"Bodies of Evidence, or: The Border in Us", in: SCORES°5 - intact bodies / under protest, ed. with Tanzquartier Wien, 2016: 102-109 (original) (raw)
Related papers
More than Hybrid Movement dramaturgy in the aftermath of the Gezi protests
Performance Research, 2020
In this article, I examine how the semahs, a genre of choreo-musical forms performed within the rituals of the Alevis from Turkey, were reinvented into a more contemporary movement and performance vocabulary. As part of a larger investigation on staged representations of Aleviness in theatre and dance, I focus here on the individual and embodied reworking of the semahs by the Istanbul-based choreographer Bedirhan Dehmen, and especially on his production for three male dancers with the title “biz” (Turkish for ‘we’). Staged about twenty times from 2014 to 2017 in Istanbul and elsewhere, “biz” incarnated human bonding and vulnerability during and after the Gezi Park upheaval that rocked Turkey in 2013–14. Devised for the most part through contact improvisation technique, the movement forms in “biz” instigated the dramaturgy of an event which allowed the commemoration of those who were recently killed during the protests, all of whom had an Alevi background. The term ‘hybridity’ was used by many to refer to the way the choreography merged several aesthetic and social influences. What I suggest here are some other notions that may complement the category to attain a more nuanced understanding of this complex performance piece. Accordingly, by accompanying hybridity with concepts such as individualization, resonance, multivalence and compositionality, I propose an appraisal of the perceptual ‘re-organizations’ embodied by the dancers to then excavate the political and historical repercussions of this bodily emergence on its encompassing cultural contexts.
2016
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.
2022
This chapter aims to discuss the public agency of Çarşı (the fan group of the Istanbul football club Beşiktaş) and its role in the Gezi movement by examining Çarşı’s interactions with other actors of the movement. In addition to their vehement support for their football team, Çarşı is also known for promoting and developing welfare projects, and the group was a central figure in Gezi. Although the group clearly displays leftist tendencies, they do not adhere to a particular political agenda. In Gezi, they found themselves in the middle of the protests, clashing with the police. Çarşı became “muscle” in the movement by engaging in physical conflict and guiding less experienced protesters as well as first timers. My main argument is that Gezi, as a public square movement, created a stage for interaction and performativity where actors came together and co-constructed not only a collective defence but also a different way of living and relating to each other in the occupied public place of Gezi. By examining how a soccer fan group interacts with the actors of Gezi protests, this paper focus on the new forms of public agency that emerged out of the Gezi movement.
In Search of a New Performativity after Gezi: On Symbolic Politics and New Dramaturgies in Turkey
Theatre Research International, 2019
This article is an adapted version of a text originally published in Turkish in the historical materialist journal PRAKSIS in 2016, and translated into English by the author. It focuses on performative protest acts and the role of the performing artist in Turkey in the context of the Gezi Park uprisings of 2013. The article examines how some of Gezi's performative protest actions evidence a larger cultural transformation, of which we can see a continuation in new theatre playtexts.
The Art of Resistance: Carnival Aesthetics and the Gezi Street Protests
ASAP Journal (Journal of the Association of the Art of the Present), 2018
Art activism has been a key element in current social movements and uprisings, even as the relation of art and activism appears to have changed significantly during recent decades. In the aftermath of the alter-globalization movements, Arab Spring, Occupy movements around the world, the Gezi Resistance in Turkey, and the ongoing Black Lives Matter Movement in the United States, discussing and theorizing about art has inevitably involved taking resistance, occupation, protest, and activism into consideration. Artists engage in making political intervention, and activists use artistic strategies as a part of political action. Political communities and artistic communities are more and more constitutive of one another in the counterhegemonic struggle. Drawing on photographic and artistic evidence from the 2013 Gezi Park resistance in Turkey, in tandem with theoretical work by Mikhail Bakhtin and Chantal Mouffe, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, this essay examines the changing relationship between art and activism to the extent that protest today references and embodies street carnival and carnival aesthetics. I contend that carnival aesthetics brings about displacements within modes of perception, thus stimulating new forms of subjectification and sociability through which the communities of social movements are constituted.
Performing Arts at the Vanishing Point of Social Protest in a ‘New’ Turkey
2015
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.
The Composition of Multiple Times and Spaces in the Protests
The Rest: Journal of Politics and Development, 2021
This paper demonstrates how the interactions of diverse people with Taksim, Gezi Park, and one another, as well as with material practices and events constructed the Gezi protests’ spaces and times. While the Gezi protests began as a reaction against the uprooting of trees in the park, the excessive use of the police force turned the protests into national unrest. Gezi Park and Taksim Square witnessed a 15-days occupation, which provided countless potentials for bodily actions in material spaces. By looking at the moment in which the protests occurred and exploring the embodied performance of politics in Gezi Park, this paper argues that the Gezi protests created their own times and spaces, in which bodies performed, acted and experienced a different kind of sociality. The paper calls attention to how the protests produced such unique spaces and how internal and external dynamics shaped these spaces. To explore such multiplicity and diversity of the moments, the concepts of “politics of encounter,” “performativity” and “carnivalesque” will be deployed in separate sections. In using these concepts, this paper elucidates the different narratives of the protesters, captured in the moments and practices of the protests.