Entries by Arjun Dhawan

Trace

March 1, 2021 /0 Comments/in , , /by

 The play dwells on the stories of people who live in the same mansion in Tarlabaşı (a historic and diverse community neighborhood in Istanbul that was declared a regeneration area by the government in 2006), in three different periods of Turkey’s late history. Stories of two Greek / Turkish sisters in the 1950s, a landlord from the Black Sea region and his communist tenant in the 1980s, then a transvestite and his lover in the 2000s intertwine together and develop parallelly. Trace staged in a mansion like an apartment building converted into a theater space by using its different rooms with a cinematographic dramaturgy. The seats and a couple of monitors were located in a single room which can be considered as the main stage; and several cameras were placed in the back rooms. The audience could see the action on the main stage and simultaneously followed what was happening on the back rooms from the monitors through online streaming.

These three testimonial stories belonged to the mansion reveal the covert histories belonged to the others. Trace, as one of the memory plays in peculiar to the recent playwriting trends in Turkey, probes into root-bound matters of the country’s late history by focusing on various sorts of minorities and so-called extremists ranging from LGBTI and communists to Greeks and Kurds.

Funeral of the Acrobat

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The play is a comedy about how the lives of people of a small town by the sea change from the effects of urban renewal. An old man Rasim, whose nickname is Acrobat passes away. He wants his three houses within a big land should be shared among his three children without being sold for urban renovations projects in town. He also requested from his children to be buried in this land upon his death. However, while he is on his deathbed, his children have already sold the land and the houses for a renewal project. The townspeople are also divided between supporting renewal projects or not. Two teenage grandchildren of Rasim secretly decide to realize their grandfather’s last will even if a bulldozer comes to demolish the land.
Play is written for two actors with no gender specifications. These two are mainly storytellers by being several characters throughout the story. This play is important in portraying the urban renovation processes that are taking place in Turkey after a more conservative government has started to build an economy based on the construction sector after the early 2000s. The micro-story that the play is about happens as similar ways for a lot of people all around the country who are in between defending personal urban memory and gaining more capital in an economy unsustainably growing.

You Are More Beautiful Than Istanbul

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The play tells the stories of three generation women from the same family: Grandmother, mother and granddaughter. Even though they all grew up at different times in the same city, their struggles and finding a purpose in life as women do not change fundamentally for each of them. When the play first performed it was directed by the playwright himself. As it is described in the text three women sit on chairs side by side at downstage center without getting up most of the performance. They speak their own monologues to tell the parts of the story from their characters perspective which are written as if we listen to their stream of consciousness in relation to each other and the world they interact with. In staging style and directions with few props and limited physical movement, by most critics the play is often compared with Meddah tradition in Turkish theater which is a storytelling technique that is based on enacting several contexts of a story through different characters. What the play successfully achieves is giving insights to these women’s lives and connecting them to subjects such as change in the city, motherhood, problems of youth etc. When grandmother recalls her memories from her youth, we know the facade of the city with its history disappearing with big urban renewal projects, however struggles of being a woman still continues from how society represses them.

I Love You Turkey

March 1, 2021 /0 Comments/in , , /by

The play tells the story of an unexpected encounter of five young people at a laundromat in the middle of Istanbul. One of them is an employee at the facility and the others are customers waiting for their laundry since there is a water supply cut in the neighborhood. At first they don’t seem like they have anything in common to share. However, once the employee suspiciously reveals a situation that may cause one of these customers to find themselves in a criminal offense, the story unfolds to present each character’s own perspective on how they see the society they live in. Text successfully utilizes post dramatic approach in its structure. While characters try to prove their innocence we hear conversations and monologues that are reflecting their positions and reactions for Turkey’s current political climate. Play’s choice of space and time playfully brings characters who are quite alike together so throughout the play it is possible to understand several perspectives about Turkey as if we are presented an extensive discussion of issues of 2010s such as Gezi Protests, recent military coup d’etat attempt and its aftermath, leaving country for good etc. Rather than constructing a definitive conclusion, the play poses several questions letting the audience keep themselves once the play is over such as: At which age does one feel themselves responsible about the issues of the world around them?

Light Theory

March 1, 2021 /0 Comments/in , , /by

While tremendous political and cultural changes have been happening in Turkey beginning from the second half of 2010s many well educated people started asking themselves whether they want to leave the country or not. Light Theory is about this feeling in Istanbul that a lot of people are experiencing at this time: Finding themselves in a situation in which one will be forced to leave where they were born and live. There are stories of three people in the play: Anna is a scholar from Medieval Istanbul, Feraye is a young student who fled the war in Syria and came to Istanbul, Kaan is a thespian who is preparing to leave Istanbul for good. All of them are forced to leave a place at different times, and they all stop and think whether they forgot something just before they shut their suitcases. Then an archaeologist from a very far future introduces her discovery, which tells us their stories. As their lives are shaped by obligatory journeys, Light Theory imagines the potential meanings of the marks left on our shared futures, which we assume will fade away in time.

It’s Never Gonna be the Same! Wipe Your Tears

March 1, 2021 /0 Comments/in , , /by

The play is a one-man performance and one of the first works concerning the Gezi Park Resistance that emerged in 2013. Staged by Mek’an Sahne, it tells Gezi’s story through the eyes of a street child. Avzer / Mustafa is a teenager now who was left at the age of three at an orphanage by his mother. When he grows up, he escapes from the orphanage and lives alone in the streets of Ankara. He sleeps in abandoned buildings. When he wakes up one morning, he encounters a completely different city occupied with thousands of people protesting on the streets and parks. Though he can not understand what happened at all, he likes the feeling of brotherhood and enthusiasm carried by the demonstrators and then he becomes involved in the movement.. The dramatic change sparking his story will come when he meets the “girl and boy”.
During the performance, he sits on a chair on the empty stage, smokes weed and speaks the street language. He tells his story and asks the audience where “the girl and boy” are now in order to retrieve the lost and missed opportunities he gained in occupy days.

The Sack of the Witch

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The Sack of the Witch is the pioneer example of the field of politicizing transgender life stories in Turkey. Written and performed by the feminist, activist, and trans performer Esmeray, the performance is based on her real-life story from her childhood in Kars, eastern Turkey, to her migration to Istanbul. She works in different jobs but then becomes a sex worker. Her life is difficult because, as well as being trans, she is also Kurdish. When she acquaints us with ideas of feminism, women’s rights, and leftism she becomes an activist struggling for sexual and ethnic identity and gives up sex labor. Based on a feminist and humorous approach, her performance takes the audience into a journey from the 80s and 90s to 2000s, showing socio-political events and revealing relations based on gender, national, ethnicity, and class questions.

End Makam

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The year 1918. Ottoman Istanbul is under occupation. Once-famous poet Şehvar Hanım now lives alone in her ruined mansion and suffers from typhus. Her maid Sabriye visits Şehvar on her last days. Two women revive the past from different times and memories. The songs that are composed by Sabriye with reference to Şehvar’s poems accompany this time journey. As the story opens, it reveals the hidden love between two women, class differences, hidden songs, and changing lives with the war for liberty and unrealized potentials due to the historical and social circumstances. Staged by Altıdan Sonra Tiyatro, End Makam is a historical drama combining the elements of classical Turkish music and feminist approaches. It re-tells and reveals the stories of women who have been hidden in history. It is one of the first plays drawing attention to the love between women from different classes. It also shows how a servant can become both a composer and a revolutionist.

The Real Gala

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The Real Gala is a comedy for two staged by Tiyatrotem. Mrs. Müesser and Mr. Lütfi who are not performers come to the stage for the first time to tell their life story. They can not start to tell their own stories since they are so excited about being on stage. What they try to tell about their life is based on third-page tragicomic news and today’s rated and popular television programs. Are they real or fake? When it comes to the pathetic stories, their presence on stage begins to change and they make the audience believe what they tell through the joyful and painful stories. However, in the end, they confess that none of them belongs to their own.
The Real Gala combines the traditional storytelling forms with the questions of representation and theatricality and it concerns the relations between the self and role, reality and fiction, telling and performing, authenticity and insincerity.

Truth, A Day For Sure

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Truth, A Day For Sure is the story of a journey constructed with metaphors in search of a child’s letter to his mother. The action takes in a distant fairy tale country which will turn into a dystopia, where the sun is forbidden and the truth is covered. When the colorful world of childhood is destroyed by the violence, pressure, and silencing mechanism, the story begins to carry the language of mices and crows. However, by the metaphors of sunflowers, it also raises hopes that truth will reveal in any case, even though the sun is forbidden in this ‘distance’ country. Staged by D22, the performance contains indirect references to the current political and social conflicted atmosphere in Turkey ranging from censorship, the restriction of ‘freedom of thought’ to the civil deaths and arrested people for criticizing the government as well as it questions the nature of the concept of truth itself. This play won the 25 Cevdet Kudret Literature Prizes in field of best drama in 2017.