Performing Arts at the Vanishing Point of Social Protest in a ‘New’ Turkey (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
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.
Turkey underwent a transformation of the public sphere that radically reshaped the political performativities and aesthetics of performance in the past decade, and so did the broader institutional culture and society. The question that animates this volume is how can we examine and formulate these entanglements of aesthetic, cultural, and societal changes? This is why the contributions we seek for this volume sit at the crossroads of theatre and performance studies, political sociology (with a specific focus on globalization and exile), policy and cultural analysis, including wider frames of decolonization, Kurdish and Turkish (language) studies, communication and translation studies, memory studies, dramaturgy, cultural leadership, and democracy studies. Deadline abstracts: 28 May 2021; First chapter drafts: Spring 2022; Completed chapters: Autumn 2022; Foreseen publication date: Spring 2023.
Turkish Studies Stand-in as a performative repertoire of action
Numerous rallies, gatherings and occupations in public squares of large cities have occurred since 2010. They constitute a new guideline to new social movements, which embrace a transformation in public spaces through interaction, shared experience and art so that a collective energy is generated within a given context and time. They therefore propose an alternative form of acting and living together in the light of the equality of all individuals involved. The re-creation of this new active citizenship, both individually and collectively, is also highly connected with the appropriation of a performative repertoire of action within everyday life. This paper focuses on the active, yet unorganized participation of Turkish citizens across the country to the protestation and/or performance of the Standing Man. Standing still and silent offers thus a performative action, which has become collective through social networks. This unpredicted act has been a pioneer in terms of the transformation of a singular creative intervention to a collective performative action.
ResIstanbul: Turkey’s Gezi Spirit and its Spectre in Performance
In the summer of 2013, Turkey has seen an unforeseen wave of protest lead by the young and proletarianized middle classes, which has left a mark in Turkey's social history. The protests meant to thousands of citizens the unimagined possibility of channeling an energy, dubbed the ‘Gezi spirit’, to collectively produce new forms of resistance and organization against the State power and its induced social stratification in a climate of neoliberalism, trade globalism and urban transformation. In the midst of these complex social developments stands the individual artist who is faced with a looming privatisation, censorship as well as with his own deficiency to have a real social impact through his art. It is known that the Prime Minister’s gesture of inviting eight artists to resolve the Gezi Park occupation was in effect a feint action. Concomitantly, he induced a defamation campaign against theatre director Mehmet Ali Alabora for the role his theatre play, Mi Minor, supposedly had played in ‘preparing the revolution’. However, the protests have also demonstrated signs of hope as they turned into a festival, which shared a lot with Mikhail Bakhtin’s suggestions of the carnivalesque as ritualized rebellion where things are infused with new meanings. I will present some of the forms of performance (a forum theatre, a storytelling play, dance theatre initiatives and a musical) as well as the very performance of resistance in public space as both ‘carnivalesque’ and politically engaged (the standing man’s action on Taksim). I will put these examples against the background of a social stratification in transformation, a civic awareness for diversity, the precarity of the arts, as well as a general fear for loss of liberties and representation. I will reflect on the believed and real impacts of performance in ‘post-Gezi’ times and question how to approach the complexity of it.
Turkey's Artists at Risk: Dramaturgies of Resistance vs. Politics of Fear
2018
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.
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.
ITI-Journal, 2023
In the present chapter, I look at the works and practices on the theatre stage by Turkish artists who have left Turkey recently for Europe, under varying circumstances as President Erdoğan’s rule has become more autocratic and the country has been sliding into economic and political crises. This regional focus is informed by my own experience, since I previously lived and worked in Turkey, where I lived through the political events from the Gezi Park uprising in 2013 up until the post-coup witch hunt in 2017. The latter caused my Turkish partner and me to lose our jobs and to move away for security reasons due to our support of the peace petition, titled ‘We Will Not Be a Party to This Crime’, which drew public’s attention to the acts of violence perpetrated by the state in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. Thus, this research comes from a place of practical risk and a profound need to start collecting the voices and works by Kurdish and Turkish theatre practitioners and other artists in response to urgent cultural, political and aesthetic debates.
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.