COLLIDING
MAGNA PIA & CANDAS BAS
THEATERFORUM KREUZBERG
SMASHING SPHERES- PRODUCTION CANDAS BAS & MANUEL MEZA
This new meeting with Magna Pia created a new theatre version of the side specific work from 2021
“What helps you when you’re afraid?
When I was kid my parents used to leave me alone very often. During the day it was easy. But when the darkness came, I was afraid. So I would sing, sing to myself and my voice filling the room made me like I wasn’t alone. I feel strong when I sing
What should infinitely exist in this world?
Stories…Memories, dreams, encounters, relations, shared moments, personal histories, recollection of memories
What are you here for?”
Alice in wonderland, time, childhood, dreams, displacement, resistance, migration, voice, otherness, identity
At the end, it’s another psychedelic journey with Magna Pia
DARLING OF THE SPECTACLE
TANZNACHT 25TH ANNIVERSARY
UFERSTUDIOS BERLIN 2023
“I am an object of art
I lay here. Surrounded by the soft glow of the gallery lights. Center stage. The star attraction.
Here and now, my existence has taken a new form, transforming from my banal origins to become an object of fascination in this art installation.
The curators decision to showcase me as a moving entity has brought life to my static existence.
In this space where curiosity abounds and creativity reigns, I embrace my role as a living testament to the power of art.”
This solo work focuses on the isolation and the pressure of being exposed, the expectation of the spectator and the state of the observer and the observed.
Through 12 moves performed in different styles (ballet, modern, hiphop, ballroom dancing, folklore and contemporary) the piece delves deep in to the world of the performer, who at the end is nothing but an object of art.
DRAMA
CONSTANZA MACRAS DORKY PARK
VOLKSBUHNE BERLIN
Trailer of the work
In DRAMA, a group tirelessly explores the possibilities and limits of the stage space in our current post-pandemic era, where user:ins have become the content of social media.
On a real theatre stage, it still seems that what works most safely is what the audience already knows. Shakespeare? Sophocles? Again? With suits? The performers question and examine different genres, which they fuse into a recreation of the theatre genre „La Revista Argentina“: a mixture of cabaret and revue with French glamour, catchy Spanish-language music, the humour of Italian immigrants, lots of feathers, big musical numbers and famous comedians. „La Revista Argentina“ was created during the Weimar Republic, at the same time Buster Keaton presented The Enchanted House, where criminals and bad actors from a mediocre Faust meet by chance.
The characters in DRAMA oscillate between an anthropological need to carve up pop culture in order to find the tension between a high and low art and the coloured endurance of the glamour dancers: inside the Argentine revue of the 1920s. Despite the genre being considered populist and superficial, they perform with Spartan stamina and without flinching in pain. The atmosphere gains another dimension with Robert Lippok’s music, which contrasts with the musical references of pop songs.
Performers: inside compete with the depleted attention span of an audience in the era of clickbait. How can one compete with the constant spectacle that politics and news, fake or real, provide? Drama is no longer just in the theatre, it’s everywhere. Joseph Campbell’s making amends with the father is the root and repetition of endless heroic stories of a patriarchal nature, but are these heroic journeys even a reflection of the male director with a father complex?
www.dorkypark.org
OCCASIONNALY COLLIDING-
PRODUCTION CONSTANZA MACRAS DORKY PARK
FAHRBEREITSCHAFT LICHTENBERG
"The meeting of two people is like meeting of two chemical substances. If anything happens, both are changed” Jung
In this creation with Huseyin Evirgen aka Magna Pia, we wanted to focus on the concept of time and existence from a Quantum perspective where past, present and future commingle in spaces, dimensions, realities and multiverses where every action, choice, factor shapes our own odyssey.
With our roots being politically turmoiled, we wanted to dig deeper in the notions of oppression, riot, migration, freedom, voice, interrogation and identity in a universe we build up from recollection of memories, remembrance of dreams, dystopian and utopian visualisations,
In our strory based on complex psychedelic drones, synth lines, processed acoustic instruments, throat singing, vocals, text and movement, in a space where there is no arrow of time and nothing is linear, we became two floating souls occasionally colliding and every collision executed and effected different actions.
At the end, we took a psychedelic journey through movement, sound and space where we met our own ghosts, memories and emotions in all times…
BIBLIOMANIACS - LISI ESTARAS- ITINERANT ENSEMBLE
KINDLE - FAHRBEREITSCAHFT
extrait from solo
"Words define what is there. What exists. The rest are speculations. Words are the base of misunderstandings.”
(Ludwig Wittgenstein)
“What I say is never what I say but instead something else”
(Clarice Lispector)
In BIBLIOMANIACS, six women create an exposed universe of words and movements where both worlds compete with each other in order to endure, to transcend. Beautiful poetry mixed with straightforward monologues and sexual phantasies bring us to the past and the very present in a tense and unsuccessful dialogue. The unique physicality of BIBLIOMANIACS belongs to what I define as the monkey mind language: the incessant chatter in our heads when we go from one thought to another, from one emotion to another, like a monkey jumping from tree to tree chaotically. This physical language emphasizes certain randomness, the disconnection between the brain and the body, always confronting the very personal way of executing our actions, decisions, movements…
Can we hide behind sensual poetic images? Do we need to? Do we want to? Can words have the power to perdure after the body takes over?
BIBLIOMANIACS it’s like a very busy day, full of information that we can not process and still we enjoy having that day, being there, having the challenge.
www.dorkypark.org
THE WEST - CONSTANZA MACRA DORKY PARK
VOLKSBUHNE PRODUCTION
extraits from solos
Inspired by various strategies of Western societies and their worldwide influence – from Africa to Latin America – in THE WEST fictional worlds are developed and the means for constructing visual landscapes – which have shaped the social-economic relations between “the other” and Europe up to the present day – are questioned. Exoticism as a projection of Western fantasy wish fulfilment and as aesthetic exploitation of the foreign in the empire of Western mass cultures. During the height of the Cold War, the CIA invested enormous amounts of money in a secret programme that supported cultural propaganda in Western Europe. In In the United States of Africa author Abdourahman Waberi shifts perspective to a reality in which the Western world no longer plays a role. The West sketches out an anthropological, performative study of Western civilisation and takes a humorous look at Western societies as a dream factory of artificial authenticity.
www.dorkypark.org
STAGES OF CRISES - CONSTANZA MACRAS DORKY PARK
extraits from solos
In 2013, Constanza Macras | DorkyPark created the show Forest: The Nature of Crisis, a piece that took the romantic associations to the forest, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the economic bubbles and economies in crisis as point of departure. Romanticism is the cult of the individual, the inner spark of divinity that links one human being to another and all human beings to larger truth. For the Romantic, nature was, indeed, a constant companion and teacher. She became the stage on which human drama was played, the context in which human beings came to understand their place in the universe. Throughout all of Romantic literature, music, and art, nature is a dynamic presence, a character who speaks in a language of symbols at once mysterious and anthropomorphic. The piece was performed in Müggelwald Berlin as a 4-hour long performative walk through different notions of space.
Stages of Crisis was to be a stage version of the materials developed in the forest. The piece was to carry the converted fairy tales and the reminiscence of nature to another place: a supermarket where products present themselves as the biggest possible vortex to nature.
The creative process started in 2019, was to be premiered in May 2020 and had to be postponed to May 2021. The context of the pandemic hangs over the long ago chosen title of the work
Today, as the crisis deepens economically and ecologically, as humanity moves forward in denial of the harmful effects of digitalisation on the environment, and the place of the stage is largely in danger, the reality of theatre is put into question. The hierarchies of the stage, the fight about the “better” or “bigger” stage become obsolete when there are only empty theatres; Where are the questions about the audience numbers, who has a bigger platform, and where the hell is the Theatre Meeting? The piece transits between over-consumption and the global initiatives and reactions born on the internet, fed by a threatening horror vacui, the fear of nothingness, and cookbooks during lockdown. Individualism is in crisis but without searching to copy nature to find new collectivisms, a new way that fails because solidarity as such hasn’t established and predatory forms without a clear goal or pray prevail.
“What happens when the best biologists of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did? What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western-indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human-only histories? Surely such a transformative time on earth must not be named the Anthropocene!”
(Haraway, Donna J., Staying with the Trouble (Experimental Futures) (pp. 30-31). Duke University Press. Kindle Edition).
www.dorkypark.org
DELIRIUM--MY MINDS CHATTER- ONLINE PERFORMANCE SERIES FOR PURESPACE ISTANBUL
Being on my own, digging deep, time elongates, time bends, time spins, time becomes a loop.
Being on my own, chatter never ends, chatter loops.
Being on my own, loops become the time
But at the end, time is my relative space
So what is the perception of time? Where is my past, where is the future and where is now? What is my reality? Where am i?
My interest in the sensation of time when it is spent isolated and alone and how it shifts and effects the whole being, even the state of perception of reality in a person made me start digging about this profound concept
During the isolation time, most of us had an inward journey. Some of us had the courage to look in the mirror and accept what we see while the others were on denial, finding all kinds of destructions for not facing ourselves. This critic times between life and death, experiencing the strong fight or flight impact in our lives made us vulnerable.
So what is happening in our mind with the infinite chatter. Which concepts are kicking when we’re alone with ourselves. Are we even open to our own heart?
These series of online and live performances “Delirium- My Minds Chatter” aims to touch people who are living in different geographies, coming from different cultural backgrounds, different heritages and beliefs but experiencing similar emotional, intellectual and psychological experiences during pandemic. Touching the untouched, making them feel that they are not alone in this transformative inquisitorial phase.
TRAUTES HEIM GLUCK ALLEIN
A picnic ... a date ... a date with a person she already has memories with ... a date with a total stranger ... maybe a blind date ... She listens to Turkish music and tells the story of her homeland through songs, through a conversation over Rakı. Rakı opens her heart ... She came here a while ago ... Rakı talks ...
Her body talks ...
Candaş Baş stepped onto the stage with shopping bags in her hands, walked towards a corner, spread a cover on the ground, and sat down. She calmly started setting a rakı ‘table’ on the stage, took a bottle of rakı and meze dishes from the bags and placed them on the cover. The moment she poured rakı into her glass, she started talking to an imaginary person accompanying her. She talked about the culture and rituals of the rakı table, explained the proper ways of drinking rakı, accompanied a song by the famous arabesque musician Orhan Gencebay, and told several stories and anecdotes about the rakı table. She had several phone conversations with her mother and talked about her troubles and struggles in Berlin, concluding with ‘Don’t worry mother, I am fine’. Several episodes of conversation and contemporary dance followed each other throughout the performance. When leaving the rakı ‘table’ towards the centre of the stage to dance, the artist took the glass with her and never dropped it. During the dance, the rakı glass and her bodily movements followed each other on a dark, empty stage. During our interview, Candaş Baş explained the place of the rakı glass in her performance:
The glass was my entire connection with Turkey. I carried it on the top of my head; it became part of my hand. I could not break ties with it. The glass was the story of my past, my rituals, everything I brought with me. But I told my story in an empty space, in limbo, to someone who doesn’t understand rakı culture at all, who doesn’t even exist. I imagined the glass as my close friends, the ones that I had drunk rakı with, the ones that I had drunk rakı for, the ones that I lost. The glass represents my deep connections.
Candaş Baş describes her performance as ‘a story of loneliness’ that emerged from her ‘profound need to tell’. Although she has met with many new people from many countries in Berlin, she does not have friends ‘close enough to drink rakı with’ or who ‘know how to drink rakı and share a rakı table conversation’. Agreeing with the popular saying ‘One does not sit at a rakı table with just anybody’, she says:
The rakı table is an important part of our culture of intimacy. That table is shared with very close friends, not with someone you have just met. Rakı, the çilingir, opens heart and tongue so much that at some point it discloses even things that you have hidden from yourself. A lot happened at those tables, I heard many stories. And we saved Turkey so many times. It has always been a political table; sitting at that table has been a political stance itself. I have been missing all of it so much.
Candaş Baş’s performance stages her personal experience of migrating by drawing on the anticipation and experience of the rakı table as the locus of intimate, honest and affectionate conversations. I am not able to comment on how the audience who are not familiar with the rakı table perceived the performance – which is worthy of further research – but the moment I saw the rakı bottle and the glass on the stage I expected to witness one of many emotional/political stories of our migration. The intertwining of the emotional and the political that completely describes the rakı table atmosphere is central to the affective experience of post- Gezi migration from Turkey, which is characterised by profound feelings that flow from the lived experience of politics and (re)shape political horizons. Therefore, the rakı table perfectly serves as a material and immaterial medium for the emotional and political need to recount felt experiences of political oppression, displacement and relocation.
OZLEM SAVAS- Rakı table conversations of post-Gezi migration from Turkey: emotion, intimacy and politics
WHEN THE BOMB DROPS
If a bomb drops Says a voice from racks far away Someone resurrects all of a sudden and says If a bomb drops I’ve never seen a bomb before What would i do If my hands İ could hold with, hold with, hold with Even if I could hold it I have none in my hands Not enough Not like a bomb
After experiencing a bomb explosion, time stopped, silence remained. Was there a way to leave all this behind and start a new life? Was there a road, a place for hope?
When a bomb drops, is the story of immigration process of a woman. A woman who was “the other” in her country and becomes “the other” in the new one. But what is hope really when your whole world is in turmoil? Time flies, you remain silent.
Till now all is fine…