Handala Playreading:
Fundraising and Solidarity for Ayyam Al Masrah and Children in Gaza
Ayyam Al Masrah, also known as Theater Day Productions, has been tirelessly working to run children's theatre workshops in Gaza, the West Bank, and Hebron. Liesbeth Coltof led a nation-wide call to the Netherlands theatre institutions to support them, as their buildings and infrastructure have been destroyed in the war. We came together as two Arnhem institutions to offer our community an evening to reflect on the history, as entangled and incomplete as it is, beyond October 7. But how to speak truth when everyday language fails? We turned to the power of theatre and satire. With the help of dramaturg Giulia Cristofoli, I directed a reading of Abdelfattah Abusrour’s play Handala, the namesake of artist-journalist Naji Al-Ali's cartoon boy who has become a symbol of protest in Palestine. Thanks to brave and dedicated actors (most of whom are students or recent grads from ArtEZ), and Verso's A Child in Palestine compilation on Naji's strips, we brought this wonderfully complex and critical text to have a say on our current moment.
Aesthetics and Necropolitics: Dramaturgical Agency in the 2020s
The title of this talk refers to the book Aesthetics and Politics (1977 [1938-1970]), a milestone debate on the dynamics and function of representation and reality in (Marxist) revolution. I propose to use this extended conversation between four philosophers and a theater maker–Bloch, Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, and Brecht–as an inspiration to formulate some dramaturgical questions for us. For us, millennials and Gen-Z who live in equally unpredictable times with unprecedented means, who have concurrent reckonings with coloniality, neofeudalism, planetwide ecocide, genocidal wars, and extreme virtualization of the public sphere. What are the imperatives and impacts of rethinking aesthetics in performance today? How can we make our dramaturgies more capacious? How can we generate creative forms of political agency on stage in the face of state-sanctioned coercions over humans and nonhumans? Less of a lecture, more of a puzzling together.
I had the incredible opportunity to curate the Dag Dramaturgie for Festival Cement '24. Following this lecture, I performed an unrehearsed dialogue with my comrade Judith Blankenberg on our dramaturgical practices. We wrapped the day with a dramaturgy practice workshop for the participants, whose enthusiasm was phenomenal!
Hölderlin Vorträge:
Choreo-dramaturging the Anthropocene
The new climatic regime is manifest in our lives with an unprecedented urgency, but the planetary damage has been ongoing for much longer. Likewise, ecological activism and discourse have a global history, while we are groping for resistance and solace within a politically and digitally induced amnesia, obfuscation, and denialism. These are only the starting conundrums of what I consider to be characteristically the Anthropocene episteme. By positing the Anthropocene as a crisis of sense and sensibility, this lecture argues how performing arts has a unique advantage to figure, rupture and radically transform this widespread yet unevenly distributed doom scenario.
I outline the intricate web of choreographic and dramaturgical frames for articulating and activating ecocritical communities and courses of action. Drawing on works of Pina Bausch, Eiko Otake, and Mette Ingvartsen among others, I demonstrate how the choreographic experiments within the past half-century have allowed us to recognize and negotiate with nonhumans in their autonomy and agency, in their meaningful mattering. Inextricably, the dramaturgies of these works have opened a counterfactual space, where ambiguous and interdependent relations can be discussed, violence readmitted, and the audience implicated beyond gesture or codified participation. Through assemblages of immersion and alienation, the spectators are corporeally primed for cognition, representation, and debate. Through this overview, I question what the Anthropocene forces contemporary performance to do: Double-bound in fires, deluges, and plagues of tragic proportions, how do our stages address multiplicities in which nonhumans are equally sensuous, autonomous, mobile subjects of history?
It was such an honor to deliver the outcomes of my doctoral research and the seminar on ecodramaturgy among a cohort of excellent scholars. I am extremely grateful to Professor Nikolaus Müller-Schöll for his trust and support.
BLA BLA BLA ACT NOW 2.0
In October 2013, WUNDERBAUM created a reconstruction of the Warsaw climate summit out of anger and amazement. We are now eight climate summits on and we are taking stock again.
The word ‘Fly Shame’ arose, The European Climate Act was passed, Urgenda won its lawsuit against the Dutch State at the Supreme Court, Greta Thunberg inspired millions of young people worldwide, and well-known Dutch people joined radical action groups occupying motorways.
Meanwhile, the effects of global warming have become increasingly palpable, extreme heatwaves and floods are the order of the day. But political ideals still seem to be losing out to economic interests. The mood is gloomy if not very gloomy and panic is starting to set in.
Working closely with a mega-cast of actors, dancers, and natives of Rotterdam, TR and WUNDERBAUM pose the inescapable question: Is it too late?
An evening of self-confrontation that must inevitably take place, because: there is no Planet B.
When Matijs Jansen asked me if I'd like to think along in the revision of the piece, I didn't take a beat to say yes. What kind of a performance would generate a visceral experience of the Anthropocene disintegration? WUNDERBAUM's acclaimed performance is a wonderful test site to think further about the function and method of ecocritical performances. Reimagined after what can be called “a decade of post-truth” (Trump’s election and the U.S.' withdrawal from Paris agreement, COVID-19 pandemic, Russia's war on Ukraine, the generalized AI…), Bla Bla Bla Act Now 2.0 has the opportunity to focus on the nature of truth and doubt in the way of acting for collective destiny.
Devised & Written by
Dates & Location:
9-10 November 2023 20:00 | Theater Rotterdam
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Smuggled Tea Performance |
Kaçak Çay Performansı
Smuggled Tea Performance is a playful mise-en–abîme of the impossible collaboration between a Turkish and a Kurdish artist within the complex sociopolitical landscape of Turkey. Fatih Gençkal and Mustafa Zeren embark on an extraordinary journey of making a dance performance together despite the power inequalities and economic struggles that permeate their lives. Their curiosity in each other’s movements and imaginations rubs against the inertia of physical and creative distances. While they gleefully bump into the difficulties of collective creation as well as the fraught rules of choreography, will they keep the taste of friendship in their tea together?
With gripping courage and transparency, Gençkal and Zeren explore the intricacies and pitfalls of bridging distinct biographies and heritages between İstanbul and Diyarbakır, unashamed of their blind spots along the way. Masterfully switching between personal insights and critical jabs at the local and global art scene, Smuggled Tea Performance confers the vulnerability, responsibility, and determination of two men from the opposite corners of the country as they battle against the overwhelming burdens of making and sharing dance in Turkey today.
My dramaturgical contribution was subject to the same impossible conditions of the making of this piece. Even though we could never be in the same room, I felt fully present as I sent provocations and wove together the performance score over miles and years via a variety of digital communication devices. And maybe because of that, the saga keeps on writing itself.
Devised & Performed by
Fatih Gençkal & Mustafa Zeren, with design by Cansu Pelin İşbilen
Dates & Location:
7-8.09.2023
| Podium Mozaïek, Amsterdam
10.09.2023 | Tak Theater Aufbau Kreuzberg, Berlin
23.09.2023 | Arter, Istanbul
Audio Choreography: Gazhane
I co-choreographed, dramaturged, and dubbed the instructions of Audio Choreography: Gazhane, invited by choreographers Filiz Sızanlı and Mustafa Kaplan. The audio score guides the participants in exploring the architecture, industrial history, social choreography, and the environmental imprint of Hasanpaşa Gasworks Museum, recently offered to public as a culture campus.
This is the second installment of our site-adaptable project Audio Choreography. Starting from our a choreographic desire to take over the desolate public spaces during COVID-19 lockdown, we have been formulating a new methodology of participant-activated movement and embodiment scores for (mostly outdoor) locations. We research the embodied intimacy of imagining prompts, hearing it via the personal interface of earbuds, and exercising the freedom and possibilities of holding and re-forming the collective space. This is an ongoing project with future life in archaeological sites, niche ecologies, and other architectures of industrial heritage.
Concept:
Sound Design:
Sair Sinan Kestelli
Dates:
Sundays,
Fall 2021-Spring 2023
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Commissioner:
Choreographing Ecocritical Routes
ACT—Art, Climate, Transition
Choreographing Ecocritical Routes is an ongoing artistic research conversation between Eylül Fidan Akıncı and Tery Žeželj, which culminates in day-long events in Ljubljana and Rotterdam.
Connecting ecocriticism, choreography, and activist practices of place making, this event brings forth performative ways of grieving and reformulating our experience of dwelling in the Earth. How do the artistic practices engage with the sudden disasters or the slow disappearance of beings and places? Designed as an exchange of discursive practices, Choreographing Ecocritical Routes centers on the importance of body, mobility, and space for ecocritical activations in the performing arts. This exchange will take choreographer Eiko Otake’s film A Body in Fukushima as its focal point.
A Body in Fukushima is crafted from tens of thousands of photographs, taken by William Johnston, of Eiko Otake’s improvised dances in the surreal, irradiated landscapes of post-nuclear meltdown Fukushima, Japan. Otake travelled six times to evacuated, desolate Fukushima since the triple disaster—earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown—of 2011. From her second trip forward, she was accompanied by Johnston (also a professor of Japanese history and public health at Wesleyan University) who documented her body in places of nuclear contamination.
In conjunction with the film screening, Akıncı delivers her lecture “Choreo-dramaturging the Anthropocene” to contextualize Otake’s extended performance series as an artistic response in the aftermath of Fukushima disaster. What is the performance artists’ task at the age of Anthropocene? As the public and scholarly conversations tackle the term “Anthropocene” and its propriety to name the geo-ecological epoch we are in, it becomes clear that we need critical and creative tools to retain sight of the planetwide commons of disasters. Akıncı proposes a generative model of how dramaturgical and embodied practices facilitate a new theory and practice to address the planetary.
As a bridge between the film and the lecture, Žeželj will propose a site-sensitive walking activation to recalibrate the mind and body for perceiving things unmourned and unmournable along the path. Combining the audio-walk with a zine, Žeželj invites the participants to reflect on: What is deemed mournable in the contemporary western societies? How are we dealing with ecological grief collectively? Can we mourn for other-than-humans? How do arts make mourning a visible and inviting process? How can mourning cultivate our response-ability?
Join us in this afternoon of interweaving critical and creative discourses around the questions of sensibility, efficacy, and sustainability of performing arts. Open to general public and free.
Co-curators:
Eylül Fidan Akıncı
Tery Žeželj
Dates & Locations:
24.08.2023 |
Bunker, Ljubljana
06.06.2023 |
Theater Rotterdam TR25, Krijn Boon Studio
Special thanks to:
ACT, Bunker, Productiehuis TR, Blaž Pavlica, Eiko Otake, Allison Hsu
EASTAP23 | The spider and the crab: Dramaturgies of moving laterally
The 6th Conference of the European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance is organized under the theme “Dimensions of Dramaturgy.”
Our curated panel session, The spider and the crab: Dramaturgies of moving laterally, proposes and explores the notion of ‘lateral dramaturgy’; dramaturgy as a practice of lateral movement and, in turn, moving laterally as a dramaturgical practice. We are especially interested in the doings, knowings and embodyings of dance and choreography within their infrastructures, alongside the complementary movements of undoing, unknowing and disembodying those infrastructures.
Go to our interactive Miro board
Moving laterally, sideways, refuses the centered, the linear and the directed, possibilizing decentring, incidentalness, inconsistency and opaqueness in knowledge and attention. In our aim to resist the anxiety of reasserting knowledge, and to suspend knowing by maintaining what is present, we are also searching for ways to move with our research sideways. We acknowledge that this takes place in western educational institutions and organisations where moving/thinking is mostly expected to be progressive and where laterality is usually associated with thinking creatively (often referred to as thinking ‘out of the box’), but rarely contributes to reconfigured or inconsistent directions or actions thereafter.
One of our basic questions then is ‘How do we move/think laterally?’; how might we be doing this in our individual yet interconnected practices – of making, collaborating, curating, dramaturging, writing – but also in the ways that we come together in research presentations such as this one. Our individual contributions will draw on recent practice research to raise questions around attention and (in)visibility, collage and fragmented narratives, institutional unruliness, unquiet belonging and experimental collaboration, as well as – inevitably perhaps – the micro-politics of speaking/thinking along each other.
I contributed with my experiences of moving laterally across academia, education, and arts institutions. Swinging between stand-up comedy and confessional, I tried to make sense of my maneuvers as a performance researcher and production dramaturg, and of my attempts to formulate robust structures of care and labor for institutional dramaturgy. I also did an artist talk with Marina Otero after her show FUCK ME at ILT Festival!
Panelists:
Konstantina Georgelou
Efrosini Protopapa
Tamara Tomić-Vajagić
Eylül Fidan Akıncı
Date & Location:
14-18 June 2023 |
Aarhus University
Info:
Not All Is Lost
Since June 2022 I work as dramaturg for Not all is lost, a physical theatre performance by Davy Pieters “about bodies caring for other bodies. About the power of our mutual interdependence. About our fragile need for the other. What does it mean to care? What does it mean to be cared for?”
Solidarity with Turkey and Syria
I was lost in the grief and weight of the double-earthquake of 02/06. Being a diasporic citizen brings its own schizoid fake-coping and guilt trip. The last decade had opened so many other wounds while I was away from home and alone. But at least now I had a chance to find my own public. I wanted Theater Rotterdam to provide me and orphans like me a place of collective mourning. A forum where we could discuss our emotions of pain, fear, and anger. A recording device for Turks-Kurds-Syrians and the other sympathetic folks to listen to each other. With Belit Sağ, Sinan Arat, Modar Salama, Hasan Gök, Davy Pieters, and Salih Kılıç, we were able to hold space for dealing with the incomprehensible scale and stupidity of this semi-natural-humanmade disaster. I want to thank Eiko Otake for teaching me how to do that all through the years since Fukushima triple-disaster. I am indebted to Walter Ligthart for granting this wish, and for commissioning donation to LGBTQI+ earthquake relief in Turkey and Syria.
In collab with:
Theater Rotterdam
Date:
26.02.2023
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Graphic & Photos:
Jeroen Van Diesen & Salih Kılıç
Primisi
Can we give in to our desire to give and receive love? How can we allow ourselves to feel compassion and connection? In Primisi, Surinamese for “permission”, artistic director, theatre maker and choreographer Alida Dors asks seven performers, each with their own feminine energy, to explore. Attuned to Black feminist thinker bell hooks, whose Love Trilogy is a rare comprehensive study of love and society, Primisi dares you to let go of your advertised definitions, power plays, and cynicism of love.
"Om terug te komen op de vraag of dans kan formuleren: dans is in staat om abstracties vorm te geven maar daar wordt het niet concreter door: het werk blijft aan de toeschouwer. Zo blijf je na de voorstelling achter met de indruk dat je iets belangrijks hebt meegemaakt dat je maar voor een deel hebt kunnen bevatten. Het is de kwaliteit van elk belangrijk ritueel: om dat tot in alle finesses te ervaren, moet je er meermalen aan deelnemen."
Javier López Piñón @ Theaterkrant
Choreography
Alida Dors & Nicole Geertruida
Premiere:
11.11.2022
More:
Dramaturg’s essay:
Photo:
Mark Bolk
Eylül Fidan Akıncı 
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