Gonca Yalcin

The Featured Researcher for April 2024 was Gonca Yalcin, with a project title Practicing Alternative Historiographies: Contemporary Material Performance Practices in Turkey, Lebanon and Iran

Each month, we offer the spotlight to one of our researchers to exhibit their research projects in more detail.

HEI: University of Glasgow, School of Culture and Creative Arts

Subject Area: Theatre Studies

Supervisors: Dr Michael Bachmann, Dr Azadeh Emadi, Dr Lotte Segal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Practicing Alternative Historiographies: Contemporary Material Performance Practices in Turkey, Lebanon and Iran

I am from Istanbul, Turkey and I am currently in the third year of my PhD.  My research project is focused on contemporary puppetry and object theatre in the Middle East. The driving force behind my research is my interest both in performance and the political and cultural geography of the region – in exploring or writing about the artistic practices I’ve encountered, I look at the way they exist in conversation with the surrounding political and cultural landscape they are a part of. I find it exciting to see how artistic practices can offer insights into questions of resistance and alternative forms of being, living and relating to each other and to other worlds.

 

From Nehna wel Amar wel Jiran festival, Hammana 

My case studies include puppetry practices and performance festivals that involve sight-specific elements such as walking, and ones which take place outside traditional theatrical spaces – happening in Istanbul (Turkey), Beirut and Hammana (Lebanon). In my reading of these, I write about issues of public space – what it means for it to be de-materialised within a political context, and the moments of encounter and intimacy when public and private spheres meet in these performances. I’m currently focusing on questions of care and hospitality as an ontological requirement of relational worlds: care as ways of practicing ‘the pluriverse’, which is a world of many worlds consisting of distinct ways of being and knowing – I trace these through stories of puppetry and material performance.

 

Performance of Panique Olympique at Hammana
 

The choice of puppetry and object theatre, or the more material aspect of performance-making, allows me to shift my focus from words and scripts to the material relationships such practices entail and perform. I draw on New Materialist and Posthumanist theories, particularly Political Ontology, to think of the entanglement between humans and non-humans, and the puppets and objects as co-creators of these practices. This engagement also involves a critique of Euro-centric assumptions that New Materialist and Posthumanist theories make, such as ignoring or silencing Indigenous cosmologies and knowledge systems. Using a decolonial lens allows me to ground the practices I study as knowledge–making practices. The readings they offer are not seen as universal truths or theoretical approaches applied from the outside to Turkey and Lebanon, but as informed by situated ways of making, living, and relating. These hold the potential to resist the colonial logic of the ‘one-world world’ that separates the world in hierarchical terms along the lines of life and non-life, imposing its own logic onto distinct ontological and epistemological worlds — a logic which has an inextricable relation to racial capitalism and environmental destruction.

 

Bread and Puppet Theatre workshop – the final performance 

So far my PhD has taken me to some really exciting places. In the summer of 2022 I attended a month-long workshop in Istanbul by Bread & Puppet Theatre where we created a public performance; in June 2023 I went to Lebanon to visit the festival ‘Nehna wel Amar wel Jiran (‘Moon, Neighbours, Us’), organised by one of the leading contemporary puppetry collectives in the region. In September 2023, I went to Mardin in South-East Turkey to Flying Carpet Festival which is a multidisciplinary performance arts festival organised by Sirkhane, a social circus school. It is one of the first mobile arts festivals in the region travelling to children living in difficult places. These have been supported and made possible by funding from SGSAH. My PhD is not practice-based, but I find that it inspires and informs the practice I make outside of it: in March 2024 we ran a puppetry workshop in Glasgow – together with my collaborator and our participants, we explored our relationship to the natural world through puppetry and devising exercises –  this was supported by University of Glasgow’s Thinking Culture.

 

The Flying Carpet Festival