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©  Laura Gauch Muhammed Kaltuk was born and raised in a conservative Turkish family in Switzerland. After completing his secondary education, he studied medicine and then, at the age of 25, enrolled at the Zurich School of Contemporary and Urban Stage Dance to pursue his passion and dream of a professional career in dance. After making a name for himself in the Swiss hip-hop scene and at major international competitions such as World of Dance, Kaltuk has worked with companies, institutions and festivals such as Theater Basel, Dampfzentrale Bern, Kaserne Basel, Tanzhaus Zurich, Theater Luzern, Theater St. Gallen, Gauthier Dance Company (COLORS Festival), Theater der Jungen Welt Leipzig, Theater Plauen/Zwickau and Breakthrough Festival Zurich. In 2017, Kaltuk founded and became artistic director of Company MEK, which oscillates between hip hop and contemporary dance, cultural and dance traditions, and known and new methods.  Kaltuk creates his works by composing and designing with materi

What is the essence of performance in your opinion?  As a dancer, I always try to present physicality to the audience.  Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?  I believe that dance transcends language and is a way for people to interact.  When you are working on a piece, what sources inspire you? Do dreams play a role in your works?  I get my inspiration from everyday real life. The music, novels, and movies I listen to on a daily basis are also a big influence.  When do you decide to give a title to a work you are working on if it already does not have one?  I always start my work by deciding on a title. The title suggests to me the direction in which the work should go.  Are there any artist or person whom you think influenced your art most? And if there is such an artist or person, who?  I was heavily influenced by old punk rock bands. Their spirit and attitude of thinking is the source of my activities.  When you consider the current state of the world in every sen

What is the essence of performance in your opinion? The performance proposes an existential preposition of trying to find closure in trauma memories using artistic interventions. An attempt at a ritual ‘Going back to forget’. Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?   Yes. I believe that a theatrical space has the power to move mountains and touch the viewers in that space. But it also has the power to shift thoughts on a micro level, to charge the experience in the moment with something unfathomable. When you are working on a piece, what sources inspire you? Do dreams play a role in your works?   Dreams haven't played any roles in my works and inspirations so far. My works are grounded in long research into a particular subject matter, an issue, working with a certain community of people and their skill sets. As a performance maker who is interested in notions of documentary theatre and social practice, inspiration, ideas and forms emerge from the people I work with

©Kenneth Morton  Celebrating its 5th anniversary this year, the Istanbul Fringe Festival, which took place between 16th - 23rd September, presented innovative and alternative shows in theatre, dance and performance from Turkey and around the world, as well as workshops and panels.  This week's guest is The How Theatre, an international ensemble of movement artists, actors and musicians based in New York. The How's mission is to create a space where audiences and artists can be challenged by a variety of perspectives, forms and stories. The company members believe in taking the emotional warmth of the world and manifesting it in physical form, breaking convention. Experimenting theatrically and involving musicians in their work, The How Theatre presented My Favorite Person at the festival, a two-person movement theatre piece that explores the dynamics of relationships between men and women using space, form and sound. Now it's time for our interview with the its director, P

Organised by GalataPerform, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, the New Text Festival, the first playwriting festival in Turkey, will take place for the twelfth time this year between 24 November and 4 December 2023 with the theme "Reality".  Tiago Correia is the first guest of our conversations with international playwrights, whose plays will be translated into Turkish and staged readings will be performed at the festival, which creates a space for Turkish writers and directors to meet artists from abroad within the framework of Theatre Beyond Borders. What is the essence of good play/playwriting in your opinion?  I think the essence of a good play is in its search for truth, whatever the kind of play. So, normally the essence of a good play is also the compromise that the artists - playwrights, directors, actors, set and light designers, costume designers, videographers, etc. - have with themselves, with each other and with theatre itself, in the search for

What is the essence of good play/playwriting in your opinion? Something that entertains me, keeping me away from my own existence for some while. And then it gets back at me while i’m driving home to perceive that it was a moment of non self-explicative text that spoke about things that keep me awake at night.  Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How? I have to, otherwise I would be doing it for rocks and plants. The fact that we charge tickets for our works of art is the perfect answer to that question. We keep trying to send a message to our audience, not essentially trying to convince them of what our points of view are, but just to keep them aware that we exist. It is a market exchange: I tell you something, you’ll leave the place richer, whether it’s on self-awareness or on the things that surround you that you didn’t know.  When you are working on a text, what sources inspire you? Do dreams play a role in your works? When I start a text I never know where it’s lead

INK, Megaron-Athens, 2023, January 12th, World Premiere © M ehmet Kerem Özel 15 January 2023, on the plane, on the way back to istanbul  there are two worlds: one lived inside, the other projected outwards. the first is at the level of the stomach; full of water, turbulent, whirling, swirling, emotional, sensual; naturalness, sexuality reside here, this is where man is born. the second is at the level of the head; the mind, thoughts, lights scattered around... the old man on the stage, in black trousers and a black shirt with rolled up sleeves, has these two worlds...  in the first moment, the old man suddenly grabs an octopus from the ground, pulls it out, tames its flesh by beating it, bites off a piece, eats it, then sits down on a chair and rests... at that moment, the fountain moves in a certain radius from the level of the man's head and sprays water, the water hitting the curtain behind him...  the hunt for octopus is a very greek phenomenon, it's something that all gree

© Jakub Sobotka Founded in Norway in 1998, Jo Strømgren Kompani has become one of Scandinavia's most successful independent companies and a much sought-after dance theatre company worldwide, performing around 150 shows a year in both large national theatres and small alternative venues. Jo Strømgren Kompani, which has toured more than 60 countries, will perform for the first time in Istanbul on 21-22 November 2023, tonight and tomorrow night, as part of the Cemal Reşit Rey Concert Hall's 2023-24 season dance programme. At CRR, the company will perform Made in Oslo, a show consisting of three short works created by its founder Jo Strømgren for the Oslo Danse Ensemble, which closed in 2018. GONE (2015), THE RING (2014) and KVART (2007) each deal with independent themes, but together Strømgren aims to portray different aspects of contemporary life. Strømgren is an interesting and versatile artist. Trained as a dancer, he has choreographed and continues to choreograph for many of t

[This interview was conducted by Ayşe Draz.] What is the essence of theatre in your opinion?  Encounter, exchange and compassion! In a theatre that works without words and with masks, empathy is a basic prerequisite for the audience and also for the players. In this way, theatre can practice this valuable human gift and entertain at the same time. And when the audience leaves the theatre with a little more courage than they came, then it was good theatre.  Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?  Yes! Reality is transformation! Theatre is a lot about how something affects us. The German word for reality (Wirklichkeit) is related to the word effect (Wirkung). Even if we believe in things and can touch something, the universe is made of effects, something always happens and transforms Theatre can play a concentrated role in this. An open and focused person can experience transformation in the theatre and that in return has an effect back on stage.  When you are working on

What is the essence of theater in your opinion? I can only speak about the essence of my world. Our essence is to give emotions, playfulness and interactivity to help the audience from 4 to 104, to find their innocent playfulness and imagine and invent. We have 30 little stories in our show, and each one is full of emotions of very different ideas, some contemporary. People all over the world feel these emotions because they are to do with love, with hate, with competition, with jealousy. So, our essence is really to guide the people to that innocent world and imagine. Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?   Yes. I mean, I go to a museum and some paintings, sculptures transform something in me for sure. Not that I rush back home and want to copy, but they give me that emotion. They give me that strength to continue my way and maybe to invent something. So I do believe that the arts have a very powerful message that we should listen to, and I believe a lot of people d

© Joana Linda What is the essence of performance in your opinion? First of all we need to say that we don’t have any special skill to answer questions that are simultaneously general and profound. And even less in such a short time. Most of our answers to these questions are just commonplace. Where we think we may have something to say (slightly different from everyone else) is in our performative work. And even there we don’t know. Having said that, we can start… Before we used to say that our mission was to act, not necessarily to change or maintain a reality, but to reveal it in the sense of finding “images” for certain sensations, emotions or ideas for which they had not yet been found. You know when you’re reading a text or a poem and you say “oh, it was exactly what I was feeling but I hadn't found the words yet”. Well, in our work we are just trying to find forms for things we feel but for each we still don’t have the words or the gestures or the images. We just finished say