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Organized by GalataPerform and being the first playwriting festival in Turkey, the New Text Festival was held for the tenth time this year between November 1st and 28th, 2021, with a hybrid structure focused on the theme of "Breath", both in the physical space and digitally.   We hosted Magne van den Berg in the second of our conversations with international playwrights whose plays were translated into Turkish and staged and read at the festival.   Ayşe Draz & Mehmet Kerem Özel © Caroline Bijlhi What is the essence of good play/playwriting in your opinion? For me the essence is to find the right tone in which a play is put… almost like making music… the right content in the right form, makes a good play a good for me… besides that it is important that a play shows me something that was hidden, that I was uncontious of, a taboo, a pain or un unconvenient thuth that is not easy to talk about, and I like it when there is something to laugh and cry about. Do you bel...

Organized by GalataPerform and being the first playwriting festival in Turkey, the New Text Festival was held for the tenth time this year between November 1st and 28th, 2021, with a hybrid structure focused on the theme of "Breath", both in the physical space and digitally.  We hosted Demian Vitanza in the first of our conversations with international playwrights whose plays were translated into Turkish and staged and read at the festival. Ayşe Draz & Mehmet Kerem Özel © Tine Poppe What is the essence of good play/playwriting in your opinion? I believe a good play creates problems for the theatre. That is, a play which is able to force the producing theatre to rethink how a text should be staged. In the end, a good play challenges the audience to think or feel in new ways. Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How? I believe in the double role of comfort and disturbance. A wellknown saying goes: Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. I...

Zwermers, Pan~ // Catwalk, © Jostijn Ligtvoet Fotografie  What is the essence of performance in your opinion?  Performance, in our case, has the double meaning of being a live-performance but also being Performance Art, the art form where the artwork is created through actions executed by the artist.  Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?  In our project Pan~// Catwalk the performers provide this action: the continuous changing of outfits. By doing this, the outfits take centre stage and tell the story: the huge transformative power outfits can have on a body and how it provides a sense of identity. The audience get’s confronted with their own inert tendency to label everything we see and realises how fluid the concept of identity really is. As an artist working in the field of performing arts, how do you personally cope with the challenging conditions resulting from the pandemic? The pandemic has greatly influenced our work. Due to cancelled perfor...

© Jan Versweyveld A large empty space in the middle of the stage; the floor of the space is orange-red, near the center of the space stands a white pedestal sink. This is Jude's domain. Jude's painful past comes to life here, and all the characters who made him suffer appear here. In the present where the play takes place, Jude repeatedly leans against the foot of the sink sitting in front of it on the floor and cuts into his arms. The blood falls to the floor; its orange-red color comes from being bathed in Jude's blood over the years. The narrow long spaces around this large empty space on the stage are the places of Jude's friends; the kitchen of the house where he was adopted at a late age, the architect’s office, the painter's workshop, the doctor's office. All these spaces surround the gap in the middle, just as all of his friends surround and embrace Jude, sensing his injury and trying to avoid him from his pains. Each one of them; one as his lover by car...

In this series of interviews we try to get to know the artists who were the artists of İstanbul Fringe Festival 2021 - Hybrid. Our first guests are Pierre Larauza & Emmanuelle Vincent from t.r.a.n.s.i.t.s.c.a.p.e.  Ayse Draz, Art Unlimited Performing Arts Editor & Mehmet Kerem Ozel, Writer  [The Turkish translation of this interview is published on art.unlimited ] What is the essence of performance in your opinion? The living, the live, the relationship of a body with an audience. Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How? Art does not transform reality, it helps to see it differently. In this sense, yes, art transforms the public's point of view. How do you think that this pandemic which humanity is facing at a global scale today will transform performing arts in the future? The pandemic has already transformed our relationship with space and with each other. Living art is affected by this and will undoubtedly become more and more valuable in an increasin...

In this interview we try to get to know Dávid Somló who is one of the international guests of the "From the world" section of the 2nd Bergama Theatre Festival in August 2021.  Ayşe Draz & Mehmet Kerem Özel  [The Turkish translation of this interview is published on unlimited ] What is the essence of performance in your opinion? People are paying attention together in a space.  Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How? It is quite tricky. Most of the time I think it does very little transformation, rather just creating comfort and entertainment, but sometimes it can be very cathartic and inspirational. But I guess it also depends on the willingness of the individual to be transformed. The ‘how’ depends on the form of the art as well, but in performative genres for me it is working as a pointing finger, that says: you can do that, you can be like that as well, there is something over there, etc.  How do you think that this pandemic which humanity is...

The 74th Holland Festival, which continued throughout June, ended with the livestream of the music-theatre named TIME by the famous Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of the associate artists of this year's edition, on 27th June.  TIME , a joint project of the Holland Festival - Amsterdam, deSingel - Antwerp and the International Manchester Festival, had its world premiere on 18th June at Gashouder-Westergas, which was converted from one of Amsterdam's old gasworks into a culture and events centre.  © Sanne Peper A woman blows a flute-like instrument and walks slowly across the stage filled with ankle leveled water. An hour later she passes again blowing the same instrument, but this time making more painful screams than before. The water through which she passes is no longer the clear water as before. There are dry branches in the water, stones of compacted earth, and there is a man's body in the water, bent like a rock. In the realm of a dream that lasted 100 year...

for twelve years...  

Interview with one of the four Netherlands-based theatermakers in PerformLab exchange programme in Istanbul.  Ayşe Draz & Mehmet Kerem Özel [The Turkish translation of this interview is published on  unlimited ] What is the essence of performance in your opinion? How do you define contemporary performance? I think there are so many ways to answer this question, but if I were to try to describe for myself what the essence of performance is; The first thing that comes to my mind is the desire to be together, to play the game of seeing and being seen, and above all a personal but absolutely collective experience. I am convinced that performance allows for a deep experience that is simultaneously intimate, collective, intellectual, emotional and physical. It can make it possible to question, decontextualise or reformulate our relationship to the other, to reality, or to society. Performance is the place of the sublime and also the place of politics. How then to describe co...

The Schöne Aussicht (Bright View) International Theater Festival, which appeals to young people and children, but most of all to those who still feel young and have a child spirit, ended last Sunday (June, 13), but the recordings of the performances can be watched until the end of June. One of the four shows of the festival was the production of Compagnie Bakelite from France called Envahisseurs (Invaders). It was Olivier Rannou, who both created and staged it, which is one of the qualified examples of object theater. Its subtitle, “Theatre with Unknown Objects”, contains a pleasant humor about both its content and form and the show itself. On one hand, it refers to the "unknown" state of the invading aliens, and on the other hand, it mocks the "known" state of all the objects used in the show, which we are familiar from our daily lives. Well, what are the things Rannou used in the show? Three bond-style briefcases, miniature soldiers, visceral dolls, touristic min...

Interview with one of the four Netherlands-based theatermakers in PerformLab exchange programme in Istanbul.  Ayşe Draz & Mehmet Kerem Özel [The Turkish translation of this interview is published on  unlimited ] © Mélanie Musisi What is the essence of performance in your opinion? How do you define contemporary performance? ‘’For now…’’ I see it as an ongoing process and or attempt to reflect on the time. The past, present, future and all the grey speculative areas in between. A tool, an arena and or platform where beauty, grotesque, chaos, structure, realism and surrealism can clash, collide, transform, connect, find friction, resolve and transcend to then bring us back to earth again. Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How? I believe in the transformative power of art. For me performing arts or any art form in that matter gives us a playground to make space for our individual and collective imagination. This can be in the form of transformation of physical...

Since the International Theater Festival Schöne Aussicht (Bright View), which is organized biennially by JES (Junges Ensemble Stuttgart / Stuttgart Young Ensemble) with the financial support of the municipality and the ministry, was canceled last year due to the pandemic, it takes place this year both in the physical space and online for the theaters in Germany starting to open.   There are not only performances at the festival, but also various events and most importantly, a workshop organized by ASSITEJ (International Association of Children's and Youth Theaters) that lasts for a week during the festival. This workshop titled Concepts for a Theater of Solidarity for Young Audiences is held via Zoom and is open to professional artists and anyone wanting to change things. Respecting and not categorizing the various realities lived in, the workshop is built on thinking and exchanging ideas about questions such as; How can we create theatre for young audiences that practices solida...

Interview with one of the four Netherlands-based theatermakers in PerformLab exchange programme in Istanbul.  Ayşe Draz & Mehmet Kerem Özel [The Turkish translation of this interview is published on  unlimited ] What is the essence of performance in your opinion? How do you define contemporary performance? For me, contemporary performance is about an encounter ; with another, with a stranger, with one self. I am curious about what can happen in this space between us, and what possibilities can be evoked, rehearsed, dismantled, that everyday life denies us. Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?  A friend recently said to me: I am less interested in vectors, but rather art that impregnates my mind with new thoughts and dreaming. I love this statement, because this is where transformation occurs for me, in the slowing down that art can create. By providing a stretching out of time, space and new assemblies, I believe that we are able to create alterna...

[In memory of Anna Halprin, who passed away on May 24, 2021 at the age of 101, I'm sharing my blog post of May 11, 2012 by expanding it.]    Recently, while reading about Pina Bausch, I came across the name of Anna Halprin in one of the texts. So, I realized that it was time to watch the documentary  Breathe made visible – Revolution in dance, Anna Halprin that had been waiting on my shelf for nearly a year.  The 80-minute documentary, dated 2009 and directed by ruedi gerber, tells about the dancer, choreographer, “shaman” Anna Halprin, who was 86 years old at the time of filming. The documentary, which opens with Halprin's words emphasizing the relationship of human, body and movement with nature, takes place almost entirely in nature. Halprin moved from east to west coast of USA, from New York to California in the early 1950s, as soon as she realized that urban environment is not a nurturing place for her.  Her husband, landscape architect Lawrence...