Istanbul

Palimpsests of Violence:Urban Dispossession and Political Theatre in Istanbul Emine Fişek (bio) What is the relationship between theatre and politics in contemporary Turkey? The answer to this question is linked to the proliferation of so-called alternative theatres in Istanbul in the twenty-first century. Designating theatre ventures that exist outside the publicly funded state and municipal theatre circuits, the phrase "alternative theater" is one way in which artists, critics, and audiences have referenced the proliferation of theatrical activity that has characterized the new millennium. Of course, a broader historical lens reminds us that experimental theatre companies had already emerged in Turkish metropoles in the 1960s; but the sheer political, aesthetic, and institutional variety of twenty-first-century alternative theatre is better traced to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Istanbul-based ventures like Bilsak Tiyatro, Kumpanya, 5. Sokak Oyuncuları, and Şahika Tekand's Stüdyo Oyuncuları sought to create autonomous spaces for theatrical expression, research, and pedagogy. This search has only accelerated in the twenty-first century, with new spaces like GalataPerform, Kumbaracı50, DOT, Moda Sahnesi, İkinciKat, MekanArtı, and Şermola Performans (among many others) vying for public visibility. Alternative theatre is not a monolithic whole, yet one trend that has characterized the domain's emergent work is a concern with the politics of both collective and individual memory as well as the complexities of national identity in twentieth-century Turkey. If Turkish theatre has witnessed a shifting terrain in the new millennium, however, so has Turkish politics. The ascendancy and rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has challenged the Kemalist [End Page 349] state project that had previously defined Republican history, with its emphasis on Turkish nation-statehood and secular modernization. Campaigning on a neoliberal brand of Islamic social conservatism, part of what the AKP has introduced into Turkish political life is a historiographic tendency in which an array of past political grievances are brought together to rewrite Kemalist memory politics. While drawing attention to the "multiplicity of alternative memories" that have emerged in the wake of this shift, Onur Bakıner nonetheless signals the arrival of "a new state-sanctioned historiography," where conservative-nationalist readings of the past have resulted in selective reckonings as well as further silencings.1 Two trends in particular are important to note: first, the emergence of a depoliticized memory of the country's successive military coups that obscures the history of human rights violations, and second, a discourse of neo-Ottomanism that both imagines a Muslim-Turkish imperial past and engages in facile celebrations of Ottoman multiculturalism. How did alternative theatre respond to this shifting terrain? How did playwrights and theatre artists negotiate the possibilities as well as the limitations of conducting political theatre in the new millennium? In this essay, I focus on Ahmet Sami Özbudak's play İz (The Stain), which was directed by Yeşim Özsoy at the alternative theatre venue GalataPerform in Istanbul in 2013, to formulate some preliminary answers to these questions. İz was created by Özbudak in 2010, in the context of the Yeni Metin, Yeni Tiyatro (New Text, New Theatre) writing workshops that Özsoy had been organizing at GalataPerform since 2006. Since then, the play has had a smooth run, and the company celebrated their hundredth performance in June 2016. Meanwhile, Özbudak has published a novelized version of the narrative that also includes the playtext, and negotiations are in process for a film adaptation. The play, in other words, has grown beyond its seemingly medium-specific identity, despite a tight dramaturgical structure and pronounced use of theatrical space and media. What is the play's enduring appeal? İz tells three concurrent stories, each of which is anchored around a specific moment in modern Turkish history. The first story is set in 1955 and centers on Rum (Anatolian Greek) sisters Eleni and Markiz, who are tending to their mother, an elderly woman who has not exited her bedroom in a number of months. As they [End Page 350] discuss their mother's condition, the political tension that underlies their everyday existence culminates in the events of September 6–7, during which Istanbul's Greek community was systematically attacked by Turkish mobs...

“Creative Drama” in Turkey

The Turkish Republic is a young one. Established in 1923, it has gone through many social and political transformations, which have inevitably had an influence on how science and art are perceived. The Republic inherited from the Ottoman Empire a performative art tradition which had its roots in three distinct types of theatre: village shows; folk theatre played in town centres; and court theatre, which was based on “western” theatrical traditions. Considering the geographical location of Turkey, the term “West” signified the more advanced and civilized countries of the time, most of which were located in Europe. Having recently emerged from a tragic war, Turkey’s most urgent aim was to be on a par with these western countries in terms of science and arts. Therefore, western theatre, rather than the traditional forms, was promoted by the government (Karacabey 1995). As a result of this emphasis on western forms of theatre, many translated and adapted works were performed in theatres. In fact, even today, nearly half of the plays put on stage by Turkish state theatres are translated works. The following sections describe some examples from traditional and western forms of Turkish theatre. Fig. 1: http://aregem.kulturturizm.gov.tr/Resim/126102,ari-oyunu-yozgat-akdagmadeni-bulgurlu-koyu.png?0 These are short plays performed ...

"Rosy, White, and Clean Pages of History": Jojo Eskenazi's "Moiz Plays" and the Politics of Contemporary Jewish Theatre in Turkey

"Rosy, White, and Clean Pages of History":Jojo Eskenazi's "Moiz Plays" and the Politics of Contemporary Jewish Theatre in Turkey İlker Hepkaner (bio) Introduction Approximately 18,000 Jews currently live in Turkey, comprising one of the largest Jewish populations living within a Muslim majority society.1 In this community, there are multiple amateur theatre groups, either housed in clubs open only to Jewish community members based in İstanbul or staging their plays under the auspices of the Jewish Community of Turkey (Türkiye Musevi Cemaati)2 and the Chief Rabbinate. Despite its popularity among members of the community, contemporary Jewish theatre in Turkey has received little attention from scholars working on theatre in Turkey or on Jewish identity in theatre in national and transnational contexts. Among the Jewish theatre groups' activities, Jojo Eskenazi's comedic "Moiz plays" stand out for their consistent performance schedule and the support they receive from Turkey's Jewish community leaders and members, particularly for their political messages and community-building function.3 These plays are centered around İstanbullu Manifaturacı Moiz (Moiz the Draper from Istanbul), played by Eskenazi himself, and Moiz's wife Kleret, played by Fani Bonofiyel. Analysis of the texts, recorded performances, playbills, and introductory remarks by the organizers before performances of these plays unravels their wider functionality within the Jewish community and the theatre scene in Turkey.4 Moiz plays staged in the last twenty years crystallize [End Page 323] how Jews of Turkey engage with international Jewish, Turkish-national, and communal identity discourses; partake in the contemporary efforts of preserving Judeo-Spanish through bilingual performances; and contribute to transnational connections among Jews of Turkey in Turkey and Israel.5 When Moiz plays are analyzed in relation to the cultural context in Turkey and not as isolated cultural products only by/about/for the Jewish community in Turkey, the contemporary Jewish amateur theatre proves to be an important part of Turkey's theatre scene, a scene which needs reframing outside mainstream institutions and practices—that is, only consisting of performances in the Turkish language or staged by state institutions. Focusing on Jews' transition from an Ottoman millet (confession-based community) to a modern Turkish minority or their emigration to Europe, the Americas, and Israel, contemporary studies have investigated Jews' self-positioning within the modern Turkish context from a state-minority relations perspective. Jews' cultural production in Turkey has been analyzed only as those of a minority, almost completely isolated from the majority cultural context, not in relation to and as part of the context that is dominated by the Sunni-Turkish majority's cultural conventions.6 Discussing the political repercussions of studying "Arab-Jews," Shohat argues that segregating Middle Eastern Jewish cultures from their local contexts has served Eurocentric and Zionist interpretations of history, especially in the light of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. By selectively reading Judeo-Muslim histories through a "pogromatic" discourse which only focuses on contentions and not on collaboration between Jews and Muslims, the Euro-Israeli historiography has subsumed the Jewish histories in the Muslim lands to a "universal" Jewish experience defined by the European Jews' history.7 Such discourse rejects "an Arab and Muslim context for Jewish institutions, identities, and histories."8 Instead of these deliberate distortions, Shohat argues for investigating Jewish history and culture in the Middle East in relation to their Muslim majority contexts. Such an approach based on relationality resists glorifying Judeo-Muslim history, which whitewashes Jewish-Muslim relations and is often used for nationalistic interpretations of history.9 Not dismembering Jewish culture and history from its Muslim contexts reveals this community's own positionality in Turkish culture, which needs to be analyzed apart from Eurocentric imaginations or nationalistic impulses projected onto it. [End Page 324] In this light, contemporary Jewish theatre should be considered as part of Türkiye Tiyatrosu (Theatre of Turkey) a theatre scene which includes more than plays and performances staged only for the Turkish-speaking majority. There are multiple examples of "Theatre of Turkey" which are multilingual and multiethnic yet engaged with the mainstream Turkish theatre scene. In the late 2000s, the Istanbul cultural scene witnessed the blooming of theatre companies and performances outside the...

Melodramatic Ends: <em>Winter Sleep</em> (<em>Kiş Uykusu</em>)

Reviewed by: Melodramatic Ends: Winter Sleep (Kiş Uykusu) dir. by. Nuri Bilge Ceylan Susan Potter (bio) and Matias Perez (bio) Melodramatic Ends: Winter Sleep (Kiş Uykusu) Dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Scr. Ebru Ceylan and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. 2014 This review arrives late to the red carpet, following the award in 2014 of the Palme d'Or, Cannes Festival's most coveted prize, to Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Winter Sleep. The accepted critical narrative is that the film is not Ceylan's best but that the recognition of his directorial talent was long overdue. Feted in the director's home country, the Turkish-French-German co-production had a wide national release and consequently generated the director's highest box office in his career to date. Reviewers across the period of festival releases were divided about the film's merits, some hailing it a masterpiece (Karin Badt, Film Criticism), while others experienced it as enervating literary exercise (Gavin Smith, Film Comment). For us, Winter Sleep, for all its stagey and durational faults, remains weirdly compelling, in part because of its seeming last-minute reliance on melodrama to conclude its two intertwined plotlines. It's not as if the Ceylans' films have not been identified with melodrama before. In the aftermath of another award, for Best Director at Cannes in 2008, Three Monkeys was described by critics as "distressingly empty melodrama" (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice) and, in a more negative evaluation of Ceylan's work, "failed melodrama" (Kent Jones, Film Comment). In some of the reviews of Winter Sleep, melodrama returns as a salient, if suppressed, genre. Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian, calls the film tragicomedy, but his review has the key words of melodrama written all over it: pathos, domestic drama, soap opera, and swells and surges of emotion. Moreover, he faults the director for failing to realize the full potential of the film's most dramatic scene, finding it "overstated and misjudged." Even if other critics endeavor to rescue the Ceylans' films from melodrama by [End Page 86] pointing to the quality of direction and the understated performance of the actors, overstatement and misjudgment are qualities that melodrama might happily lay claim to. Indeed, the film's melodramatic register is key to its subtle but trenchant theme of social inequality. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Nihal (Melisa Sözen) appears unbidden outside the imam's family home. Screen capture from Winter Sleep (Kiş Uykusu). Winter Sleep's opening sequence introduces the protagonist Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), a wealthy retired actor who has returned to his childhood province of Cappadocia to run a boutique hotel. His main income, however, comprises rents from local families who occupy properties that Aydin has inherited from his father. Aydin retreats from his role as landlord by employing Hidayet (Ayberk Pekcan) and a series of unnamed and unseen lawyers to manage his tenancies, freeing him to write a weekly column for a local newspaper, Voice of the Steppes, and to research his long-anticipated book on the history of Turkish theatre. While Aydin endeavors to sustain his identity as an educated, artistic, and literary man by distancing himself from his own status as landlord and the cruelties inflicted by his agents, he is drawn into a conflict with the family of the local hodja or imam, Hamdi (Serhat Kiliç), as their eviction looms. It is the action of a child, Hamdi's nephew Ilyas (Emirhan Doruktutan), that propels Aydin into closer proximity to those people with whom he has a relationship based less on community than on property. Seeing Hidayet driving Aydin in his distinctive orange jeep through the village, Ilyas lies in wait further down the road and throws a stone to smash the passenger window where Aydin sits. We soon discover in a following scene that the stone's throw is retribution not only for the repossession of the family's fridge and television but also for the humiliating beating suffered by Ilyas's unemployed father, Ismail (Nejat Isler), at the hands of the police who were also present during the repossession. With his stone's throw, Ilyas catalyzes one of the film's plotlines, which involves Hamdi [End...

Türkiye’de Politik Tiyatronun Gelişimi

The use of political subjects in Turkish theatre is first observed in theatre-inthe-round in folk drama. As political theatre makes progress during the Tanzimat Reform Era in Turkey, it gains importance with transition periods such as the proclamation of the Turkish Republic and the development of the multi-party system. It was in the 1950s and 1960s when social unrest was unignorable that works of political theatre were most written. The development of political theatre depends on the political events of the period in which it is produced. For instance, while plays written in the Tanzimat Reform Era and the Period of Autocracy depict the oppression of Sultan Abdulaziz, the liberation of art is reflected in the works produced during the Second Constitutional Era. Following this period, political theatre displays the transition period experienced by a divided society with the declaration of the Republic. In the political theatre of the 1950s and 1960s, civil unrest resulting from social disorder is in the foreground. Although some theatre groups still continue dealing with political issues in our day, political theatre, which has regressed after 1971 memorandum and 1980 coup d’etat, seems to have lost its former efficiency.

The Role of Music in the Shadow Play "Hacivat and Karagöz"

The shadow play Hacivat and Karagöz has become an important part of the Traditional Turkish Theatre continuing for centuries. The existing shadow play which still preserves its popularity has become a significant entertainment tool for people. According to the local features of the performed characters and the content of the topic, this art type carried out by reflecting on a screen specially designed puppets from behind a lightened curtain and by playing with the voice of the performer has various music types and its instruments, especially Turkish folk music and Turkish classical music. in this study, within the play, the role of the music which is thought to form an important part of the shadow play was researched and the music and instruments used were analysed. The effect and role of the music within the play was particularly tried to be put forward.

Istanbul 2014

ISTANBUL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Turkey's most prestigious film event, the Istanbul International Film festival (5-20 April 2014) raised the curtain this year with the presentations of Honorary Awards to several Turkish artists: scriptwriter Umur Bugay, actors Sevda Ferdağ and Eref Kolçak, producer Abdurrahman Keskiner, musician Attila Özdemiroğlu and director, screenwriter, and producer İrfan Tözüm. The opening film was Stephen Frears' Philomena (2013), starring Judi Dench in the main role. The international competition jury presided over by the celebrated Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi included Turkish theatre actor, Defne Halman; French writer-director Philippe Le Guay; former director of Edinburgh Film Festival, Lynda Myles and screenwriter-director from Rumania, Rāzvan Rādulescu. Twelve films on art and the artist competed in the Golden Tulip International Competition. One of Iceland's most stimulating filmmakers Ragnar Bragason, who is known for successfully blending comedy with tragedy, participated with his latest film Málmhaus (Metalhead, 2013). A sentimental comedy,...

James Baldwin's 1970 Turkish Interviews: “The American Way of Life” and the Rhetoric of War from Vietnam to the Near and Middle East

On the ninth and tenth of May 1970, the American writer James Baldwin agreed to do a videotaped interview in Istanbul with an aspiring young Turkish film maker Sedat Pakay.1 The two had first met at Robert College, now Bogazici University, in Istanbul, Turkey, where Pakay had been a student in the early 1960s.2 Though readers are more familiar with Baldwin’s years abroad in France in the late 1940s and 1950s, beginning in 1961 the writer maintained semiresidency in Istanbul for nearly eight years.3 He had first come to Istanbul with his friend, the Turkish theater actor Engin Cezzar, whom he had met at the Actor’s Studio in New York. He then would come and go, often staying for months at a time. From the fall of 1966 to the summer of 1967 he would rent the Vefik Pasha Library, a Romantic nineteenth-century villa surrounded by gardens and towering pine and plane trees looking out over the Bosphorus Straits toward the Asian continent. His direct neighbor was the fifteenth-century fortress of Mehmet the Conqueror. It was from here that the Turks conquered the Byzantines in 1453. Constantinople would then become Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire for the next four hundred years. Though much less populated than it is today, in 1970 Istanbul was a vibrant, cosmopolitan metropolis. Baldwin would live at the Vefik Pasha Library with his brother David and his friend and assistant, the young Robert College English professor David Leeming. In his 1994 biography of Baldwin, Leeming recalls “the simple daily routine” at the villa:

The Resources and Problems of Theater in Turkey: Review on the Theatre Literature During ‘Single Party’ Period

Turkish theater, during all its development period, has been divided into some sub-braches such as: Traditional Theater, Tanzimat Theater, Constitutional Theater and Republic Theater. During the Republic Period, there have been many political effects that impact the theatre perceptions too. Also during this time the theatre profiles started to multiple and to be divided from each-other. From this separation, have been formed new perspectives of theatre that have been influenced by the ‘Single Party’ mentality received during the years 1923-1945. Even thought, this period the single party regimes had principles such as democratic state, consolidation of the institions, freedom of speaking and freedom of acting. These principles have been affected on the theater’s literatures too. All the principles of this political regime were accepted and applied by the theatre literature, which normally caused a huge lack of reality. Another important issue that must be claimed is to blame all the past history of Turkish society. This happened because existed an opportunity to have a possibility of non repetitions of these mistakes in the future. But consequently to this issue it is very important to stress that it brought out a strong barrier between the present and the past of society. In this study it is going to focus on the Turkish theater resources and problems during the period of a ‘Single Party’ (1923-1945) in Turkey. Also it will be focus on the social, cultural, family etc. problems and issues that have been faced during this period of time and have been written to different theatre’s literatures. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n9p748

Eighteenth International Istanbul Theatre Festival (review)

Reviewed by: Eighteenth International Istanbul Theatre Festival Amy E. Hughes Eighteenth International Istanbul Theatre Festival. Istanbul, Turkey. 10 May-5 June 2012. Turkish theatre today is on the verge of enormous change. Arguably, the current situation can be traced to April 2011, when a 31-year-old woman walked out of a play. The woman was Sümeyye Erdoǧan, the youngest daughter of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan—the leader of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), a neoliberal political organization whose conservative religiosity and attempts to suppress free speech have increasingly polarized Turkey over the past decade. At the performance in a state theatre in Ankara, an actor (who claimed not to have recognized her) allegedly mocked Sümeyye during an improvisational sequence; feeling insulted, she left. A year later, Istanbul mayor Kadir Topbaş (a protégé of Erdoǧan) instituted new rules regarding repertory selection for the city's municipal theatres, including an ambiguous mandate requiring that all plays reflect the "ethical values of the society." Angry resignations and vehement protests by artists and audiences followed, to no avail. The prime minister seized the opportunity to rail against Turkey's theatre-makers and spectators, characterizing them as arrogant elitist outliers. Even more distressingly, Erdoǧan threatened to terminate all governmental subsidies for state theatres. The eighteenth International Istanbul Theatre Festival (2012) opened shortly after this highly publicized debate over artistic expression and public funding. The festival program included almost forty productions by Turkish companies, as well as five shows from other countries. Istanbul Kültür Sanat Vakfı (Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts [IKSV]), one of Turkey's most important cultural organizations, organizes the biannual theatre festival, as well as festivals showcasing film, music, dance, design, and visual art (the internationally acclaimed Istanbul Biennial). The founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, began supporting Western artistic practices as a way to modernize Turkey; since then, subsidized arts companies have provided opportunities for reflection and experimentation. In light of the uncertainty surrounding the future of theatre here, the festival's theme in 2012 ("Freedom-Questionings") seemed particularly relevant. Click for larger view View full resolution Members of Diyarbakır Şehir Tiyatrosu performing Antigone. (Photographer unknown.) The sense of uncertainty that permeated the festival was evident to me even during Samuel Beckett's Play, directed by Şahika Tekand under the aegis of Istanbul Şehir Tiyatroları (Istanbul Municipal Theatres). Tekand has attracted considerable attention internationally since founding her own company, Studio Oyunculari, in 1990. Her productions have been featured at prominent venues and festivals in Germany, Greece, and Japan, among other countries. Tekand's stunning, thoroughly engrossing rendition of Play (in Turkish translation) constituted her first project with Istanbul's municipal theatre. In Turkish, the word for a theatrical play is oyun, a homonym that can also mean "game" (similar to Spiel); Tekand consciously mined and explored this double entendre. As written, Play depicts three people—M, W1, and W2—interred in urns up to their necks. The members of this love triangle bitterly complain about the light, their lives, and one another. In Tekand's production, each actor (fifteen in all) inhabited one square of a massive grid of boxes that filled the stage. Although the actors could not see one another, their bodies were fully visible to the audience. During a fast and furious sixty minutes, [End Page 258] the musicality of Beckett's text was foregrounded through repetition, stylized gestures, and text spoken in unison. Words flew by with amazing speed; small gestures and strange postures took on incredible (if illegible) weight; and the buoyant energy of the performers was palpable. The ensemble's precision was reminiscent of a dance troupe—a result of Tekand's distinctive directorial approach, which she calls the "Performative Staging and Acting Method." Light was deployed in such exacting and assertive ways that it seemed like a character in itself. During quiet moments, disembodied heads emerged slowly from the black void; during more tumultuous sequences, the claustrophobic compartments were illuminated in a flash—just long enough for a performer to stomp a foot, or guffaw, or hiccup—before the play/game mercilessly moved on, built to a crescendo...

U.Ü. GSF Sahne Sanatları’nda neden Tavtatikütüpati? Bir oyunun sahnelenme süreci

Tavtatikutupati, written by Atilla ALPOGE, is a play formed during the process of Young Actors’ efforts to settle an original theatre. The play which has influences of our traditional type and absurd theatre, has been studied and brought to audience during the education year of 2011-2012, at the course of Scene Practice, at Uludag University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Performing Arts. Tavtatikutupati has been preferred because of the following reasons: it is suitable for a team-work, it has influences of traditional and absurd theatres, its essence is valuable from the point of the historical and the universal, it is written through Open Style and Demonstrative Theatre, it is appropriate for the economic conditions of a theatre school. Staging (acting attitude at the base of comment, decor, costume, music, dance, light and effect), settling and strengthening of the play, which has been evaluated through organic point of view in Autumn term and as consistent with the programme of Scene Practice, has been realized through a certain rehearsal order. And the play came together with the audience in May 2012. Application period, which has been checked in courses of Traditional Turkish Theatre and Theatre Management beside the course of Scene Practice, has been completed successfully. Further, the process of acting and directing strating from play selection to the Premier has been told during the application of Tavtatikutupati and the student has learned this process through practice.

Review of Hamlet Forever (adapted and translated by Murat Karahüseyinoğlu), Öteki Tiyatro, Ankara, 15 April 2011

In the last two years a clutch of Shakespeare productions have appeared in the Turkish theatre (Titus Andronicus and Macbeth in Istanbul, Hamlet Forever in Ankara) aimed specifically at 18 to 30 ye...

Impact Of Brecht On Turkish Theatre

Impact Of Brecht On Turkish Theatre

Turkish Hamlets

In modern Turkey, Hamlet is a freely adaptable text, a source for multiple translations conveying the complexities of modernization and Westernization in republican Turkey. Its translators include Halide Edip Adıvar, a female republican activist of the 1920s; Orhan Burian, a magazine editor and writer of the 1940s; Suut Kemal Yetkin, a republican literary essayist and art historian of the 1940s; Sabahattin Eyuboğlu, an academician, documentary director and translator active in the 1950s and 1960s; Can Yücel, an outspoken poet of the 1970s; and Bülent Bozkurt, a contemporary scholar of English literature. The text has also been modified in theatre and film adaptations. In Beklan Algan's play Hamlet 70 (1970), Hamlet is a leftist republican revolutionary who fights against imperialist, reactionary, and rightist forces. In a cult film, İntikam Meleği: Kadın Hamlet (The Angel of Vengeance, Female Hamlet, 1976) by Metin Erksan, Hamlet is portrayed as a modern female, the murder occurs on screen, and this failed “art film” turns into a “surrealist” melodrama. A comic version by Müjdat Gezen, Hamlet Efendi (1995), depicts a traditional theatre troupe that attempts to accommodate the republican Westernization project by changing their repertoire. Finally, Semih Çelenk's 2004 adaptation Hamlet Renkli Türkçe (Hamlet in Colour in Turkish) brings together Shakespearean characters with those of traditional Turkish theatre in a comedy of cultural encounters. The manipulations of each rendition of the play expose various aspects of “Turkification” involving elements from the republican project and its culture of opposition, often aligned with a rift between secularism and Islamism. This paper explores how Turkish Hamlets demonstrate the versatility of the play in addressing the traumas of cultural change, translation, and transformation; how Hamlet is portrayed as an ideal figure epitomizing the Westernizers’ model hero; and how the history of modern Turkey coincides with these different renderings.

Evolving Attitudes To the American Dream: Death of a Salesman in the Turkish Context

As in other countries, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman has become a popular text in the Turkish theater, as well as being taught on many university courses in American Literature. It has received at least twelve productions in Ankara and Istanbul; and has been translated at least twice – the first appearing in 1952 under the title Saticinin Olumu, published by the Ministry of Education and translated by Orhan Burian, a major figure in Turkish translation who was responsible for bringing m...

Increasing returns to information and the survival of Turkish public theatre plays

This paper investigates increasing returns to information and the survival of Turkish public theatre productions. Log size and rank relationship is found to display autocorrelated growth in a sample of 556 plays put on stage in the Turkish public theatre system in 12 different cities between 1998 and 2003. The lifetime of plays is also investigated and the features of plays are found not to matter for duration which can be explained by the non-profit nature of public theatre. However, the lifetimes of plays in more developed cities are longer than in less developed cities. In contrast to Broadway shows, the hazard function for Turkish public theatre plays is increasing in the number of performances.

Burmese Nights: the Pagoda Festival Pwe in the Age of Hollywood's ‘Titanic’

The Burmese zat pwe, an exuberant variety show involving almost every kind of performing art, has fascinated foreign visitors to Myanmar for the past hundred years. It continues today as a vibrant amalgam of singing, dancing, acting, and comic improvisation, still performed annually at pagoda festivals. As Burmese scholars have noted, the Burmese performer is primarily a singer and dancer rather than a dramatic actor, and therefore tends to use plays as frameworks for demonstrating virtuosity in these areas. This is reinforced by the training given at the two State Schools of Music and Dance, and while the Drama Department at the University of Culture does acquaint students with dramatic acting, the emphasis remains on music and dance. Moreover, the scripted drama, especially the classical drama, which reached a peak in the mid-nineteenth century, is increasingly omitted from the pwe programme, having gradually been displaced by the pop music that is considered necessary to attract young audiences. Despite such changes, which alarm traditionalists, the pwe performance has shown a resilient flexibility to adapt to audience preferences and remains a lively highlight at the festivals. Catherine Diamond – who has previously written for NTQ on Vietnamese and Turkish theatre, and on oriental approaches to classical tragedy – is a dancer and drama professor who is currently directing for the Thalie Theatre, the only English-language theatre in Taiwan.

Darkening Clouds over Istanbul: Turkish Theatre in a Changing Climate

Modern Turkish theatre, benefiting from the support of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, has had a secular bent throughout its history. However, after the elections of 1994 and 1995, when Refah (Welfare) Party candidates espousing a distinctly religious agenda swept into power, dramatists have found themselves in an uneasy position, caught between corrupt secular politicians and a censorship-inclined military on the one hand, and Islamists hostile to theatre both in principle and as an unnecessary luxury on the other. Besides swiftly changing demographics and competition from alternative entertainments, shifts in political policy in Istanbul are eroding the city's strong theatre tradition. Yet the theatre of this nation which straddles Europe and Asia maintains an impressive vitality and variety, with state and municipal companies mounting regular seasons of foreign and Turkish works, and experimental troupes challenging established theatre forms as well as daring to broach some of the sensitive ideological conflicts in Istanbul. Catherine Diamond, a dancer and drama professor in Taiwan, is author of Sringara Tales, a collection of short stories about dancers in South-East Asia and the Middle East.