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Waiting for "Guernica Guernica" (20 September 2025, Jahrhunderthalle - Bochum) Can war be depicted on stage? The performing arts certainly find a thousand and one ways to tell a story, but can they convey the horrors and devastation of war and the sociology and psychology of the victors and losers without being didactic, informative or descriptive? FC Bergman, the Belgian theatre collective whose work I have followed for many years, successfully answered this question with their wordless performance Guernica Guernica, which premiered in the Bochum Jahrhunderthalle from 19 to 21 September 2025, during the final week of the 2025 Ruhrtriennale, directed by Belgian director Ivo van Hove. I will now attempt to explain how they achieved this through my impressions of the performance.  FC Bergman chose to depict the war using the Guernica incident. It's easy to understand why. Guernica is the name of a Basque town in Spain where a state bombed its own civilian population f...

Waiting for Goodbye Lindita  (Eleni Papadaki Stage - Rex Theatre, Athens - 20 April 2024, 18:00) © Mehmet Kerem Özel Waiting for MAMI   (Onassis Stegi, Athens - 16 March 2025, 14:00) © Mehmet Kerem Özel Born in 1998 in Tirana, Albania, residing in Greece since 2004 and graduated from the Athens Conservatory Theatre School of Acting, director Mario Banushi is currently the youngest rising star in Europe, and even the world, in the performing arts.  Following the end of the pandemic period, in 2022, he garnered significant attention with his inaugural work, entitled Ragada (Stretch Marks). This was followed by Goodbye Lindita , staged in 2023 upon an invitation from the National Theatre of Greece, which played to sold-out crowds in Athens for a period of three years, while also touring the world. Invited to the Amsterdam Brandhaarden Festival in February 2024, the Madrid Festival de Otoño, Dresden and Munich in the fall, and the prestigious Adelaide Festival in Australia in...

© Kamerich & Budwilowitz - Eyes 2 Atta, Turkey's first and only international arts festival for babies and children, has been held in Istanbul around 20 November, the International Children's Rights Day, since 2016. The festival, which has hosted many groups from abroad so far, brings together babies aged 0-3, children aged 3-18, young people and their accompanying adults, and children and young people with disabilities aged 3-18 with theatre, dance, music, film and exhibitions as well as interactive content. The programme of this year's sixth edition of the festival includes opera for babies, dance for audiences aged 7 and above, theatre and pop-up performances. From 22 November to 8 December 2024, performances by ensembles from the United States, Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Ireland, as well as Atta Festival's own and co-productions, will be staged at Alan Kadıköy, Arter, Caddebostan Cultural Center, Hisar Schools Cultural Center and Kadıköy Barış Manço ...

© 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. ...

© Richard Terborg  6th Istanbul Fringe Festival's international guest Sanne van Dijk is a puppeteer and storyteller based in Amsterdam. Sanne graduated in acting from the Theatre Academy in Amsterdam in 2006 and also studied puppetry at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch in Berlin. Sanne played the main character in the sci-fi film Gliese 581 , which was selected for the 2015 Imagine Film Festival, and was nominated for the International EMMY Children's Awards 2020 for the TV production Dropje (Doopie) , in which she played the main character as a puppeteer. In her work, Sanne draws on her own life experiences to reveal universal truths that transcend different cultures and societies. By daring to speak honestly about her own struggles and challenges in life, Sanne provokes the audience to confront their own struggles. In her interdisciplinary work VLOED (FLOOD) , which we had the opportunity to see at the Istanbul Fringe Festival, Sanne combined acting, puppetry ...

We interviewed with Katsumi Sakakura, the creator of the show The Life of HOKUSAI, which will be the guest of the 6th Istanbul Fringe Festival, which will be held between 13-21 September 2024 this year. It will be staged at ENKA Auditorium on 17 September 2024 in collaboration with ENKA Arts and Istanbul Fringe Festival 2024 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and Turkey. The show's creator, Katsumi Sakakura (1963), himself a composer, director, choreographer and actor, is, as you might expect, a multi-talented artist. Sakakura, who started karate at the age of five and boxing at university, has created a performance art called Geibu, based on the unique "movement, rhythm and spirituality" of the traditional Japanese martial art Budo. He also created Street Nunchaku by combining Nunchaku, a defensive art he learnt alongside karate, with the hip hop dance moves he began performing in his twenties. He then dev...

Waiting for MACBETTU , July, 13rd 2024, Teatro Lirico di Cagliari-Sardinia ©  Mehmet Kerem Özel In the middle of summer, with the humid heat of July raging everywhere, I set off for a weekend in Cagliari, the capital of the island of Sardinia in the middle of the Mediterranean. My aim was to see a show that, since its premiere in March 2017, has had 350 performances around the world in seven years, from Peru to Japan, from Finland to China, from Azerbaijan to Bosnia-Herzegovina, from Russia to Brazil, as well as many cities in its home island of Sardinia and its home country of Italy. This show was MACBETTU, long after its last performance in 2022, returning from a one and a half month, four-stop tour of the Far East, and after many years in its own city for a single performance on 13 July 2024. Inspired by the carnival traditions of the island of Sardinia and translated into Limba, the local language of the island (the translation belongs to Giovanni Carroni, one of the actors in ...

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...