Deniz Başar

This study focuses on the aesthetics of the contemporary theatre of Turkey through the focal point of Ottoman non-religious and urban performance forms, and particularly the medium of shadow puppetry known as Karagöz . The major signature of Karagöz is its metatheatricality, which was incorporated into the contemporary theatre of Turkey through the various methods discussed in this thesis. Adaptation, epic theatre, ‘two and a half dimensions,’ and ‘narrative theatre’ are all methods that serve this culturally-rooted metatheatrical performance paradigm. As a through line, while tracing the aesthetic hybridities, Western influences, and organizational structures that shaped the contemporary theatre field of Turkey through multiple case studies, this thesis centers itself around the focus of illustrating the patterns of how the archetypes, elements, and techniques of Karagöz were recycled and re-invented on the contemporary stage. This overall metatheatricality sets up the dramaturgy and acting style through its open form, and through the direct engagement of the performers with their audiences.

Çalışma Tarihi Yarımada kapsamında sınır öğesi – kent strüktürü ilişkisini inceler. Bunu inceleyebilmek için yöntem olarak yapısalcı eleştiri kuramından faydalanır. İki ana kavram olan ‘sınır’ ve ‘kent strüktürü’nü bu yöntemin fiziksel mekânı okumanın iki yolu olan eş zamanlı okuma ve art zamanlı okuma yoluyla yapar.
Çalışma kapsamında öncelikle Tarihi Yarımada’nın kent strüktürünün değişimine odaklı bir kısa tarih okuması yapılmıştır. Bu okumanın sonucunda kent strüktürünün değişim gösterdiği on bölge belirlenmiş ve bu strüktürel değişimin nasıl olduğuna bakılmıştır. Sonrasında sınır öğelerinin fiziksel mekânda ve çalışma kapsamında üç ana harita olan Mamboury, Pervititch ve Halihazır haritalardaki sürekliliği ve değişimi incelenmiştir.
Odaklanılan on bölgenin dördünde sınır öğesi ve kent strüktürü arasında doğrudan ilişki tespit edildiği için bu bölgeler ayrıca çalışılmıştır. Bunun sonucunda sınır öğelerinin kent strüktürünü iki şekilde etkilediği tespit edilmiştir: dolgu alanlarını sınırlandırarak ve yangınların yayılmasını engelleyerek.

This thesis looks at the alternative theater field in Turkey especially after mid 2000s which is separated from conventional theater making styles by the usage of blackbox stages, new texts (translated or locally written), experimental dramaturgies and
new acting techniques. The research was based primarily on long-running and deep field analysis varying from spatial analysis to interviews where the supplementary material is mostly collected from newspapers and websites. The conclusions reached
were that this “new” form of theater created a significant public sphere based on tools of “performative publicness” in which different groups from various backgrounds (though being limited by class to an extent for now) can have contact with each other and their stories.

Türkçe Özet: Bu tez Türkiye’deki özellikle 2005’ten sonra bilinen tiyatro yapma tarzlarından black-box sahne, yeni metinler (çeviri ya da yerli yazım), deneysel dramaturji ve yeni oyunculuk teknikleri ile ayrışan alternatif tiyatro alanını inceler. Araştırma büyük ölçüde mekansal analizden mülakatlara uzanan uzun soluklu ve derin alan çalışmasına dayanır, destekleyici materyalin ise büyük ölçüde gazeteler ve websitelerinden gelmektedir. Sonuç olarak bu “yeni” tiyatronun “eylemsel kamusallık” ile tanımlanabilecek bir kamusal alan oluşturduğu ve bu kamusal alanda geçmişleri çok farklı olan bireylerin (şu an için kentli orta sınıflara mahsus olmakla birlikte) birbirleriyle ve birbirlerinin hikayeleri ile ilişkilenebildiği anlaşılmıştır.

This article is a very short guide to navigating institutional racism within universities. Focal points of this piece are how institutional racism works, how it can be diagnosed, and how one can invent ways to survive it. The first section of this article is an overall analysis of how institutional racism is set up, particularly in the humanities and arts departments of North American universities. The second section is a step-by-step guide to surviving institutional racism in the university, and particularly in graduate programs. This article is distilled through and explained by first-hand experiences and observations and is written both to archive the structure and affect of the current atmosphere of institutional racism and to document and propose some strategies of awareness and resistance.

In this paper I will analyze Robert Lepage’s 2008 production of The Nightingale and Other Fables and Robert Wilson’s 2015 production of Faust I&II through the themes of globalization and inter-cultural dialogue, but also with the counter narrative of bastardization. I use the term "bastardization" as an umbrella definition under the studies of cultural globalization, especially for the countless cases where various works can be framed and justified with the terminology of intercultural dialogue, when there is actually no one answering on the other side.

The Gezi Resistance was a breaking point for the historiography of the Mi Minör play; it shifted the importance and meaning of the play. My basic argument in this paper is that play gained its political importance not because of the creativity and theatricality of its textual and dramaturgical ideas, but because of the political discourse constructed around it after the Gezi Resistance.

Movement Atelier is a unique dance ensemble from Turkey made by women. They use oral history, literary texts written by prominent women writers of Turkey, and social science texts that theorize about public culture of Turkey as their starting points to develop performance works; which have the power of triggering a vast landscape of connotations for the Turkish audiences about the collective public memory of their country from an intergenerational feminist perspective. The focus of this paper is their 2009 performance cirCUMstances, in which the semiotics were constructed for the feminist blurring of public and private, and was realized through the female performers’ bodies that rapidly oscillate between affectionate and abject movements.

The central case study of this paper is the 1985 production of The Taming of the Shrew in Ankara State Theatres directed by Yücel Erten, which was a production where a male non-Anglophone director successfully subverted the play into a tragedy. In 1985 Yücel Erten, as a director working in State Theatres, was given the task of staging The Taming of the Shrew by the general coordinator of the State Theatres of that time, Turgut Özakman. Here, it is important to note that Yücel Erten did not chose this play to stage on his own – he was given the task and turning down the appointed play would have been an improper move within the institutional framework of the State Theatres. Under these unique institutional conditions Erten took on the task of staging the play, which he saw as ideologically flawed especially within the circumstances of contemporary Turkey. Therefore he decided to subvert the play into a tragedy with one momentary twist at the end: In the final scene of Erten’s production, Katharina comes on stage carrying a shawl in her hands to give her last monologue (where she explains how to be a good and obedient housewife) and when she finishes this last monologue, she lets go of the shawl to reveal that she actually cut her wrists and is about to die. This last twist made the production remarkable among the worldwide production histories of The Taming of the Shrew, and Erten’s production became the only Shakespeare production from Turkey which ever created a debate among the international Shakespeare performance scholars.

This is an examination of Tony Nardi’s critique of Canadian culture industry through his series of performances, which he acted live from 2005 to 2012. His performances found stages in Toronto and Montreal and he evolved the text through Q&A sessions that took place after each performance. Content of the performance was withdrawn from the real cases that offended Nardi as a professional actor in Canada. Performance of the letters are stylized as semi-reading, semi-acting that has the gist of slam poetry/spoken poetry. In this essay, I look into how Nardi’s work created a public and how this public engaged (or disengaged) with the letters based on the analysis of some of the debates and events that are documented in the printed version of “Two Letters… And Counting!”.

“Down the Hill Entrusts” was a site-specific play devised by Kumbaracı50 stage about the mass urban transformation that is taking place in Istanbul. It was performed only at the beginning and at the end of 2012-13 theatre season, since play was outdoors and depended on good weather. The rules that the audience was asked to follow were written on key chains that were distributed at the beginning in return of their identity cards: “Don’t ask questions. / Follow officials’ orders. / Group won’t wait for you. / Your old key is inoperative. / Give your identity. / Don’t sing. / Thank you for your cooperation. ” The group devised the piece through the performers’ improvisations on the streets around the stage of Kumbaracı50, from which the performance was later made into one collective narrative. The audience listened the live monologues through the headphones as they walked with the group through the streets of Istanbul. The play was strongly site-specific, where it can’t be carried to another site; just as urban transformation cannot carry the urban culture and social relations of a society to other spaces. As the play continued, it was slowly revealed to the audience that they are already exiled from the city, and they are collecting the last people to be exiled with them. Audience walked through the streets followed by the performers who were picked up on the way after they gave their monologue. This particular technology worked as a tool to single the characters out from the crowds of the vibrant and living center of Istanbul, and entrusted these precious stories to the audience.

“Haz Makami”, which can be translated as “Modes of Pleasure” into English, was a unique event in Turkish theatre field. It was a production of 6’dan Sonra Tiyatro, who also owns the blackbox stage Kumbaraci50 in central Istanbul. “Modes of Pleasure” was first staged in 2012 and continued for two theatre seasons. “Modes of Pleasure” starts with the daily interactions of four women who live in the same apartment in Istanbul, but story takes a wild turn after midnight when each of them start exploring their very kinky sexual fantasies, separately in their own homes. The rhythm that each character catches is unique, but they find unisons immediately so it forms a “makam”, a specific definition of “mode” in tone and timber scaling system of classical Ottoman music, which results in a rhythm (and melody) that is unique to Istanbul and women of Turkey. Communication takes place among the characters through reduced body language of the puppets and musical rhythms they find throughout the play. This paper describes and analyzes the play theoretically through the layers of estrangement effects it brought to the audiences of Istanbul (estrangement via the technique of puppetry and feminist subversion of bringing women’s sexuality on stage) through placing the play in the broader social context it belongs to.

Funeral of the Acrobat (“Cambazın Cenazesi”) written by Firuze Engin, directed by Berfin Zenderlioğlu as a production of IkinciKat theatre in Istanbul is a new breath in Turkey’s theatre field; but beyond its local importance, it is a very important rebellion against the Anglocentric current of the contemporary world. The theatricality of this play paradigmatically contradicts with Anglophone theatre’s purist obsession to grasp “authenticity”, which is a paradigm still colonially distributed through media and academia. The play’s staging is revolutionary in the most pre-modern way: two performers use the “meddah” technique to embody the narrators and eleven characters each, where they tell and act the story without a fourth wall. Putting two “meddahs” in dialogue is a surprising use of tradition since the comedic “meddah” storytelling technique is known to be a solo performance tradition which originated in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. These two “meddahs” act on a stage designed with shadow images appearing in light screens behind them, images which also refer to the tradition of shadow puppetry in Turkey. Two “meddahs” sometimes go behind these screens and become a part of the shadows of the story and dissolve in the allegorical landscape. On the other hand Funeral of the Acrobat has a concrete dramatic structure with a chain of events layering from the most personal to the most social where the fictional Western Thracian village Yapıldak slowly becomes a microcosm of the transformation of the Turkish society in the last decade as a result of rapidly precipitating neoliberal urban transformation. Yapıldak exists in the same parallel universe of the planet Solaris of Stanislaw Lem, country of Uqbar of Jorge Luis Borges, or the town Macondo of Gabriel Garcia Márquez where allegory devours life and creates a habitat of truth beyond the stagnating pornography of our contemporary and mediatised “reality”.

Here I present a variety of new plays from contemporary Turkey dealing with the ongoing civil war from a variety of sides. Through the characters presented in these plays,  it is possible to see a nuanced reflection of an on-going civil war, and its long term affects in society. The most important potential these plays provide is making this neutralized state of mind that is distorted by this collective trauma visible; therefore questionable and potentially changeable. Reminding the potentiality of change through making the unnaturalness of the current situation visible is the most important long-term political goal of these plays.

This is a subchapter from my Master’s Thesis named “Performative Publicness: Alternative Theatre in Turkey after 2000s” which I finished on the July of 2014 and presented in Bogazici University, Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History. This paper has three core theoretical key words, which are “ethical compass”, “tyranny of privacy” and “performative publicness”. I’ll present my narrative on appearance of unorthodox trans-characters (and trans-performers) in alternative stages in last decade within this framework. I need to add that the plays I’ll refer are acted before July 2014 but within the slide show I included the new plays also.

This paper is presented in three sub-sections and an appendix to provide a backdrop for the comparison of the main case study, which is the comparison between Petrushka, the modern classic from the Ballets Russes repertory (music by Igor Stravinsky, choreography by Michel Fokine) and Çeşmebaşı [At the Fountain or Fountainhead], the first Turkish ballet from 1965 (music by Ferit Tüzün, choreography by Dame Ninette de Valois). The introduction provides the background of Ninette de Valois’s career and impact of Ballets Russes in her choreographic and management work as she established the Royal Ballet; the middle section gives insight into de Valois’s work as she developed the state conservatoire and state ballet institutions in Turkey (influenced by the political consciousness of Cold War) based on the first model she established with English national ballet; and the final section compares Petrushka and Çeşmebaşı as a case study to analyze the aspects of the Ballets Russes legacy that became the foundations of Turkish Ballet.

The appendix has four sub-sections. The first section lists the Ballets Russes ballets that Ninette de Valois danced in, the ballets that she was a part of in the creation process (grounding the influence of choreographers and styles mentioned in the introduction section of the paper) and a short chronology of her most-cited choreographies; the second section provides a timeline of the development of Turkish Ballet through its foundational period; and the third section provides a detailed description of Çeşmebaşı’s music. The very last sub-section of the appendix is the visual material I collected about the Çeşmebaşı Ballet from various sources.

It is not uncommon to read performance through its affects on the viewers’ body, but it is more of a rarity to read literature through its embodiment. Alperen Kartal (b. 1998) is a writer from Turkey, who writes in the self-defined genre of ‘theoretical novel’. Despite the fact that he constructs a language that is highly abstracted within a narrative style that is not just fragmented, but the very personhood of the narrator is constantly under attack; his novels have unexpected snapshots of real-life fragments in them. These real-life fragments are mostly from the most mundane moments of life. For example his first novel Moratorium for Torso, is exclusively set (if it can be defined as such) in a crowded public bus, probably in Ankara. From within this crowd of bodies, the reader (I) get a sense of the claustrophobia and abjectness of this undesired proximity for the undefined (indefinable?) narrator. Human body appears as a space that is constantly occupied or dismembered, and the owners of these bodies – like the ‘sheep of Abraham’ leitmotiv that is used throughout the novel – have no say on these external forces. The high-level abstraction in the novel allows for an ‘open work’ to emerge, as Umberto Eco defines it, in which the reader (I) fill/s in the gaps. The sense of coherence for the reader corresponds to a journey guided by the map that the writer provided, which has connotational stops at the contemporary collective traumas of Turkey. What I want to discuss in this presentation is the embodied experience of reading Alperen Kartal’s novels, which triggered me and opened layers of my memory that was forgotten long ago. The memory that I’m referring to here is not only a personal one, it is through the collective subconscious of the violence that the intellectuals of Turkey have been made into a witness (and receiver) of in the past decade, which makes it possible for this open work to occupy space in the reader’s body (my body).

Video of the panel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r83Ocg4fxqo

4’33” in Baghdad is a brilliant play asking important overlapping questions in the North American context about military and cultural invasions; and the forceful exportation of “democracy, free speech and art” to the Middle East. The play is described as “an 'immersive and interactive academic striptease' in the form of a TED-talk stand-up comedy” in its press release, and this description, which might seem contradictory at the first sight, is fulfilled in its entirety through out the play. 4’33” in Baghdad is a one performer show where Nicholas Royer-Artuso acts an ethnomusicologist funded by some prestigious Western scholarship, where he is assigned to conduct an academic research on the first performance of John Cage’s 4’33” (a piece known to be silence for four minutes and thirty three seconds) in Baghdad right after its “liberation” by United States in 2003. Artuso’s fictional ethnomusicologist analyzes “the silence” through its conduction by the US military forces and through its reception by the locals in the war zone. As 4’33” becomes a direct metonymy for American invasion of Iraq through the play, the overlapping realities about forceful exportations of American liberal democracy, violence of the war imposed on a civil population, and how American conceptual art deals with these multilayered aesthetic and political contexts in its displaced contexts and within its own conformist position at its home are all questioned in the points of intersecting violences of international politics; where the play brilliantly clashes these different contexts with each. Directed by Turkish woman director Ülfet Sevdi, show is an unexpected juggling of ideas and theories, and it demonstrates different frameworks about the nature of colonialism from military to artistic and cultural levels. The show inevitably engages with countless displacements: the displacement that war itself imposes onto people, the displacement of ideas, the displacement of cultures, and finally the displacement of art and its relevance in its exported contexts while (Western) art’s claim is to be “universal”.

I went to see the political-satire-bunraku-puppet-show “Manufacturing Mischief” on 24th of May 2018 at the Berkeley Street Upstairs Theatre (Canadian Stage) without really knowing what to expect from the show. “Manufacturing Mischief’s” online information gave a crazy sense of what the play might be: “American linguist Noam Chomsky is headed to Silicon Valley to judge a competition of new Artificial Intelligence devices hosted by South African inventor, Elon Musk. Chomsky’s prized student, Millie, has entered a device, called the Print-A-Friend, in the competition. It materializes the author of any book inserted into it. Chaos ensues as Ayn Rand, Tiny Trump, Karl Marx, and others are reanimated - and the Print-A-Friend is stolen! Chomsky, Millie and Marx must fend off the forces of capitalistic evil and the damage they might do with this new AI machine.” After I watched the show I was pleasantly surprised by the intellectual charm of the show and how it dealt with so many difficult ideas through the material world of puppets and objects. Show’s maker, Pedro Reyes, has a long and profoundly interesting artistic career where he has used a variety of theatrical mediums, including performance-exhibitions like “Doomocracy” (2016), and other political puppetry pieces like “The Permanent Revolution” (2014), to broaden the political and ethical imaginations of adult participants and audiences through the Americas. The show consciously made the choice of casting women puppeteers for male puppets and the only male puppeteer for the central female puppet (Millie), which not only successfully bended the expectation of gender roles but also very smartly used bunraku’s potential of making characters through superposed elements (such as the material reality of the puppet, its animation and its voice). In this paper I will analyze the show’s technicality, how it merged digital and analog mediums, its allegorical approach to political reality, and its pedagogical approach towards the intellectual accessibility of philosophical and ethical debates that correspond to substantial means in many people’s lives.

Course Objective and Learning Objectives: This course approaches dramaturgy as a practical realm of theatre, therefore the main objective of the course is to make sure students learn the tools of analyzing plays with a dramaturgical lens, and can apply their skills of dramaturgy in their future productions.

Course Objective and Learning Objectives: This course approaches dramaturgy as a practical realm of theatre, therefore the main objective of the course is to make sure students learn the tools of analyzing plays with a dramaturgical lens, and can apply their skills of dramaturgy in their future productions. At the end of the course students are expected to understand: 1) The differences between production dramaturgy and literary dramaturgy 2) The cultural divergences between historical understandings of dramaturgy 3) Importance of the context of the creation of a theatre piece, and the labour involved in translating&adapting it to another context 4) Analyzing and criticizing performances from multiple perspectives 5) Developing the self-efficiency to watch theatre productions and understand the dramaturgical structure involved in the making of the performance Course Structure Course hours take place between 14:30 and 17:20 on Thursdays, but there will be an additional study hour prior to the classes. In this study hour we will watch the assigned videos together. The course time itself is divided into two, the first section will be lectures, the second section will be class discussions.