Exiled Lives on the Stage: Turkey's Artists at the Crossroads of New Aesthetic Practices and Political Subjectivities (original) (raw)
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Pieter Verstraete is an independent theater scholar who, for the past 6 years, had been working and researching in Turkey. The political development of the last years has had many effects, e.g. on the daily lives, on the arts and culture, on journalism. Verstraete is not only one of those who had to leave the country but also an expert on contemporary Turkish theater. In this very personal and moving text, he shares his impressions of the last two years and gives a brief insight into a few of the artistic consequences.
Performance Matters, 2019
In this essay, we explore what is at stake for Kurdish theatre artists who develop their theatre praxis in a permanent state of emergency imposed by the Turkish government, and why it matters to act, both in the general sense and in the theatrical one, in a language that is neither the accepted one of the nation nor of the majority culture. This essay discusses interviews with five prominent Kurdish theatre artists, some based in Turkey and others currently in exile in Europe. The respondents included costume designer Ismail Oyur Tezcanli (based in Turkey), playwright Yusuf Unay (in Turkey), actor and director Mîrza Metin (currently in Germany), instructor and director Rezan Aksoy (in Germany), and director Celil Toksöz (in the Netherlands, though not in exile).
Performing Arts at the Vanishing Point of Social Protest in a ‘New’ Turkey
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In this paper, I focus on both performative and theatrical forms of social protest as strategies of resistance to hegemonic processes and discourses of the State, particularly as they materialized during and after the Gezi protests in Turkey. I first focus on individual artists and their response-ability. Second, I go deeper into Gezi’s ‘performativity in plurality’ (Butler) as a tool of resistance against dominant strategies of the sovereign gaze. In this context, I discuss Peggy Phelan’s ‘active vanishing’ (1996) as a most dominant yet paradoxical mode of performativity, which demonstrates a plurality of potential readings, forms of resistance and citizen participation to resist established codes and regimes of representation through self-performance. Lastly, I extend the line of thought on visibility to discuss the limitations of dramatic representation by focusing on newly written plays – particularly those that played upon the iconicity of Gezi and the multiple identities of its protagonists.
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Performances and performance cultures are often seen in our discipline as indicative of the political unconscious in the way they shape dramatizations of collective myths and identities. Yet they are also so much entangled with the present political agendas, the arts (and education) decrees and legislation, the support by local communities and audiences, and the general social and political climates in which they operate, respond to and aim to influence. In Turkey, for over a decade, politics and theatre are increasingly at odds with each other in a general climate that seeks to restrict freedom of speech and expression as well as the public representation and visibility of (political) identities that go beyond the homogeneity of an 'ethnically' Turkish nationhood and a (Sunni) Muslim denomination or cultural background. Moreover, right before the previous general elections and even more so after the failed coup attempt, the role of the state as a primary actor in identity politics has taken a nationalistic turn. Despite its ethnically diverse history and social reality, the homogeneous Turkish nation as predicated by the state leaves formally and publicly no space for cultural pluralism. Theatre and aesthetic protest take up an important social role in contesting mainstream notions of citizenship and in creating a space for plurality. In this keynote, I propose to do four things: 1. I will first focus on the current political climate in Turkey and look at its implications for the artist's response-ability (Lehmann 2006). 2. I will move on to reintroduce Turkey's protest culture after the Gezi uprisings and discuss how performativity in protest actions has the potential to be called a 'structure of feeling' (Williams 1977) with a wider history in political performance history. 3. I will unpack similarities and differences with protests and theatre cultures in the 1950s and 1980s. However, it must be said that my rereading of Turkey's history of aesthetic protest and the role of the artist within it will only reveal a very disparate story. 4. I will return to today's Turkey and pose some critical questions regarding the term ‘Gezi spirit’. I will conclude with the question whether or not the Gezi spirit is (or should be kept) alive and what it left us – as academics – to make sense of what is happening around us today.
Artistic expression in times of peace and war: the case of Turkey’s Kurds from 2009 to the present
Turkish Studies, 2018
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Contrasting Landscape of Theatre in Turkey: Resisting (with) Theatre
Critical Stages, Volume. 17, 2018
When I was writing a draft for this report, I realised that in Istanbul, the most populated city in Turkey, more than 150 theatre productions are being staged every evening. It is quite surprising and gratifying to witness this, despite the socio-political crisis and the censorship in art. Actually, for a while it has been discussed that Turkish people are divided into two sharp poles both in terms of political and cultural life, namely the Republicans and the conservatives. However, the landscape of theatre studies presents a contrast. On one hand, especially over the last ten years, theatre productions in Turkey have a very prosperous landscape. One can find various trends, theatrical forms, new dramaturgical and narrative techniques ranging from musical, in-yer-face, feminist theatre, queer studies, performance art to storytelling forms, monodrama, monologue drama, solo-performance, newer adaptations of classical texts and traditional forms. More recently, a number of new groups, new venues, theatre and performance research centers such as GalataPerform, Tiyatro Medresesi, Kadıköy Theatron which are seeking for new theatrical forms, acting styles, narrative techniques, have emerged. Concordantly, the number of theatre critics and new theatre magazines, websites, blogs focusing on current performances have been gradually increasing. Additionally, there are now more than thirty-five academic departments in Theatre, Acting, Performance Arts, Dramaturgy Studies all around Turkey.
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European Stages, Volume 14, Fall 2019
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Traffic in remains: identity and resistance in recent work by Turkish artists
This paper explores work from the 2000s by Turkish artists Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, HaleTenger and Zeren Göktan that links together identity and resistance, considering what Derrida termed the 'ex-appropriations' of terms and figures of the ascriptions of identity in their gallery-related art. It positions this in relation to national, trans-national and regional politics, touching on particularities of media and gender, in the longer history of the region, especially in relation to the binding and unbinding of relations with Europe, from the Tanzimat era on. It proposes that the challenge of the art of these artists is partly as responses to topics and effects of cultural colonization, including those linked to digital culture.