2022
2022
Bio:
Emine Fisek is Assistant Professor in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Boğaziçi University. She is the author of Aesthetic Citizenship: Immigration and Theater in Twenty-First-Century Paris (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and Theatre & Community (Red Globe Press, 2019). She has published articles in Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Text and Performance Quarterly, Comparative Drama and French Cultural Studies. Her current research is on the impact that cultural memory, urban transformation and international migration have had on Turkish theatre in the twenty-first century. From 2023-2028, Fidek will be the Principal Investigator of a multi-sited, collaborative research project on “Theatre and Gentrification in the European City,” funded by the European Research Council’s Consolidator Grant program.
Setting the Stage: A Brief History of Theatre and Performance in Turkey
2022
Emine Fişek
Summary:
The goal of this panel is to introduce the TheatreIST Showcase’s audience to two persistent themes that have haunted the theatre and performance practices that emerged in Turkey during the 2010s. Dr. Eylem Ejer will identify what she labels of a dramaturgy of return, and Dr. Deniz Basar will examine how artsists draw on Ottoman performance traditions to construct a resistant public sphere. This introductory talk will offer a brief outline of the history of theatre and performance practices in Turkey, to provide listeners with the necessary frame for understanding the significance of the developments outlined by Drs. Ejder and Basar.
Bio:
Deniz Basar is a theatre researcher, puppet maker, and twice national award-winning playwright. Her research is included in anthologies, such as Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations by Routledge (2019), Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race (2021), Creative Activism: Research, Pedagogy and Practice by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2022), and Palgrave Handbook on Theatre Censorship (2023). She completed her PhD in Concordia University’s Humanities Department with her work on contemporary Turkish theatre, entitled ‘A Dismissed Heritage: Contemporary Performance in Turkey Defined through Karagöz’ in 2021. Currently, she is an FRQSC post-doctoral fellow and continuing her research in Bogaziçi University, İstanbul
Theatre as Public Sphere: Spatial Networks and Re-inventing Aesthetics of Traditiony
2022
Deniz Basar
Summary:
This presentation is derived from the two major components of my past ten years of research. First component is theatre as public sphere, which analyzes the networks of alternative theatre spaces and movements of ensembles in İstanbul, to understand how they succeeded in creating relevant micropolitical interventions that calls major socio-political taboos into discussion. These ensembles work as urban networks, which allow new political imaginaries to sprout through new ideas and sensibilites being proposed to audiences via new aesthetic languages, grounded in the intimacy of small and independent theatre spaces. Such theatrical interventions are dependent on the potential of creating non-institutional and nuanced theatre aesthetics within these ensembles, which can challenge the hegemony of the semantics and discourses of the life outside of theatre. These theatre spaces create dramaturgy laboratories within their theatres, which lead them to create new hybrids of performance languages to challenge both social and artistic paradigms. Notion of new hybrids of performance languages leads us to the second major component of my research, which is based in how these theatres create their own performative aesthetics that can destabilize rooted societal biases through utilizing suppressed Ottoman urban and non-religious traditions of performance forms such as Meddah, Orta Oyunu and most importantly, Karagöz. I will discuss these urban alternative theatre networks and their aesthetics from a theoretical and historical angle in my presentation.