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© Annemie Augustijns The famous opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny , in short Mahagonny , with the libretto by Bertolt Brecht and music by Kurt Weill, tells the story of a city where, if paid for, there are no rules for entertainment (food, sex, boxing and drink), everything is permitted for entertainment. In this artificial city, people are prevented from realizing that their lives are empty and meaningless by spending their time with entertainment, so much that people are made to forget that they are human by dulling their feelings. So, the plot of the Mahagonny can be read as a critique of American society, so Mahagonny may represent Las Vegas, for example, or it may also describe the corrupted Berlin of the 1920s of the Weimar Republic. Mahagonny, which premiered in Leipzig in 1930, was the culmination of a six-year partnership between Brecht and Weill. Like all cult and timeless works, it was met with protests (organized by sympathizers of the National Socialist ...

In this series of interviews we try to get to know the artists who will perform in Fringe Festival Istanbul 2022. Our second guest is Eleni Papaioannou from A(r)CT. Ayse Draz, Art Unlimited Performing Arts Editor & Mehmet Kerem Ozel, Writer What is the essence of performance in your opinion? A performance, for me, is life magnified, reproduced, represented, reoccuring in front of your eyes. The essence of a live performance is the exchange of energy and ideas through movement or words, through images, music and aesthetics. A performance is filled with emotions and motions. It is a shortcut to the creator’s soul and a window to his/her creative mind. That’s why, in my opinion, to watch a performance is something sacred. Something we should really admire, whether we get attracted to it or not. Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How? I deeply believe that art has the power to transform people and societies and it has been proven many times in the past, in both politic...

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 Athena Farrokhzad in the fourth of our conversations with international playwrights whose plays were translated into Turkish and staged and read at the festival.  Ayşe Draz & Mehmet Kerem Özel © Carla Orrego Veliz What is the essence of good play/playwriting in your opinion? To me, a written play, more than anything, is literature. Therefor, the same quality criterias as other forms of writing can be applied to it: complexity and fierceness of style, a linguistic/existential/political/etc intervention that moves the reader/the world/the history of literature etc. Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How? Yes and no. I believe good art addresses the material conditions of life...