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Waiting for Leaning Tree (Studio Stage - The Royal Danish Opera, 2025, March 8th) © Mehmet Kerem Özel Leaning Tree is a dance piece produced by the Dansk Danseteater (Danish Dance Theatre) and the Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra. It was choreographed by Fernando Melo and its music composed by Signe Lykke. The first performances of Leaning Tree , which took place at the start of the 2023-2024 season in the main hall of the Royal Danish Theatre, were presented to the audience with live music performed by eight groups of musicians placed in different areas of the auditorium as well as in the orchestra pit, creating a feeling of immersiveness. In the 2024-2025 season, Leaning Tree was once again included in the programme of  Dansk Danseteater, this time performed with recorded music at the Danish Royal Opera's small hall, Studio Stage, as well as in various cities across Denmark, and at the Kuopio Dance Festival in Finland. Comprising 13 dancers from around the world and led...

© 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...

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 Cecilie Løveid in the third of our conversations with international playwrights whose plays were translated into Turkish and staged and read at the festival.   Ayşe Draz & Mehmet Kerem Özel © Helge Skodvin What is the essence of good play/playwriting in your opinion? I think the essence of good writing is if you can transfer from body to body a language we all understand, that is useful for the actor, a place the theater can renew itself, again and again. Through history the literary theatre has sometimes been boring, but it has also functioned as political platforms of ideas and its language of the heart maybe more honest than any other art form. People play to people, I live ...

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...

Photo: mehmet kerem özel / danzon When I enter the auditorium to find my seat, I see a man sitting on the edge of the apron of an empty stage. The man, whom I know to be the creator of the work that is about to start, is holding a small piece of stone in his hand; fiddling it and also eyeing the audience. Then a technician appears on the stage and pulls the chair under the man. However he doesn't fall down. On the contrary, he is frozen as if there is still a chair under him; or maybe there wasn’t even a chair at the very beginning. A little while later, he comes to his feet with a gesture as if standing up from the nonexistent chair and leaves the small stone in front of him to the ground. We hear the bang of the stone thanks to the microphones on the ground. He tidies himself up, softly brushing his shoulders off as if to sweep dust; gives us a last look and turns his back. There are two patches of white on the upper side of his shoulders looking like angel’s wings. He di...