The new season at Beykoz Kundura’s interdisciplinary stage Kundura Sahne, whose restoration has captivated audiences, begins on November 3. With a program that brings original projects from stages around the world to Istanbul, Kundura Sahne has become a favorite destination for theater and dance lovers, and it opens its 2023-2024 season with “Never Odd Or Even”, a dance project co-produced by Türkiye and Portugal.

On the evening of Friday, November 3 at Kundura Sahne, the Türkiye premiere of “Never Odd Or Even” brings together on the same stage Filiz Sızanlı and Mustafa Kaplan, whom we know well from Taldans, the company they founded in 2003, and the Portuguese artist duo Sofia Dias and Vítor Roriz, who have been working together since 2006.

A five-year creative process on stage

All four artists share an interest in the relationships between speech, sound, movement and gesture, along with a common curiosity about precision, minimalism, language and abstraction, and they reveal the richness of being able to look at these subjects from different perspectives, individually or as pairs. Created jointly by two duos who for more than a decade have worked almost exclusively with their own partners, “Never Odd Or Even” opens the door to an intimate world while also discovering that creating together over many years is an experience of shared solitude.

Developed over five years in which the artists watched, listened to and observed one another, and sharing this creative process with the audience, the performance also draws on the experience of living in two different countries in seeking to understand the artistic, social and political reflections of duality.

NEVER ODD OR EVEN
Filiz Sızanlı, Mustafa Kaplan, Sofia Dias, Vítor Roriz

In Turkish and English, with Turkish and English surtitles, 70’

NEVER ODD OR EVEN is a collaboration between two choreographic duos from Türkiye and Portugal. Bringing together Filiz Sızanlı and Mustafa Kaplan from Türkiye and Sofia Dias and Vítor Roriz from Portugal, the project shows that, for these two couples who have worked almost exclusively with their partners for more than ten years, working together for so long is also an experience of shared solitude. Despite their different creative approaches and experiences, the two couples share the same interest in precision, minimalism, language and abstraction, and a growing interest in the interplay between the spoken word, sound, movement and gesture. In NEVER ODD OR EVEN, while the resemblance between each duo and each body holds a strong attraction, the choreographers are equally interested in what sets them apart and in how to accentuate these differences in a search for distortion. Yet there is still much to be done with the collective energy of the quartet for each of these duos to shift itself into “unknown” territory…

Co-direction and Performance: Filiz Sızanlı, Mustafa Kaplan, Sofia Dias, Vítor Roriz
Lighting Design and Technical Direction: Cárin Geada
Set and Costume Design: Ângela Rocha
Sound: Sofia Dias
Management and Distribution: Vítor Alves Brotas
Production: Agência 25

Co-producers: Théâtre de la Ville, São Luiz Teatro Municipal, Alkantara Festival, La Briqueterie, Teatro Viriato, CCN Nantes, Teatro Municipal do Porto /Festival DDD – Festival Dias da Dança

Support: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Casa-Atelier – Fundação Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva, Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista
Thanks to: Leonor Carpinteiro