danzon_eng

Atta, Turkey's first and only international arts festival for babies and children, organized around November 20th, World Children's Rights Day, since 2016, celebrated its ninth anniversary in 2025. Having welcomed numerous international groups to date, the festival unites babies aged 0–3, children and young people aged 3–18, their accompanying adults, and children and young people with disabilities aged 3–18 through theatre, dance, music, film, exhibitions, and interactive activities.  This year's programme included a variety of performances, ranging from dance theatre for babies aged 6–18 to a new circus for audiences aged 4 and over, as well as dance and object theatre. Between 20 and 30 November 2025, performances by groups from Turkey, Finland, Denmark, France, Norway, Lithuania and Ireland were staged in Istanbul at the Paribuart, Arter, Barış Manço Cultural Centre and Hisar Schools Cultural Centre.  In the first of our conversations with participants from the latest i...

© Pinelopi Gerasimou  Greece has had, and continues to have, important creators in the field of contemporary dance over the last 20 years. Dimitris Papaioannou, who became known with his work in a squad in Athens in the second half of the 80s, peaked with his extraordinary creation for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, and has continued to mesmerise audiences with his subsequent pieces. In addition to Papaioannou, Ioannis Mandafounis, who studied dance and has been choreographing since 2004, has been at the head of the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company, which was founded by William Forysthe, since last season; Euripides Laskaridis, whose work we had the chance to see in Istanbul two years ago, has been travelling the world from Chile to Finland, from the Far East to London with his pieces in which he blends the grotesque and pop with his unique style and in which the use of sound and material stands out; Dancer and choreographer Andonis Foniadakis n...

© Housam Mcheimech Lebanese theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright Rabih Mroué's performances of Taking the Road with a Cloud and Make Me Quit Smoking met with audiences for the first time in Turkey on 24 and 26 April at the Beykoz Kundura Stage. We invited Mroué to our series of conversations in ten questions. What is the essence of performance in your opinion? The essence of art and the theater and performance in my opinion is like to open a platform where artists, performers, theater makers can share their thoughts, their questions, their doubts with audience made of individuals, and to open a discussion maybe after the performance, and dialogue.  Do you believe in the transformative power of art andhow do you think it achieves it?  Yes, I believe with this magic of performing arts and art in the sense that it really can ignite discussions, debates, new ideas, new concepts in this sense. Like it looks like for me like the philosophers role in life, thoughts. ...

La Ruta  © Rahi Rezvani, NDT 1 Gabriela Carrizo and Frank Chartier, founders of the Peeping Tom dance company, have been working separately again for the past two seasons, following Kind in 2019, which they created together long after A louer in 2011. In 2022, Carrizo created her second choreography, La Ruta , with NDT 1 dancers. In 2023 Chartier created a piece for the duo's own company, S 62° 58', W 60° 39' .  La Ruta was on NDT 1's programme in 2022-23 and the current 2023-24 season, while S 62° 58', W 60° 39' continues its world tour. For those familiar with the work of Peeping Tom, neither Carrizo's La Ruta nor Chartier's S 62° 58', W 60° 39' begins surprisingly or unexpectedly. In La Ruta , which lasts about 30 minutes, Carrizo has transferred the eerie and creepy atmosphere she created indoors (in the cabin of a cruise ship) in The Missing Door , which she had previously worked on with NDT 1, to outdoors, on and around a road, an asp...

Waiting  (Onassis Stegi, Athens, 21 April 2024,  © Mehmet Kerem Ozel ) In November 2019, I saw the world premiere of Euripides Laskaridis' Elenit by coincidence; I was in Athens for the last performances of Dimitris Papaioannou's The Great Tamer tour, I had an evening free, I gave Elenit a chance at Onassis Stegi, I did not regret it. I enjoyed Elenit , I laughed, I had fun, I especially admired the grotesque and ridiculous character of Marie Antoinette versus Madonna, played by Laskaridis himself. At that time, I wrote an impression article about the piece here .  In November 2022 Laskaridis was a guest at the Istanbul Theatre Festival with Titans , the second part of his trilogy of which Elenit is the last.  On a rainy evening when Laskaridis first arrived in Istanbul, he took the metro from Mecidiyeköy to Tepebaşı and met Ayşe Draz, my friend Emre and me at the Georgian restaurant Fıccın, where we had dinner and thus met face to face.  I found Titans , whi...

The New Text Festival, organized by GalataPerform, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, and which is Turkey's first and only playwriting festival, took place this year for the twelfth time between 24th November and 4th December 2023, focusing on the theme of "Real". At the festival, which creates an area where Turkish writers and directors meet with artists from abroad within the scope of Theater Beyond Borders, we continue from where we left off by publishing our conversations with international playwrights whose plays have been translated into Turkish and staged readings. Our next guest Marie Bjørn.  Marie Bjørn, who is interested in both theatre, film and prose writing, graduated from the Danish National Faculty of Performing Arts as a playwright in 2019 and from the alternative film school Super16 in Copenhagen as a screenwriter in 2022. Bjørn was nominated for the Reumert Playwright of the Year and Special Mention awards in 2020 for his first play, Apocal...

© Kurt Van der Elst In most of the works that use film/video in the performing arts, the films are shot live on stage, near or off stage, and broadcast live on screens on stage. In some others, films shot live on stage are used in combination with pre-recorded films. Frank Castorf and Ivo van Hove are two of the most skilful users of film and live transmission as a narrative element in theatre, and they have made it an indispensable part of their work, almost their signature. Alongside directors such as Milo Rau, Thomas Ostermeier, Kornél Mundruczó, Katie Mitchell, the FC Bergman collective, consisting of Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Thomas Verstraeten and Marie Vinck, are among those who use this narrative technique in innovative and exciting ways in their oeuvre such as in the pieces  300 el x 50 el x 30 el and JR .  Since 2013, FC Bergman has been creating pieces at the Toneelhuis (a subsidised theatre company of the City of Antwerp), and in their latest piece  ...

Swiss theatre director Milo Rau, who has become an important figure in contemporary Western theatre with his works that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, push the boundaries of traditional theatre, and display an innovative and sometimes radical approach, often using theatre as a tool for social commentary and participation, is in Istanbul for the second time with his work La Reprise. It would not be wrong to say that art and activism are intertwined in Rau's work, who previously as part of the Istanbul Theatre Festival, encountered the Istanbul audience with his work called Hate Radio, that was about the genocide which took place in Rwanda in 1994. Rau, who as part of his Trilogy of Antique Myths, has rehearsed an adaptation of Oresteia by Aeschylus in Iraq in 2019, then staged a film with refugees in Matera, Italy for The New Gospel, has most recently focused on the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil where farmers occupy non-working fields and grow crops inspired ...