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.

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Afra or Another Passes

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Afra is a teacher from a working class family with a retired mother that used to serve in the house of a Qajar princess, while her father, an official clerk has passed away , Afra tries to makes ends meet by tutoring old Qajar princess’s son but the princess treated her badly scheming his dim wit son marrying Afra but her offer is rejected by Afra that claims she has a suitor as a pretext.
The conflict with the bourgeoisie and working class rises when the princess accuses Afra of stealing so she would marry her son to avoid her reputation destroyed but again she refuses, the other characters in working class join the opposing voices against Afra and drag her to police station for persecution since she is no longer belongs to her own class either.
Meanwhile a police officer and a real estate audit investigate the events and proves Afra’s innocence by the end the story is being read in a newspaper by a story teller that decides to change it and claim he is the imaginary suitor to create a happy ending.

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Once They Die, They’ll Realize

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Once They Die, They’ll Realize is the first of an identity performance series that was a part of the “Identities”project which aimed to research the process of putting the socio-religious rituals of the Arab World -particularly in the previously-called The Levant region, and the mixture of religions it accommodates (Islam, Christianity and Judaism)- in the form of theatre performance.  This aim is to be achieved by researching a ritual’s movement vocabulary. With its form, indications and tokens; this vocabulary holds the possibility of being turned into an integral movement language that can eventually construct an identity of the Arab.

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The Kite Runner

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Amir and Hassan are best friends growing up in Afghanistan in the 1970s until the Soviet invasion pulls them apart. Amir and his father immigrate to the United States, while Hassan stays behind. Twenty years later, Amir is called back to Afghanistan to rescue Hassan’s son from the now war-torn country, but first, he must face demons from his past. The Kite Runner is a heartbreaking story of loyalty, betrayal, and redemption set against the backdrop of global politics.

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The Guaranteed Way to Remove Stains

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After a long night, a woman decides to murder her lover by putting him into a bathtub full of acid. The play is a long monologue delivered by the woman where she examines how her entire life is shamed and how it has been filled with “stains”. She discovers that everything that she is attached to has been viewed as a stain, that she herself has been seen as a stain. The play is almost the only one of its kind in Egyptian theater where the narrative is entirely constructed from a feminist perspective and where the voice is solely given to the woman to share the prohibited truth of her shamed sexuality and the objectification of her body. Due to the nature of monodrama, the feminist discourse is given the ultimate chance to expand via the discourse of the victimised female character who transforms into a killer. This transformation is neither shamed by the author, nor judged. It could seem that the killing itself has a symbolic value, and that the woman is equally killed while killing her lover. To commit murder in such a horrific way is equal to committing suicide. The Egyptian society witnessed many cases of wives killing their husbands and cutting their bodies to pieces, especially during the 1990’s. This play is the only theatrical text to have tackled the issue.

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