We spoke with Kerem Kurdoğlu and Naz Erayda, the directors of “Geçen Gün”, Kundura Sahne’s first theater production.

Esra Ece Kuleci*

Geçen Gün, the first play produced by Kundura Sahne, which celebrated its fifth anniversary in 2023, met audiences in December. Written by Kerem Kurdoğlu and directed by him together with Naz Erayda, Geçen Gün tells an anxious love story between the city and two people. The play features music by Tophane Noise Band, founded in 2021, which gives performances on instruments made from urban waste, while Çıplak Ayaklar Stüdyosu serves as the play’s executive producer. The play presents dance, concert and performance to the audience in harmony on stage. Esme Madra and Ozan Çelik, meanwhile, accompany us through this story as the “two people”. We talked with the play’s directors, Kerem Kurdoğlu and Naz Erayda.

Kumpanya Theater began its work in 1991 at the Istanbul Art Center in Tarlabaşı, Istanbul, and continued until the Istanbul Art Center closed in 2006. So my first question to you is this: how and when did the desire to create again arise?

Naz Erayda: Kumpanya left its physical space with the decision to vacate the Monastery (İSM), but we, Kumpanya’s founders, continued our work, sometimes collaborating with theaters and artists whose founding purpose or work we felt close to, or with art collectives through which we felt we could express ourselves because of their modes of production, and for a long time now with educational institutions as well. We continue to create work on different platforms, across disciplines that are different from yet close to one another, on subjects that interest us. Kerem continued the kind of work he had done before and during the Kumpanya years after it closed; while he keeps writing and directing plays and screenplays and teaching courses on these subjects, he also continues to work as a post-production supervisor in film. The ones that first come to my mind are Ve Hep Birlikte Soldan Çıkarlar, staged at the State Theater; İstanbul’da Bir Dava, a musical adaptation of Kafka that he wrote and directed; and Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, which he directed. At Mehmet Birkiye’s request, he adapted Shakespeare and wrote the play III. Richard, Neden Yaptım? After Richard, he is now writing the second of a series of plays, again adapted from Shakespeare, which are intended to be worked on one after another as a trilogy.

As for me, while teaching courses titled Experimental Stage Design, Art Direction in Film, and Improvisation – Space Time Body at three different universities and leading workshops at various institutions, I continued to work as a production designer and art director for independent films. I served as editor-in-chief of Gist, an interdisciplinary contemporary performing arts magazine. At the same time, I continued making my own interdisciplinary works. Among them, some of the ones that excited me most are İstanbul by Naz, Antakya by Naz, Çizelge Oyun, Sansürcü, Ya Seni Rüyasında Bir Daha Hiç Görmezse, which I adapted and directed from three stories by Sevim Burak, and Beni Duyuyor musun?, Nurşen, Course, Hulahoop, Uzun Bir Yıl: Yürümek, Durmak, Ölmek Üzerine Bir Çalışma, Kesişmeler I and II, which were both liberating and shaped my outlook on collectivism and boundaries.

I would also like to talk a little about the writing process. I didn’t have the chance to see Kumpanya’s works, but we do have access to rich information about Kumpanya in the archives. I noticed that the words “geçen gün” (the other day) also appear in the 1994 work Kim O? Can we say that Geçen Gün is the product of everything that has accumulated from then until now?

Kerem Kurdoğlu: Rather than an “accumulation” from then until now, we could say it is an idea whose seeds were planted back then and which has come to fruition today. In Kim O?, which we made in 1994 as Naz’s project, I had rewritten the words of ideas we drew from our work with the actors. For one of the exercises Naz gave, I wrote a piece told by two actors sharing it word by word, which began with these words: “The other day, I was walking down the street, and a police officer stopped me.” Naz liked that piece and decided to use it in Kim O?. I loved that scene, and the idea of expanding it into a stand-alone play was already in my mind back then. A true “spin-off”, to use TV series terminology. In fact, in 2005 we worked on a version of about 15–20 minutes with Kumpanya actors Bilge Arat and Cenk Telimen, but that work never turned into a production presented to an audience. Later, Filiz Sızanlı and Mustafa Kaplan asked me for a text they could use in one of their performances, and I gave them this text. They used part of it. And finally, in September 2022, when Mihran Tomasyan offered to make a work together with us, we suggested this text; they loved it, and the final journey began. At that point the text was only 15–20 minutes long. I rewrote it and brought it to its current form. Some sections from Kim O?, and even some of Naz’s staging ideas, are still used in the play. For example, the actors coming to the front of the stage and calmly looking at the audience for a long time. So we can say that Geçen Gün is the long-awaited realization of an idea from 30 years ago. A question I am often asked is: “It fits today so well. Did you update it while rewriting?” Frankly, the theme the play deals with didn’t require any effort to “update”. For example, I didn’t feel the need to make any changes to the dialogues we took from Kim O?. In fact, while rewriting, I deliberately chose to keep it “timeless”. Apart from a few details such as mobile phones, I don’t think there is anything in the text that couldn’t have existed 30 years ago.

How did your paths cross with Tophane Noise Band? I find it very valuable that these two collectives have produced a shared and timeless “work”. In this work you have been carrying out for about a year, how do you think your production practices and techniques have nourished each other?

N.E.: As Kerem said, about a year ago Mihran Tomasyan, one of the founders of the Çıplak Ayaklar Kumpanyası, invited us to watch a special presentation by Tophane Noise Band (TNB), of which he is also one of the founders and which was then still in the process of being formed. In their space in Tophane, one of the city’s distinctive neighborhoods, they had turned objects they had collected, the kind of things we come across almost every day in daily life, into sculptures that could produce sound. We were enchanted. The atmosphere created by the materials used and the sounds they produced reminded us of the work we did at Kumpanya, inside the Monastery in Tarlabaşı, and especially of our play Kim o? Our paths had crossed with Mihran way back then. We have been following each other’s work for about twenty-five years. This exciting encounter led to the production of our play, which we named Geçen Gün. After TNB’s special presentation, Mihran offered to make a work together. The first stages of the work flowed almost by themselves, through long and enjoyable meetings with Mihran Tomasyan, Serkan Aka, Ufuk Fakıoğlu and Selim Cizdan from TNB on many subjects such as the text, sound design, approach to movement, acting and space design. Kerem wrote the text in a short time. The production process continued with a laboratory work lasting a week to ten days, with acting contributions from our assistants Ahmet Mete Balyan and Zivan Arya Çelik. In fact, on the first day, before working hours, we set up the space at Çıplak Ayaklar Stüdyosu, using platforms of different heights and sound-producing objects that TNB might use in the performance. To better understand each other and the work we wanted to make, we continued our work sometimes through short conversations about our approach to movement and sound, and sometimes through improvisations based on these conversations. I would also like to acknowledge here the efforts of our assistants Basma Seiba and Ahmet Mete Balyan and our assistant director Ekin Deniz Görk in setting these improvisations. With Mihran and all the friends with whom we completed the project, there are so many common points, and a certain number of differences, in our approach to life and to many subjects and details, that these were reflected positively in the work we created together. The desire that almost all of us share to be free and sincere in matters of space, time, movement, sound and word, or to turn the familiar inside out, is what allowed us to create Geçen Gün together.

Will we be able to access the play’s music as a soundtrack in the future?

N.E.: Yes, we would very much like that too and are eagerly looking forward to it. The combination of the instruments Tophane Noise Band creates and the sounds they draw from them evokes very rich associations. The music they made for this play, somewhere between past and future, evokes people we seem to know very well and yet have never met, places we know very well or have never known, and familiar feelings. Their followers know this well, but let me say it here too: you might come across them sometimes at their own concerts at DasDas, sometimes at a ‘Büyük Ev Ablukada’ concert, sometimes accompanying a silent film, sometimes in an art gallery, and sometimes perhaps on the street in one of the city’s distinctive neighborhoods.

Let’s also talk about the venue and the production. Geçen Gün is the first play produced by Kundura Sahne. Could you tell us a little about this experience of co-producing with Beykoz Kundura?

K.K.: For us, Beykoz Kundura is a very valuable institution that holds a unique place in this city’s memory. The fact that the site has been preserved through extremely careful work, without being damaged, and by making excellent use of the possibilities of contemporary architecture, makes it very special. The archiving work that has been done and the museum are an excellent example of the approach that should exist and that we have been longing for. For many years, it has also held an important place for the film industry as a film studio. In addition, the venue has a truly enchanting aesthetic beauty. When we were looking for a producer for this play, Mihran suggested Beykoz Kundura to us. As soon as he said it, we said, that’s it, that is the right place for this work. And indeed, the play blended perfectly with the space, as if it had been made for it. It should also be particularly emphasized that Beykoz Kundura and Buse Yıldırım, as producers, act not out of commercial concerns but with the aim of making works they truly find right and valuable. As you know, contemporary performing arts are, all over the world, a field that does not bring much commercial return but is valued for the development of culture and the arts. It is very valuable that there are institutions here that value and support what we do.

As an audience member, the first thing I would point out is the balance of performance, dance, music and acting within the “play”. None of them overshadows the others. I had the chance to attend rehearsals, and what I observed is that every step must be planned and technically solid, yet at the same time it is inclined to stay within the nature of that moment and to carry it onto the stage. It also makes you ask a question like “Who is the actor?” I would like to hear from you how you directed this process with the actors Esme Madra and Ozan Çelik.

N.E.: That is exactly what we wanted to do; it is a very accurate observation. During the week-long laboratory work we carried out after the text was completed, we had established in broad strokes what Geçen Gün would be like. The bricks in the final section, the ramp and the steps, as well as the movement style in the play, are all ideas found in that first week a year ago. Of course, there were also some ideas we later dropped or used in modified form. It is also very important to us that movement, sound and word, and even objects, costumes and space, can transform into one another, and that while doing so we can establish genuine communication with the audience. Mihran and I know each other’s artistic tendencies well, but we were working with Esme and Ozan for the first time. Their self-discipline was so strong that they turned the challenging ideas of us directors, and of Mihran and Maral, who did the movement design, into creative results. Not only did they memorize a text that is so hard to memorize because of its fragmented structure, they also absorbed that text without giving up who they are. Both are actors who are as enjoyable to work with as they are disciplined and creative. Most of the time they even managed to cope with the fact that I am from another planet.

K.K.: In one of our first meetings with Mihran, while describing the structure of the performance we were aiming for, we dwelled with particular emphasis on these definitions: each element should be so strong on its own that if, for example, we removed movement and word from this performance, the remaining “thing” could be watched as an hour-long concert. Or if we removed music and word, the remaining “thing” should be worth watching as a dance performance. Likewise, if we removed the dance, a play with music should remain. We maintained the same approach to set and lighting design. We didn’t ask our lighting designer Utku Kara simply to light the scenes we perform correctly. We asked him to use light to create “tableaux”, each of which we would want to gaze at for a long time. In the same way, we treated the set changes as an important category of action worth watching within the movement design and the performance.

Kumpanya, an important pillar of the “innovative” theater movement that began in the ’90s: can we say that your search on stage continues today?

N.E.: Yes, I suppose one could say that. We usually do detailed work on the subjects and fields that occupy our minds, generally without the concern of reaching a goal. Sometimes these reach a result in a shorter time and turn into something watchable that people can witness. Sometimes they remain simply work that nourishes us and can, years later, at a time we never expected, turn into another work. The fact that we have both been teaching in these fields at various educational institutions for years also allows us to continue our research and keeps us lively. In those years I was doing things the way I do today, not with the aim of being innovative but because that is how my mind works. So it is something innate; the sources that nourish me seem to go through a process on their own and turn into works like these. The passion to reach a new balance by turning things inside out always continues. Something very positive happened in this project, too. My works usually consist of melancholic moments. In Geçen Gün, when this combined with Kerem’s sense of humor, it turned, with the influence of music and movement as well, into a multilayered depth.

K.K.: I think the expression Naz used, “not with the aim of being innovative but because that is how my mind works”, is very important. By putting ourselves in the audience’s place, we try to make works we would enjoy watching. We don’t make any extra effort specifically to be “different” or “innovative”.

Producing work in arts and culture is getting harder with every passing day. Drawing on your experience, what would you like to say, especially to those who struggle to produce work and find space for themselves in this field?

N.E.: It really is becoming harder and harder to suggest anything on this subject. As the population grows, resources run out and becoming visible gets harder. In fact, simply surviving is gradually becoming almost impossible. Despite all this, could summoning the courage to keep going with passion, faith and persistence, without letting go of the work one wants to do, and being part of collective production while individual creativity continues, open up space? Could it help to think of making works produced within one’s own collectives, far from the center and outside the mainstream? Can methods different from the known methods, the ones we know, be developed? Can different methods through which you can express yourself be developed? It seems as if there is no other way. We need to create different forms of perception.

K.K.: That is a very difficult question to answer. But I would like to simplify life a little by answering from a single perspective that I find very important: I think it is very important not to make work in order to win the approval of others. We should make work according to our own taste and our own truths, for ourselves before anyone else. The culture of living focused on “more views” and “collecting likes”, brought about in recent years as we have started to live on our mobile phones, is the biggest obstacle to truly good and sincere work emerging. I find making work “according to audience approval” very harmful. Working “by putting yourself in the audience’s place” is, I think, the right perspective. The two are very different things. If we keep making works, according to our own tastes, that make us happy and that we are proud of, the continuity we create will surely build its own audience over time.

A city. And two people. Two people who constantly encounter each other, pass each other by, collide, but never truly see each other. Two people against the world. They move through the city. They try not to be crushed. They try to cope with the city. Everyone is against them; they are on their own. One moment they are eighty, the next eighteen. One moment they are the victims, the next they are gnawed by guilt.

We know them. And they know us. The city changes. The city keeps drawing different routes. The city pushes them around. Other people, at one with the city, sweep them along. At every moment they are under a different threat. Sounds envelop them all. Now a disturbing cacophony, now an enchanting calm. Now a tangle of noise, now music.

But in fact, they are the city, and they are the other people too. That is, there is no city other than themselves, and no other people other than themselves. All that exists is them. Hundreds, thousands of themselves. This is an anxious love story.

(From the press release)

*This interview was published on Argonotlar.com on January 26, 2024.