“The greatest strength of this extraordinary performance, built from a very solid text, acting, dance and sound, is the way different disciplines come together in flawless harmony to achieve a unique wholeness. In this respect, it is one of the leading theater events of the year, perhaps even the most important.”

Erdoğan Mitrani*

I first met writer, director, actor and dramaturg Kerem Kurdoğlu, and Naz Erayda, who designed the sets and costumes for almost all of his plays, co-created and co-directed some of them, and adapted and staged others on her own, in the early 1990s through Kumpanya, which they founded in a hall of the old monastery on Tarlabaşı Boulevard that had been opened to various companies. Thirty years ago, I thought that the breathtaking ‘Fayton Soruşturması’, which I watched with admiration, was far ahead of its time, the theater of the future. With ‘Canlanan Mekân’(1994), ‘Kim O’ (1995), ‘Haritadan Naklen Yayın’ (1996), ‘Everest My Lord’ (1997), ‘Vınnlamanın Binbir Yolu’ (1998), ‘Sahte Kimlikler 5’ (2000) and ‘Yine Ne Oldu’ (2002), the company went on to create unique, pioneering works that turned ways of seeing and perceiving inside out.

When the venue closed in 2006, Kumpanya took a break from theater for a while. Alongside a successful career as head of the post-production studio ABT and as a visual effects and post-production supervisor, Kerem Kurdoğlu also worked as a lecturer at Bilgi University. Naz Erayda, by then his wife, became one of the leading art directors of Turkish cinema, taught at many universities and led workshops. But their passion for theater never let go of either of them.

In 2008, Kurdoğlu rewrote Kafka’s The Trial, not as “Kafkaesque” in the familiar sense, but as the story of a fall from the heights to rock bottom, wrapped in a glossy world of entertainment, and directed it under the title ‘İstanbul’da Bir Dava’. This tremendously striking interpretation, in which music, choreography and visuals came to the fore, was, despite its unexpected style, a work remarkably faithful to the essence of the text.

In late 2019, Kurdoğlu reunited with friends with whom he had made theater at Boğaziçi University in the 1980s and brought a contemporary and exciting interpretation to ‘The Bald Soprano’.

The period of staying away from theater was now over; right after the pandemic, Kurdoğlu set out to write a trilogy interpreting famous Shakespeare characters through the eyes of our time. The first play of the trilogy, made up of solo plays, ‘III. Richard: Niçin Yaptım’, which premiered at the 26th Theater Festival, was a mischievous black comedy in which Richard argues that if there is a goal one is passionately devoted to, there is nothing wrong with resorting to evil for its sake, and that evil can, and indeed should, be used shamelessly. Directed by Mehmet Birkiye, the play won Hakan Gerçek the Best Actor award at the Afife Jale Awards. While we eagerly await the other two plays of the trilogy, this time Kundura Sahne has brought Naz Erayda and Kerem Kurdoğlu together again on the same project with its first production, ‘Geçen Gün’.

The subject of this article is ‘Geçen Gün’, the hybrid performance written by Kurdoğlu and co-directed with Erayda. The purpose of such a long introduction is to remind readers, and to inform those who do not know, that the true pioneer who paved the way, with the Renaissance they launched in Istanbul 15–16 years ago, for all the young theater makers who still continue to create the finest theater, was Kerem and Naz’s Kumpanya.

The many intertwined stories of a city and two people, which are in fact all one and the same story

‘Geçen Gün’ is a work that breaks the familiar molds of theater, conveys its narrative in different styles and layers, and blends the performance of two actors with a surprising music and sound arrangement and a choreographic movement design close to dance theater.

Kerem Kurdoğlu and Serkan Aka have successfully created Istanbul, with its descents, ascents, slopes, and widening and narrowing roads, on a bare stage using two metal staircases and two long, narrow metal platforms whose positions and distances the team constantly changes. The voice of Istanbul, perhaps the most important character in the play, which envelops the actors, falls and rises, and never falls silent even when it almost turns into silence, is brought into being by Tophane Noise Band, positioned in the background. Made up of Selim Cizdan, Serkan Aka, Ufuk Fakıoğlu and Mihran Tomasyan, the collective makes a unique kind of ‘music’ with instruments built from materials it has found, or tirelessly stored, among the waste of Tophane in particular and the city in general, turning the sound of the city into a ‘noise symphony’.

Esme Madra and Ozan Çelik share the tremendously poetic text between them, voicing it at times as solos, at times as a canon in which one begins and the other completes, and at times as a chorus; sometimes they move, sometimes they speak while still, and sometimes a wordless series of movements interrupts the flow of the text. The movement design by Maral Ceranoğlu and Mihran Tomasyan of executive producer Çıplak Ayaklar Stüdyosu orchestrates the motions of both the two actors and the city they struggle to cope with. Entering the stage as a ‘master of ceremonies’ as the play begins, Tomasyan also turns the sound team into the crowds of the city.

Let me also remind readers that the Çıplak Ayaklar Kumpanyası, founded in 2003, created its own language and made dance theater of the finest kind before the genre even had a name, bringing many amateur and professional dancers into the field.

The greatest strength of this extraordinary performance, built from a very solid text, acting, dance and sound, is the way different disciplines come together in flawless harmony to achieve a unique wholeness. In this respect, it is one of the leading theater events of the year, perhaps even the most important. At Kundura Sahne on January 13, 14, 27 and 28 and throughout the season. Not to be missed.

*This article was published in the January 10, 2024 issue of the Şalom newspaper.