“For those who feel the exhaustion of questioning their own concepts and of striving not to succumb to violence, within personal spaces brazenly narrowed by those who see civilization as a single-toothed monster, Geçen Gün is a stage event that comes like a remedy.”

Münip Melih Korukçu* – Faculty Member, Department of Drama and Acting, Faculty of Fine Arts, Istanbul Aydın University (İAÜ)

Naz Erayda and Kerem Kurdoğlu… Easy to say, but they are the founders of Kum.Pan.Ya, the ambitious company of 30 years ago… A duo I came to know and admire in 1999, when I was preparing my graduation thesis titled Experimental Theater in Türkiye and TAL, and whose friendship later honored me… The brain trust of Kum.Pan.Ya, which pierced the institutional dominance of 1980s Turkish theater and, with its avant-garde works, created a powerful alternative to the moldy, museum-piece theater that Peter Brook defined as ‘The Deadly Theater’… Of course, however you look at them, such descriptions can turn into a reductive approach. But the main reason I begin the article this way is not so much to express the place they hold for me as to emphasize their importance for Turkish theater. To this emphasis one might also add the need to remind us of what is truly alternative, at a time when someone who gets hold of a projector and tries to force-feed different variations of the theme of othering, turned into a tasting menu, through a microphone placed at the front of the stage, is considered alternative. The new work of this remarkable duo, who in everything they do not only seek but actually find what is new and different in both substance and form, Geçen Gün, with its ever-relevant agenda, deserves attention today as one of the finest examples of alternative theater!

Aiming for a holistic theatrical language, the duo, as in their other productions under the Kum.Pan.Ya banner, applies in the creative process of Geçen Gün, this time a Kundura Sahne production, a method based on the mutual interaction among all elements, rather than the typical creative template of “play + dramaturgy + director’s interpretation + performance of the play + set + the contribution of light and sound effects”. For instance, an idea brought by the lighting design may give rise to ideas that require parts of the play’s text to be rewritten. Striving to preserve this dialectical relationship of creativity to the very end, the duo begins by identifying an element as the starting point, a touchstone from which all the other elements will make their first leap, and analyzing it thoroughly so that it can take on a quality that provokes  the creativity of the other elements. This igniting element may be a text, but it may just as well be a space or a lighting design. The productions achieve their wholeness through the relationship and creative interaction this igniting element establishes with the other elements.

As I leave the play, a sentence from Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther rings in my mind: “The world is a hell for sensitive hearts.” Anyone who believes they carry a sensitive heart may feel that they have been dragged into their own hell while trying not to fall into the traps of polarizing politics in today’s Türkiye, where, for the last twenty years, ignorance, boorishness and rudeness have systematically become the rising values. For those who feel the exhaustion of questioning their own concepts and of striving not to succumb to violence, within personal spaces brazenly narrowed by those who see civilization as a single-toothed monster, Geçen Gün is a stage event that comes like a remedy…

I say event because the play’s program presents it as: “Is this a concert? A dance show? A play? A performance? None of them. All of them.” It would not be wrong at all to say that it is a fine example of interdisciplinarity. A Kundura Sahne production, Geçen Gün is an event written by Kerem Kurdoğlu and directed by him together with Naz Erayda. Sound/Word/Movement are the three key components of this one-act event.

Looking at the sound component, we see an orchestra made up of everyday objects positioned at the back of the stage. Formed by a broom, a frying pan, a water jug, a sewing machine and a host of other unrelated objects, the orchestra turns the event into a concert. The sound design is by Tophane Noise Band (Serkan Aka, Mihran Tomasyan, Selim Cizdan, Ufuk Fakıoğlu). Besides being one of the main components of the event, it takes on an organic form through its interaction with all the other staging elements, and with this form it also aestheticizes the structure directed from the stage toward the audience.

Looking at the movement component, we see the signature of Maral Ceranoğlu and Mihran Tomasyan. Drawing on the strength of the accomplished history of the Çıplak Ayaklar dance company, the movement stands out as the unifying element of the event. Within this interdisciplinary structure, Esme Madra and Ozan Çelik, who accompany the ensemble as actors, make possible, through both their use of the body and their expressive power, a delivery that is natural and fluid, free of eclecticism, yet just as sincere. Utku Kara’s lighting design, meanwhile, creates an atmosphere that embraces this motion unfolding on stage.

Before moving on to the word dimension, if we look at the production’s dramaturgical approach, we see that, in contrast to the functionalist approach of modern dramaturgy, which does not accept the legitimacy of any sign on stage without assigning it a single, definite and rational meaning, it values polysemy, and even intuitive, associative and sensory meanings, with equal weight. This  approach, which is said not to be as reckless and unconsidered an attitude as implied by the “anything goes” slogan of postmodern aesthetics rebelling against modern dramaturgy, or by the “why not” question it poses in response to modernism’s “why”, develops with a responsibility that has been thought through in every respect.

The word, approached through such a dramaturgical approach, is also an important component of the event Geçen Gün. The text written by Kerem Kurdoğlu revolves around two sensitive hearts seeing, recognizing and smiling at each other. They too suffer from the same affliction. They are trying to cope with the city and its rising values: boorishness, rudeness, uncanniness… Sometimes their paths cross. Sometimes they move along separate routes… Woven from words that merge with movement and sound, diverge and at times repeat, the text does not follow the conventional structure of a dramatic play text. It is built on a simple yet powerful mathematics that shows how storytelling, worn out from overuse in today’s productions, can also take entirely different forms. Although the two main subjects of the characterization cannot touch each other because of their sensitivities, they are able to smile while watching the view from a bench they sit on. That smile is a declaration that they are not alone, even if their paths are separate. That they have not been defeated by war, by the city… Goethe may be right, the world may be a hell for sensitive hearts, but art can turn a hell into a paradise with a single smile…

*This article was published in Mimesis Dergi on February 5, 2024.