No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Viral Interstitiality and Unlikely Resources: Gender and Labour in Turkish Public Theatre During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2024
Extract
The growing literature on Covid-19 and theatre has demonstrated how the pandemic has intensified gendered precarities in theatrical labour.1 However, the pandemic has also provided feminist theatre makers with unexpected or unlikely resources, albeit with limitations. The Istanbul Municipal Theatre's (İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Şehir Tiyatroları or İBBŞT) production of Melek that premiered in 2020 is an indicative example of such rare and largely invisible cases of pandemic theatre. Critically engaging with the archives and repertoires of tuberculosis (TB) melodrama and the Turkish lives of the genre, Melek conducts an experiential mapping of the performativity of death and the porous borders between everyday performance and artistic performance. The production offered independent feminist theatre practitioners, who otherwise maintain a precarious existence in Turkey's theatre world, access to new spaces, resources and audiences. Combining archival with ethnographic research, I will demonstrate how, in the case of Melek, the intersections between actual and fictive viral contagion – what I define as viral interstitiality – constitute inclusive economies amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. In somatics, the interstitial is theorized and enacted as suspensions of static schisms that shape relational empowerment.2 Drawing upon this grasp of the interstitial as connective thresholds, viral interstitiality sheds light on the practices and the economies of care that emerge from the porous dynamism between the viral and the theatrical.
- Type
- Dossier
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Federation for Theatre Research
References
NOTES
1 Pietrzak-Franger, Monika, Liedke, Heidi Lucja and Radak, Tamara, ‘Editorial: Presence and Precarity in (Post-)Pandemic Theatre and Performance’, Theatre Research International, 48, 1 (March 2023), pp. 2–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jeziński, Marek and Lorek-Jezińska, Edyta, ‘The Response of Polish Performance Artists to Cultural Policies During the Pandemic: Liminality, Precarity, and Resilience’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 28, 5 (July 2022), pp. 607–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Hartley, Linda, Wisdom of the Body Moving: An Introduction to Body–Mind Centering (Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 1989), p. 283Google Scholar.
3 Altınay, Rüstem Ertuğ, ‘From a Daughter of the Republic to a Femme Fatale: The Life and Times of Turkey's First Professional Fashion Model, Lale Belkıs’, Women's Studies Quarterly, 41, 1/2 (Spring 2013), pp. 113–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Altınay, Rüstem Ertuğ, ‘Staging Queer Marxism in the Age of State Feminism: Gender, Sexuality, and the Nation in Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar's Kadın Erkeklseşince (When Woman Becomes Masculine)’, Comparative Drama, 52, 3/4 (Fall and Winter 2018), pp. 243–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Interview, Altınay, 7 March 2023.
6 Akçura, Gökhan, Hatıratım: Melek Kobra (Istanbul: Everest Yayınları, 2006)Google Scholar.
7 Erdem, Emre, ‘A Feminist Tuberculosis Melodrama: Melek by Theatre Painted Bird’, European Stages, 5, 1 (Fall 2015)Google Scholar at https://europeanstages.org/2015/11/24/a-feminist-tuberculosis-melodrama-melek-by-theatre-painted-bird/.
8 Interview, Altınay, 7 March 2023.
9 Erdem, ‘A Feminist Tuberculosis Melodrama’.
10 Adak, Hülya and Altınay, Rüstem Ertuğ, ‘Introduction: Theatre and Politics in Turkey and Its Diasporas’, Comparative Drama, 52, 3/4 (Fall and Winter 2018), pp. 185–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Interview, Koçak, 10 March 2023.
12 Interview, Altınay, 7 March 2023.
13 Verstraete, Pieter, ‘In Search of a New Performativity after Gezi: On Symbolic Politics and New Dramaturgies in Turkey’, Theatre Research International, 44, 1 (October 2019), pp. 273–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Gökse Uygun, ‘IBBŞT'te Kadın Tiyatrocular Dönemi’, GazeteKadiköy, 10 March 2020, at https://www.gazetekadikoy.com.tr/kultur-sanat/ibbstte-kadin-tiyatrocular-dnemi (author's translation).
15 Zeynep Miraç ‘Women Take Over Istanbul's City Theatre’, YetkinReport, 8 March 2020, at https://yetkinreport.com/en/2020/03/08/women-take-over-istanbuls-city-theatre/.
16 Interview, Koçak, 10 March 2023.
17 Interview, Karabekir, 10 March 2023.
18 Interview, Karabekir and Koçak, 10 March 2023.