After the sixth edition of its annual jazz festival from August 26 to 28, Bozcaada (Tenedos), a beautiful island in the northeast of the Aegean Sea, will host a new theater festival for the first time this year. The Bozcaada Theater Festival will meet devotees at Ayazma Monastery on the island from September 1-4.
The festival, which is organized with the partnership of Lemur Company & K Bozcaada, includes the most popular plays of the season as well as plays that have been followed with interest by the public for a long time in its programming. It is also ready to offer its participants an unforgettable festival experience with children’s plays, concerts, theater and Bozcaada experience workshops.
12 games in 4 days
The Bozcaada Theater Festival will present 12 plays in four days to its audience. The first play in the festival program is “Every Brilliant Thing”, which will be performed by the Talimhane Theatre. Written by Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe, the play begins with a list written as a gift by a child to his mother. The chronically depressed mother couldn’t find a reason to live. After learning that she is hospitalized, her son creates a list of things worth living for in order to cheer up his mother. The list turns into something completely different over time and changes the son’s perception of life.
The second production to meet audiences is “Istırap Korosu” (“Chorus of Agony”), which had its premiere at the 25th Istanbul Theater Festival. Written by Murat Mahmutyazıcoğlu, the play tells an apartment story. The audience hears voices from a peaceful family apartment, in other words, the sound of ordinary people. The silent thoughts and uncontrollable screams of neighbors living immensely distant lives in houses extremely close together; slamming doors, shaking windows, breaking hearts, children stomping and running around are all in this two-actor polyphonic play. The actors, who assume the performances of women and men, young, old, married, single, children and even dogs, in short, all the characters, also manage all the sounds and effects that radiate throughout the play. The play’s company of performers, BAM Istanbul, draws its power from the script and the performances of the actors, and while focusing on one corner of the city, it tells the story of the entire homeland.
“Lungs”, written by Macmillan, will meet the audience with the performance of Tiyatro.IN. The play looks at the everyday life of a couple in a fairly stable relationship. Out of the blue, the man pops the question of having a baby and what follows is an emotional roller coaster ride. “Lungs” is an intimate, complex and fun piece about what it means to be a couple facing a world of uncertainty. They strive to make responsible choices in the face of growing social inequalities, environmental disasters and political unrest.
Physical Theater Studies, which was founded as an experiment mixing different styles such as Clown, Physical Storytelling, Mask Play, Jester and Grotesque Play, will present their award-winning plays “Under the Castle” and “Kalabalık Duası (“Prayer of the Crowd”). In “Under the Castle”, the text, based on “Macbeth” by William Shakespeare, was adapted for the stage after a rewriting. Jesters, which are one of the most unique styles of French actor Jacques Lecoq’s pedagogy, create the basis of the play. When the creatures of the underworld, whose only purpose on stage is to laugh at everything and believe nothing, encounter one of Shakespeare’s strongest tragedies, the result is an absurd, tragic and bloody comedy. The piece invites the audience on a provocative, dark, disturbing and quite funny journey. It is the journey into the darkness within us.
After “Under the Castle”, Physical Theater Studies shares with the public the results of a brand new research with “Crowd Prayer”. This time, the public pursues the physical and interdisciplinary possibilities of the narrative while the play stages an original text. The story, which focuses on the contemporary and the traditional, the rational and the mystical, the madness and wisdom in the background of Istanbul, seeks the narrator, playful energy, enthusiasm and theatrical truth.
“Kreutzer Sonat” is the name of a sonata by Ludwig Van Beethoven for violin and piano. The play, adapted from the novel of the same name by Lev Tolstoy and published in 1889 under the influence of the “Kreutzer Sonata”, is among the centerpieces of the Bozcaada Theater Festival. The play tells the story of an unhappy relationship of a couple that develops on the axis of love and jealousy. The play was performed by Versus Theater for the first time in Turkey on the occasion of Beethoven’s 250th birthday.
“Sanki Hiç Unutmayacakmış Gibi” (“As If You’ll Never Forget”) is a production of Kadıköy Emek Theater. The play tells the life of Nihan, a village girl who goes to the mountains with a goat, which is her only friend, and looks at the trees and the olive trees. Nihan’s life begins to change when a stranger called Zerda arrives in their village. Kadıköy Boa Sahne’s play “Istifra Çıkrıkçılar Yokuşu” (“Vomir Çıkrıkçılar Slope”), meanwhile, focuses on the story of a young man who works in a currency exchange office and tries to cope with endless demands which require time, effort, money and patience.
Gülgeç Theater’s “Öfkenin Yakın Geçmişi” (“The Recent History of Anger”), which addresses individual and social issues arising from the suppression of anger, a natural part of the human psychic stages of grief, as a way to facing modernism, is another piece to meet the public in Bozcaada in a solo performance “Bir Alzheimer’ın Anıları” (“Memoirs of an Alzheimer’s patient”), in which actor Mustafa Kırantepe tells the story of a country that offers a completely different life rather than the life he painted in his own memory and in his own mind, will have its premiere on the island.
Child games
The little theater lovers have not been forgotten in the framework of the festival. “The Only Bird Who’s Not Afraid of the Cold” is a puppet play that shared messages about growing and maturing while depicting the beauty of the change and transformation of the seasons and of human nature. Performed by the Gülgeç Theatre, the play will appeal to everyone, from all walks of life. Riki experiences the coldest and longest winter of his life. That year, winter did not end, spring, summer, even autumn did not come. In the end, an exhausted Rikki wakes up one morning and decides to find Winter and talk to him and persuade him to leave. Like the rest of the village or even the rest of the human race, he goes to say goodbye to his parents who have been sleeping all day and leaves the village. Thinking that winter is in the coldest place in the world, Riki reaches the coldest place in the world. But before winter, he meets a bird. This bird is the only bird that is not afraid of the cold.
Another children’s play with puppets is “Pırt”, a joint production of Lemur Company and Gülgeç Theater, will also tell how Zart and Zort, who live in the bowels of Inci, struggle to exist in their own world, while helping to develop Inci.
During the Bozcaada Theater Festival, participants will also have the opportunity to discover different areas of theater through workshops given by theater professionals. Details of the Bozcaada experience workshops, concerts and after-party events will be announced in the coming days. Tickets for the festival are now on sale at Biletinial.com.
