Candaş Baş is a choreographer, director and performer based between Berlin and Istanbul. Across a professional practice spanning more than thirty years, she has developed an interdisciplinary performance language that brings together choreography, theatre, live sound, text, voice and audience participation.
Her work investigates how political and social systems become embodied behaviour. She approaches the body as a site of memory, resistance and transformation, examining how power, migration, surveillance, gender, age and economies of visibility shape the way people move, perform and relate to one another. Her choreographic practice often begins with recognisable gestures and movement languages, which are gradually distorted, exhausted or transformed through time, repetition and changing theatrical conditions. Humour, contradiction and physical intensity are central to her work.
Originally from Istanbul, Baş co-founded Çıplak Ayaklar Kumpanyası, one of Turkey’s influential independent contemporary dance companies. Her work has been presented in theatres, festivals and independent spaces internationally. Alongside creating her own performances, she works as a director, choreographer and movement director in theatre, opera and interdisciplinary productions, collaborating with actors, dancers, musicians and visual artists.
She has performed in works by internationally recognised choreographers and companies and has taught movement, choreography and performance at institutions including Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. She has also been actively involved in the development of independent performing arts structures and artists’ rights in Turkey.
Since moving to Berlin, her practice has increasingly focused on participation, attention and the politics of spectatorship. Her current research asks how theatrical systems organise bodies and behaviour, how audiences become implicated in these systems, and how performance can expose the mechanisms through which people are evaluated, controlled and transformed.