Candaş Baş’s work investigates the body as a site of memory, survival, and transformation. Through choreography, text, sound, video, and humour, her performances move between intimacy and rupture, ritual and absurdity, tenderness and brutality.
Rooted in migration, political fracture, and the lived contradictions of Istanbul and Berlin, her practice explores how systems shape bodies into spectacle, obedience, or silence and how movement can resist, fail, and speak back.
Her work is shaped by a hybrid movement language where urban dance, folkloric forms, ballroom, jazz, and contemporary technique collide and transform into raw physicality.
She works with exhaustion as a physical state, exploring how the body changes when control dissolves, daily gestures pushed into distortion, grotesque faces, slow motion, staccato interruptions, and sudden explosions of feeling. She works with exhaustion as a physical state, exploring how the body changes when control dissolves.
Baş creates stages for collision: between myth and contemporary violence, between personal history and collective trauma, between desire and refusal.
Her work is an invitation to listen to what the body remembers and to question what it means to witness.
COLLIDING
CONCEPT-CHOREOGRAPHY-TEXT-PERFORMANCE: CANDAS BAS
MUSIC-PERFORMANCE; MAGNA PIA
THEATERFORUM KREUZBERG-2023
Collidings is a dreamlike descent into a world where myth, memory, and political reality collide. Time spirals, identities fracture, and history glitches into unstable archetypes, goddesses turning into data, language dissolving under surveillance and grief.
Through migration-rooted soundscapes, psycho-acoustic frequencies, and bodies that refuse obedience, the work becomes a ritual of disturbance: sound as residue, as riot, as ghost.
Created and performed live by composer-performer Magna Pia (Hüseyin Evirgen) and choreographer Candaş Baş, Collidings unfolds as a sonic-physical encounter shaped by displacement, longing, and resistance.
Alice falls but the rabbit hole leads through mermaid myths and censorship, sequins and bureaucracy, absurd beauty and social decay. Nothing stays fixed. Everything flickers between the sacred and the ridiculous.
Collidings is a quiet glitch in a world desperate for control.
DARLING OF THE SPECTACLE
CHOREOGRAPHY-TEXT-PERFORMANCE; CANDAS BAS
TANZNACHT 25TH ANNIVERSARY -2023
Darling of the Spectacle is a solo performance on exposure, isolation, and the unbearable intimacy of being watched. Set in the logic of the gallery, the performer becomes both, artwork and artifact, a living object placed under the glow of spectatorship.
Framed by a spoken monologue “I am an object of art), the piece unfolds as a choreography of twelve moves performed through shifting dance languages: ballet, modern, hip hop, ballroom, folklore, and contemporary forms. Style becomes surface, quotation, survival…A catalogue of bodies made legible for consumption.
Between vulnerability and absurdity, the work examines the pressure to be meaningful, the violence of aesthetic expectation, and the fragile boundary between subject and spectacle.
A performer on display.
A masterpiece demanded.
A moving object — like all of us.
DRAMA
CONSTANZA MACRAS DORKY PARK 2023-2025
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-
CONCEPT-TEXT-PERFORMANCE; CANDAS BAS
MUSIC;MAGNA PIA
FAHRBEREITSCHAFT LICHTENBERG 2022
Site-specific performance — experimental version of Collidings
“Isolated Human Particles Floating Weightlessly Through a Magnetic Field of Fabricated Pleasure, Occasionally Colliding.”— Oskar Fischinger
Occasionally Colliding is a site-specific, experimental performance created with composer and performer Hüseyin Evirgen (Magna Pia). Approaching existence through a quantum lens, the work inhabits a universe where past, present, and future commingle — where every encounter reshapes the odyssey of the whole.
Performed in direct relation to architectural space, often using a wall as a physical partner, the piece unfolds as an unstable collision between sound, movement, and memory. Psychedelic drones, synth lines, processed acoustic fragments, throat singing, text, and raw vocals form a non-linear landscape with no fixed structure and no arrow of time.
Rooted in politically turmoiled histories, the work moves through oppression, migration, riot, freedom, interrogation, and shifting identity — two floating bodies meeting, separating, returning, changed.
A journey through resonance and space, where ghosts, dreams, and emotions collide across multiple realities.
BIBLIOMANIACS - LISI ESTARAS- ITINERANT ENSEMBLE
KINDLE - FAHRBEREITSCAHFT 2021-2022
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 2021-2022
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 2023-2024
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
CONCEPT-TEXT- PERFORMANCE: CANDAS BAS
2020-2021
Online performance series — PureSpace Istanbul (2020)
Delirium — My Mind’s Chatter is an online live performance series created during the pandemic, emerging from isolation, temporal distortion, and the relentless noise of the mind.
Alone, time begins to bend: it stretches, spins, collapses. Past and future blur. Reality becomes uncertain. In this suspended state, the inner monologue grows louder — a continuous chatter that reveals fear, denial, longing, vulnerability, and the urgent question of how to remain open to one’s own heart.
Developed as a shared ritual across distance, Delirium reaches toward audiences living in different geographies and cultural realities, yet experiencing parallel psychological landscapes. The work touches the solitude of the pandemic not as private confinement, but as a collective condition — an unsettling inward journey.
Until time becomes a loop.
HOME SWEET HOME
CONCEPT-CHOREOGRAPHY-TEXT-PERFORMANCE:CANDAS BAS
RADIALSYSTEM 2019
Home sweet home, is a solo performance shaped around the ritual of the rakı table — a place where intimacy, confession, and politics intertwine. Migrating from Istanbul to Berlin, Candaş Baş transforms the simple act of sharing a drink into a choreography of displacement.
On an empty stage, she prepares a rakı picnic: meze dishes, Turkish songs, fragments of conversation, phone calls to her mother, memories addressed to an imagined companion who does not exist. The rakı glass never leaves her hand. It travels with her into dance, becoming a fragile extension of the body — a vessel of longing, ritual, and loss.
The performance moves between storytelling and contemporary dance, tenderness and absurdity, private nostalgia and collective political weight. The rakı table becomes more than a cultural reference: it becomes a space of survival, where friendship, homeland, and resistance are remembered through gesture.
Home sweet home is a story of loneliness, migration, and the impossible desire to recreate intimacy in limbo — carrying the past carefully, like a glass that must not fall.
WHEN THE BOMB DROPS
CHOREOGRAPHY-TEXT-PERFORMANCE;CANDAS BAS
RADIALSYTEM 2017
“If a bomb drops,” says a voice from far away.
“I’ve never seen a bomb before.
What would I do?”
When the Bomb Drops emerges from the moment after an explosion — when time stops, silence remains, and language becomes insufficient.
The work traces the immigration journey of a woman who was “the other” in her homeland and becomes “the other” again in the new one. Between shock and displacement, the performance asks what hope can mean when the world collapses, when survival demands leaving, and when memory refuses to stay behind.
A body moves through rupture, grief, and suspended time — searching for a road forward, while carrying what cannot be carried.
Until time becomes silence.
BROKEN 2015
CHOREOGRAPHY- MUSIC-PERFORMANCE; CANDAS BAS
Broken is a solo performance created at the intersection of physical injury and emotional rupture.
Made after breaking three toes — and carrying a broken heart — the work asks what happens when pain shifts between body and feeling, when grief becomes physical, and the physical becomes grief.
The choreography is confined to one point in space: a body unable to travel, moving instead through staccato fragments, slow motion, and restraint. Stuckness becomes form. Fracture becomes rhythm.
With music composed and produced by Candaş Baş, Broken unfolds as an intimate study of limitation, endurance, and the quiet violence of being unable to move forward.
A body held in place.
A heart still moving.
?
Video work 2018
CONCEPT TEXT; CANDAS BAS
This solo video work is haunted by a contemporary rumour: that intimacy leaves a trace so deep it rewrites the body.
Filmed only through the performer’s torso, struck by a bright beam reflected from a mirror, the image becomes both intimate and alien — flesh fragmented into surface, reflection, exposure. The body is no longer whole, but a site of inscription.
Moving between erotic vulnerability and quiet body-horror, the work explores sexuality as transformation, survival, and power. Queer existence unfolds here as a trembling field where desire and fear intertwine, where touch becomes memory, and the self is never untouched.
What remains after closeness?
MIRROR 2007
CONCEPT CHOREOGRAPHY TEXT; CANDAS BAS
Mirror is a performance inspired by Michel Foucault’s idea of the mirror as both utopia and heterotopia: a placeless virtual image that reveals visibility, and a real object that anchors us inside space.
Four figures meet in a parallel world, stripped down to underwear, suspended in a fragile intimacy. A wall divides the space — a threshold they long to cross, yet cannot. Blocked, they turn toward one another: forming alliances, dependencies, projections. Need becomes movement.
As they interact, they begin to mirror each other, reflecting desire, fear, addiction, tenderness, cruelty. The arrival of someone radically different, “the other,” unsettles the fragile order. Do they welcome, degrade, exclude? Or does difference open another physics entirely? Perhaps even the possibility of flight?
Mirror asks what it means to see oneself through others, what reflection reveals, and what remains invisible even when we look directly.
What can you really see?
ENGIN_AR 2009
CONCEPT DIRECTION; CANDAS BAS
Engin-ar is an ensemble performance unfolding as a party: eight people from different ethnic, cultural, and political backgrounds meeting in a shared space of intimacy, projection, and fracture. What begins as social gathering becomes a choreographed encounter with belonging — and the violence hidden inside the desire to be accepted.
Inspired by the writing of Virginie Despentes, the work confronts the impossible image of the “ideal woman”: seductive but not obscene, successful but not threatening, free but not too free — a fiction that patriarchy endlessly demands and that never truly exists.
Blending dance, text, and live music, Engin-ar moves through humour and sharp storytelling before rupturing into scenes of domination and threat. The laughter curdles. Friendship becomes unstable. The social space reveals its underlying power.
In the final turn, masculinity collapses into grotesque competition: men transform their own bodies into instruments of display, turning virility into sound, spectacle, and contest.
When laughter breaks, what truth is left standing?