10.6092/issn.2036-1599/8718
Movement Atelier è un ensemble di danza nato in Turchia da donne. Usano storia orale, testi letterari scritti da eminenti autrici turche e testi di scienze sociali che teorizzano la cultura pubblica della Turchia come punto di partenza per lo sviluppo di opere performative, in una prospettiva femminista intergenerazionale. Questo saggio si concentra su una loro performance del 2009, cirCUMstances.
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Danza e ricerca. Laboratorio di studi, scritture, visioni
A Feminist Archeology of Collective Memory in Turkey. A Retrospective Look on Works of Movement Atelier with a Focus on "AHHval / cirCUMstances"
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A Feminist Archeology of Collective Memory in Turkey. A Retrospective Look on Works of Movement Atelier with a Focus on "AHHval / cirCUMstances"
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                                                      Deniz Başar


 A Feminist Archeology of Collective Memory in Turkey.*
A Retrospective Look on Works of Movement Atelier with a
          Focus on AHHval / cirCUMstances




     This article contextualizes the Turkish female dance collective Movement Atelier (1999) within
the modern dance field and experimentalist theatre scene of contemporary Turkey, analyzes a specific
work of theirs aHHval (En: CirCUMstances) to illustrate their style and embodied counter-politics;
and in the final section it draws parallels and make comparisons between Movement Atelier’s and
certain choreographers’ works from the international modern dance scene to provide a comprehensive
backdrop for their unique style.



Background: Modern Dance in Turkey

     Turkey has a relatively young history of ballet when compared to countries that established such
traditions before the 20th century; like Russia, France, Italy, and Denmark. Institutionalization of dance
through the state has been a long process with many controversies in Turkey (established in 1923), ballet
in particular starting with the visit of Dame Ninette de Valois (Ballets Russes dancer and founder of the
British Royal Ballet) to Istanbul in 1947 to start a ballet school in Turkey through the invitation of the
then Minister of Education, Hasan Ali Yücel. Ballet (like opera) was considered to be an important part
of creating the necessary modern façade for the secular Republic of Turkey. However, state support was
irregular (and sometimes erratic, based on the political conditions of the times) in this fast developing
Muslim-majority country. In 1957, the first graduates of Turkish Ballet School became the Ankara State
Ballet Company; and up until around the mid-1960s, they became a fully professional ballet troupe.
This happened mostly because of the individual efforts of Dame Ninette de Valois, who worked like
a ballet missionary in Turkey. In this establishment period, Turkish ballet was almost only defined by

     *
         An early draft of this paper was presented in 2018 DSA conference in Malta.




                                  «Danza e ricerca. Laboratorio di studi, scritture, visioni», anno X, numero 10, 2018
                                                                                                  danzaericerca.unibo.it
                                                                         https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2036-1599/8718
200                                                                                                                Deniz Başar




the Anglophone canon (which again de Valois herself established 1 ), and only after the mid-1970s did
Russian ballet started impacting the Turkish ballet scene after the artistic control of de Valois on the
field started fading away. 2
      In her 1977 memoir Step by Step, Dame Ninette de Valois proudly writes about her efforts placing
Turkey on the map for internationally touring dance companies in such a short period of time 3 . The
only documentation of which specific companies visited Turkey in this early period can be found in
a single paragraph within Jak Deleon’s 1990 book in which he mentions the touring of Martha Gra-
ham’s dance company to Turkey in 1962, where Graham’s company performed 6 shows 4 . Modern
dance started to emerge after the early 1970s in Turkey, and the frontier Turkish choreographer in
this field was Duygu Aykal, who had trained under Kurt Joss in Germany at Essen Folkwang Bal-
let School 5 . Leonide Massine in Royal Ballet also trained Aykal through three-week intensive Dance
Composition Courses for three terms at the Upper School in Royal Ballet between Autumn 1968 and
the Summer of 1970 6 , which she took through the initiation of Dame Ninette de Valois. Despite her
early death at the peak of her career, Aykal managed to establish modern dance as a sub-branch in the
Turkish State Ballet, and was a very successful and philosophically-minded choreographer. After late
1980s, independent and experimental dance groups and festivals started to emerge in Turkey 7 due to
a combination of an increase of people with various trainings in dance, and an accumulating number
of graduates from conservatories in the country. Starting with the late 1990s, state sponsored and pri-
vately funded international dance, theatre, and opera festivals started gaining visibility in the public
life of urban centers (predominantly Istanbul) and many internationally known choreographers such
as Pina Bausch toured to Turkey 8 during this time period.
      Since the early 2000s, there has also been an emerging feminist wave in the field of theatre in Tur-
key, with feminist theatre companies like Tiyatro Boyalı Kuş (2000), established by Jale Karabekir 9

      1. Beth Genné, Creating a Canon. Creating the “Classics” in Twentieth-Century British Ballet, in «Dance Research
Journal», vol. 18, n. 2, 2000, pp. 132-162.
      2. For more information on this foundational period see: Deniz Başar, From Petrushka to Çeşmebaşı: Tracing the Legacy
of the Ballets Russes on the Turkish Ballet, University of Toronto, June 2018, online: http://www.academia.edu/36837459/,
Zeynep Günsür, Modernization Through Dancing Bodies in Turkey, PhD dissertation, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul 2007.
      3. Ninette De Valois, Step by Step, Howard & Wyndham Company, London 1977, p. 169.
      4. Jak Deleon, Cumhuriyet Dönemi Türk Balesi [Rebuplican Era Turkish Ballet], Boğaziçi University, Istanbul 1990. p.
17.
      5. Metin And, Part Five/A Newcomer: Classical Ballet, in Id., A Pictorial History of Turkish Dancing: from folk dancing to
whirling dervishes-belly dancing to ballet, Dost Yayınları, Ankara 1976, p. 175.
      6. Kate Flatt, De Valois’s invitation to Leonide Massine to teach Dance Composition, in Richard Allen Cave, Libby Worth
(edited by), Ninette de Valois: Adventurous Traditionalist, Dance Books, London 2012, p. 65.
      7. Jak Deleon, Cumhuriyet Dönemi Türk Balesi [Rebuplican Era Turkish Ballet], cit., p. 99.
      8. Arzu Öztürkmen, Reflections on Pina Bausch’s Istanbul Project, in «Dance Research Journal», vol. 35, n. 2, Winter
2003, pp. 232-235.
      9. Karabekir is also known for her long-lasting workshops with women from working class neighbourhoods in Istanbul
with the techniques developed by Augusto Boal. For more information: Jale Karabekir, Türkiye’de Kadınlarla Ezilenlerin
Tiyatrosu: Feminist Bir Metodolojiye Doğru [Theatre of the Oppressed with Women in Turkey: Towards a Feminist Methodology],
A Feminist Archeology of Collective Memory in Turkey. A Retrospective Look on Works of Movement Atelier (...)            201




and later through second-generation theatre ensembles like Nü Kolektif (2010-2015), and with emer-
ging feminist playwrights after 2005 like Ebru Nihan Celkan. Many theatre works were also created by
companies and collectives in this alternative theatre field with feminist consciousness, like Kumbara-
cı50’s feminist erotic puppet show Haz Makamı (Modes of Pleasure – 2012), Tiyatro BEREZE’s Kırmızı
Ayakkabılı Kadınlar (Women with Red Shoes – 2013), Kara Kabare’s Kamamber (Camembert – 2016),
Mek’an group’s Apaçi Gızlar (2016), or Neslihan Arol’s feminist meddah performance Meddah Geldi
Haaanım (Ladies, Meddah has arrived! – 2018). One of the earliest and foundational feminist theatre
groups that came along with Tiyatro Boyalı Kuş was Zeynep Günsür’s Movement Atelier, which was
established in 1999. Among the theatre companies in Turkey that have feminist consciousness, Move-
ment Atelier is the only group whose performers are predominantly trained in ballet and various other
dance forms, but not predominantly in acting.
      After the mid-2000s in urban Turkey, international encounters started becoming more and more
common, with many dancers and young people becoming interested in dance by joining workshops,
getting parts of their educations in Europe (through exchange programs like Erasmus), or through
participation in international modern dance festivals, like Istanbul’s very own iDans (2006-2013).
Many important contemporary artists like Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (in 2013 with her famous
Rosas Danst Rosas) toured to Istanbul because of the iDans festival 10 . At the same time, black box
theatres started mushrooming in urban areas of Istanbul, which provided a new way of spectatorship
and performative perspective for multiple communities of theatre and dance. In this moment, the
black box stage became an alternative to proscenium stage for the first time in Turkey. This allowed
for new performance experiences for both performers and audiences. Among the mushrooming black
box stages, Çatı Dance [En: Roof Dance] and Çıplak Ayaklar Kumpanyası [En: Bare Feet Company]
belonged to dance collectives. Çıplak Ayaklar Kumpanyası has especially become the singular modern
dance collective in Turkey, with a self-sustained space for more than a decade and a half now. 11
      In 2005, GarajIstanbul, one of the first black box stages in Istanbul, was established with the efforts
of a group of collective avant-garde theatre artists working since the 1990s. GarajIstanbul was at the
threshold of the alternative theatre scene, along with Dot Theatre (also established in 2005), which was
another first wave black box stage that settled in central Istanbul and sits five minute walking distance
from GarajIstanbul. Therefore, when Movement Atelier performed aHHval (En: cirCUMstances) in
GarajIstanbul in 2009, it was an exploration of another potential use of dance – dance theatre – and

Agora Kitapligi, Istanbul 2015.
    10. iDANS 06 Promo, uploaded by iDANS Festival, 2013, online: http://vimeo.com/68609910. Accessed September 8,
2018.
    11. For more information on this turning point through black box stages in theatre field of Turkey after mid-2000s
see Deniz Başar, Performative Publicness: Alternative Theater in Turkey After 2000s, MA thesis, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul
2014. For details on modern dance scene in the alternative theatre movement of Istanbul, see the pages 166-167 and 198
and 221-222 in the same thesis.
202                                                                                                                      Deniz Başar




space itself 12 .
      Within the context of this backdrop, Movement Atelier has been an interesting intersectional
phenomenon in the performance field of Turkey. Its emergence was dependent on the momentum
of the moment, but it also enlarged the alternative theatre field itself through its uniqueness. The
company has created a movement language of their own with a «primarily focus on [female] body’s
own history and memory» 13 , and their works circulate around themes like gender-based hypocrisies
of modern-day Turkey and the collective amnesia of Turkish society in the face of many catastrophic
changes over the last century. Movement Atelier uses oral histories, literary texts by prominent women
writers of Turkey, and social science documents that theorize about the public culture of Turkey as
their starting points to develop dance/performance works. The powerful, fragmented, but harmonized
nature of their performances trigger a vast landscape of connotations for the audiences of Turkey about
their collective public memory of their country through an intergenerational feminist perspective. Their
works almost inevitably unfold with moments of «autonomy and resistance» 14 , confronting the official
Turkish masculine history. Their political standing is revealed through «interruptions» of the expected,
or «by addressing the biases […] impose[d] on us» 15 ; here «us» meaning the citizens of Turkey.


An Analysis of aHHval/cirCUMstances (2009)
      I will focus on cirCUMstances (2009) 16 to analyze the nature of their feminist physical/dance
theatre works. The following quote is how the collective describes their work in cirCUMstances:

             Years of jumping rope, playing dodge ball and selling hand-made necklaces made out of sea
        shell. Debating the death penalty in the universities while impatiently awaiting our new “bay-
        ram” 17 clothes. Nurturing ourselves only with domestic products, and participating in torchlight
        festivities. Trying to shape our breasts with teacups. Voluntary dim outs, waiting on huge lines
        for gas. Some learned to read with the words: “Strike Here”. As gun shots were fired in front of
        the local Soup-Shops, we turned on our electric-radios and waited for them to warm up. Birds
        rested on telegraph lines. We wore hoop skirts and crazily munched sun flower seeds. We had
        neighbors with classic names like Nebahat, Müzeyyen or Münevver. We continuously wrote com-
        positions and hunted flies with plastic gadgets. We screamed “All You Need is Love” while properly
        humming “As Night Falls Sorrow Becomes Me Again” 18 according to tune…
             (Certain times happened, certain times didn’t. Disabled needles were stuck and impeccable
        scars appeared. Certain lies were told, certain games were played).

   12. Deniz Başar, Performative Publicness, cit.
   13. Hareket Atolyesi, online: http://hareketatolyesi.blogspot.com/2008/11/hareket-atolyesi.html. Accessed July 3,
2018.
   14. aHHval/cirCUMstances. Directed by Zeynep Günsür, 2012. Online: http://vimeo.com/33778447. Accessed July 2,
2018.
   15. Sander Bax et al., Introduction, in Id. (edited by), Interrupting the City: Artistic Constitutions of the Public Sphere, Valiz,
Amsterdam 2015, p. 13.
   16. My analysis here is based on the recording of the performance: aHHval/cirCUMstances, cit.
   17. A word that refers to national and religious celebrations in Turkey.
   18. A song in the style of classical Ottoman music, sung by famous singers like Müzeyyan Senar and Zeki Müren.
A Feminist Archeology of Collective Memory in Turkey. A Retrospective Look on Works of Movement Atelier (...)   203




             Post scriptum: The work deals with the re-writing of the history from a civil and personal
        angle. With history we mean the “past moment” which includes even the past hour, and with
        civil and personal angle, a form of playing in which we include autonomous apprehension and
        resistance. 19

      This description is as accurate as it is poetic. Everything mentioned in these two small paragraphs
are embodied in various ways through the movement and text of the performance. The minimalistic
use of language seen in this description is used as an aesthetic tool throughout the performance, which
results in poetic honesty. In this section, I will analyze the movements’ syntax and vocabularies, along
with soundscapes accompanying the scenes under thematic clusters (with the exception of opening and
closing scenes which will be noted chronologically in the text).
      Through the performance of cirCUMstances, domestic and urban settings are cited with very few
objects and gestures. A domestic setting, for example, is cited with a table that has an ashtray and white
lace tablecloth on top, accompanied by two chairs and a coat hanger with a red umbrella on it. All of
these objects are semiotically very readable to Turkish audiences who might have the exact same objects
with the same arrangement in their homes. Urban settings are cited with the same type of minimalism:
through holding an umbrella or by performers trying to run away from rain while the sound effect of
heavy rain is heard in the background. The stage is cited as itself through the use of microphones and
direct address of performers to the audience. Scene transitions are seamless with very creative touches
like the use of film-frame type of still visuals that are created by multiple performers posing within the
continuity of one action, as if each performer is actually the same body in different temporalities. This
minimalism, smoothness in transitions, and overlapping citations of-the-domestic, of-the-public, and
of-the-stage serves as a major tool to excavate the collective subconscious of the audience.
      In the opening scene of the performance, this memory excavation is visualized in a cited domestic
setting: two performers move the table at the front of the stage and reveal a sleeping woman in fetal
position underneath the table, who must have been there before the audience arrived. This image –
hiding under the table – reminds us of the common game of home-making by children, who invent
structures such as tents out of table cloths or pillows to hide under or within. These spaces provide
a womb or a protective shell within the physical reality of the family home, which might at times
be hauntingly bigger than the reality of the child. This is the reason why when the woman in fetal
position wakes up, she stares at the audience in fear. Following this, the sound of rain starts rumbling
and intensifies in the sound system of theatre. Before holding the umbrella above her head to protect
herself from the rain sounds, she first holds the open umbrella in front of her for a moment, protecting
herself from the gaze of the audience.
      Throughout the performance, the interbreeding of masculine-gendered public and feminine-

   19. aHHval, in «Hareket Atolyesi», 11 Sept. 2009, online: http://hareketatolyesi.blogspot.com/2009_09_06_archive.
html. Accessed July 6, 2018.
204                                                                                               Deniz Başar




gendered private spheres of Turkey with each other creates absurdities, or (in a Brechtian rhetoric)
the defamiliarization effect, which creates countless moments of uncomfortable laughter among the
audience. Many famous and nostalgic commercial jingles since the 1960s (like Etibör biscuits to Efes
beer), famous state-discourses repeated in media and schools, and slogans of left wing resistance mo-
vements are revived along with the intergenerational personal testimonies of the performers. These
testimonies are mixed with the histories of private and public life in Turkey, infused with what was
repeated in daily life and in media for different generations. For example, the songs that were played on
the radio from You are my sunshine to Olur mu böyle olur mu? Kardeş kardeşi vurur mu? (En: How can
this be? Can a brother shoot another brother?) are quoted, the latter being a highly political song from late
1950s which was sung against the Menderes regime before the May 27, 1960 military coup. A famous
phrase that marked one of the first large-scale civil disobedience acts in Turkey against the Menderes
regime: «555K —- on the 5th day of the 5th month at 5 o’clock at Kızılay Square» is quoted along with
the song, which were both used for mobilization purposes. The referred memories include the infamous
1st of May demonstrations in 1977 where 34 people were killed by possible state-related provocateurs
who started shooting at people from on top of a hotel roof facing where the demonstration was taking
place in Taksim Square 20 . Intermingled with all these political and public memories presented through
personal reminiscences of performers, are also phrases that were repeated in domestic life of the nation
like mothers telling (or shouting) to the their children: «don’t step on the floor bare feet, you will get
a stomachache!». There are movement choreographies that go with these testimonies, which broaden
the meaning of the testimony by embodying the memory, like hula hooping, rope games, or military
steps.
        There are famous Turkish women writers cited and performed throughout the play like the late
Ottoman and early Republican thinker Halide Edip Adıvar, and Tezer Özlü, who had written about
growing up in Turkey as a woman in the 1950s in her confessionalist narratives. While Halide Edip
is shown tiptoeing in a light square as she is being harassed by two demonic show girls, Tezer Özlü’s
lines are read by a performer who is trying to stand in a push-up position. In the quoted section from
Halide Edip’s autobiography, she tells how she was threatened with death in an unsigned letter while
she was writing for a progressive newspaper. Until that point in the scene, the demonic showgirls only
dance to the rhythm of the speech of the red-dressed performer who is quoting Halide Edip’s lines,
but after the death threat they start getting closer to the red-dressed performer and start harassing
her in their amplified playfulness. Tezer Özlü’s section opens with childhood memories of her father
forcing all of his children to wake up in the morning by pretending to be an army general. The push-
up position is a very minimalist choice to demonstrate exactly this image: a female body trapped in

      20. Which is also the place where the Gezi Park Resistance happened throughout June 2013.
A Feminist Archeology of Collective Memory in Turkey. A Retrospective Look on Works of Movement Atelier (...)   205




a challenging military position, who tries to speak her mind while dealing with that burden. In both
these scenes, movement dramaturgies reveal the difficulties that these women intellectuals faced in
Turkey both in their private and public interactions. These texts also give very personal histories of the
late Ottoman Empire and emerging Republic of Turkey, which inevitably contradicts with the official
national narratives of that history.
      Among the cited movements, there are childhood games like various hand games or rope games
that girls used to play for many decades. There is even a scene where a pseudo-Turkish folk dance is
danced accompanying the Turkish folk song Ceviz Oynamaya Geldim [En: I came to play the walnut
game]. The music and certain folk dance groupings on stage, which have been used for children and
teenagers’ school-based folk dance performances for many decades, places the atmosphere of the scene
in a Turkish folk dance setting but this setting is subverted constantly with movement citations from
contemporary culture of last few decades. These citations vary from runway models posing at the end
of their walk, to John Travolta’s dance from Saturday Night Fever in slow motion, to Moulin Rouge
type show girls. There is even an occasion in the dance where the defamiliarization effect is taken one
step further and all the performers pull the transparent petticoats that they had been wearing through
various scenes over their heads. This allows the performers to look like a bouquet of flowers, or fragile
semi-vertebrated sea creatures like tunicates. In this occasion, through creating this amorphous semi-
transparent sea creature that responds to the music, they no longer cite anything other than themselves,
their collective, and the stage.
      CirCUMstances use two very particular performance tools on stage to distance the audiences from
(what Lauren Berlant calls) the «cruel optimism» of Turkey’s official/neutralized public memory 21 .
«Cruel Optimism» is what happens when the object of longing in optimism is misplaced and the opti-
mist longing results in creating a deceptive shelter to hide from reality 22 . These moments of defamilia-
rization from cruel optimism particularly takes place when female performers’ bodies rapidly oscillate
between affectionate and abject. The tools of this defamiliarization are, as I named them, voicelessness
and mouth-full.
      There are three occasions where this voicelessness is used in different sociopolitical contexts to bring
different clichés to the surface. In the first scene, three performers simultaneously acting out different
body languages of stereotypical female singers from different decades cannot find their voices just when
they are about to sing. The second scene is a very short moment that ties two larger scenes together:
in this moment a young smiling performer enters with a microphone and a large sheet of paper in
her hand. This moment builds up the expectation that she would announce something, but she ends
up walking pass the audience by making a large o-shape on the stage without stopping. Later in the

   21. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2011.
   22. Ivi, p. 1.
206                                                                                              Deniz Başar




performance, the same scene is repeated, where this time the same performer is called from backstage
by another performer who sounds a lot like a mother calling her child to come to the living room.
The young performer then responds with a disappointed «I’m coming» before leaving the stage. In
the most memorable scene where this technique is used, there is a performer who very slowly and
very accurately cites a long text from Tanıl Bora’s social science book Lynch Regime of Turkey, while
two other performers gift-wrap the talking performer entirely with pink ribbons. These two packaging
performers are wearing lip shaped pincushions (with pins on them) on their mouths like little masks to
painfully mute them. In all these scenes, the expectation to hear something from these silent characters
is played upon, however ultimately each of these scenes end with the disappointment of silence.
      In the mouth-full section I will discuss three scenes. The first one is a solo scene where a performer
comes to the stage backwards, wearing a delicate long dress, and starts singing a nostalgic Turkish song.
She then slowly turns to the audience to reveal the absurdity: her mouth is full of small marshmallows
which makes her voice somewhat hoarse and forces her to spill the stuff in her mouth as she pushes
the lyrics out along with the marshmallows. The visual performance contrasts everything in the scene:
the romantic love song, her dreamy looks, her white dress, and longing body language. In another
scene, three performers in chemises come to the stage, pick up their microphones, and each one of
them starts talking about a variety of topics from the 2001 national economic crisis, to the IMF, to
images; all without listening or understanding each other. What they are saying are political clichés.
As the cacophony continues, they constantly stuff their mouths with gum, and, after a certain point,
they start making bubbles with the gum as they try to talk. The most memorable scene in which the
mouth-full technique is used is when one of the performers is trying to cite a long text from Feroz
Ahmad’s political history book Turkey the Quest for Identity, more specifically a section about the 1980
bloody military coup and its aftermath. As she is trying to explain this, the other performer sitting in
front of her shows signs of boredom and gets a pot full of yogurt and starts eating it. She then tries
to silence her by trying to feed her from the pot of yogurt. The lecturing performer inevitably spills
the yogurt as she continues on talking. The other performer in the meantime collects the spilt yogurt
from her shoulder and arms in an attempt to try and feed her the spilled yogurt again. She even holds
the spoon right in front of her mouth and sticks out her own tongue to make her lick the spoon.
The scene is absurd and abject at the same time: while the spoon and yogurt almost inevitably calls
phallic connotations (of the phallus and ejaculation), the act itself (feeding someone) seems motherly
and affectionate (at least in the first glance). The multiple contradictions in this scene reveal a forceful
tool of silencing through both its phallic connotation and its overt motherly affection that denies the
agency of the other person.
      Both these tools, voicelessness and mouth-full, are used to reveal the cruel optimisms within femi-
nine domestic and masculine public spheres. In the domestic realm, these are the feminine stereotypes
A Feminist Archeology of Collective Memory in Turkey. A Retrospective Look on Works of Movement Atelier (...)   207




and standard notions of romantic love and family. In the masculine realm, it is political clichés like lea-
dership cults, or faith in military intervention, or the justification of lynching which drove Turkey into
many social catastrophes. These cruel optimisms are revealed through demonstrating their crippling
and abject nature, respectively via voicelessness and mouth-full.
      In some other scenes the violence of the feminine domestic, and dreams of stereotypical romance
are visualized as the route to a dangerous escapism of denial. For example, there is a scene where there
are two performers on stage, one under a spotlight and the other on the dim side of the stage, but still
visible. The performer under the spotlight gives a short and poetic monologue, which implies that she
wants to escape from the mundanity of a domestic life with a romantic partner that she passionately
loves and can even die for. While she is giving this monologue, the other performer seems to be busy
with mundane housework. She is sewing a little piece of cloth and answers the performer under the
spotlight with a visibly unengaged voice and body language, repeating the same phrase, saying «you
are right» over and over. Her unengaged repetition works as a silencing tool, almost a sort of demand
to shut up the other performer, and to make sure that she leaves her alone in her very important daily
tasks. These you-are-rights are well known to Turkish audiences; it is the unengaged, exhausted, and
defeatist middle-class mother who thinks her daughter would inevitably only repeat her mother’s life.
Once the first performer finishes her monologue, the sewing performer leaves, then a male performer
comes onto the stage for the first and only time in the performance. His presence on stage almost feels
out of place. We see him caressing the woman performer’s face with what seems to be puppet hands
and kissing her cheek lovingly. But as he slowly moves away from her, he leaves one of his hands on
her cheek as the puppet arm extends while he slowly moves backstage. We then witness the female
performer slowly being pulled backstage with this puppet arm as she doesn’t want to let it go, as if
an imaginary or long finished love affair is drowning her. This visualizes the cruel optimism of this
romantic dream that cannot be supported in her reality.
      Similarly the cruel optimism of the Turkish-style stereotypical romance, set by classic Turkish
movies from the 1960’s-70’s, are cited multiple times through the performance. In these movies, pla-
tonic love is the best kind of love, and anything to do with bodily desires are dishonorable, morally
corrupt, and has nothing to do with love because they are dirty and carnal in nature. In various scenes,
well-known clichés from those movies like the «bad girl laugh», or still-recycled classic phrases like
«you are as beautiful as you are insolent» are quoted. There is even an amazingly absurd scene in the
performance when a full scene from a famous Turkish movie from 1965, Sevmek Zamanı (En: Time to
Love), played in its entirety as group choreography. In this scene there is a TV set on stage that shows
the scene from the original movie. In the movie, there is a man and a woman on the edge of a cliff
under a giant tree where the woman is trying to persuade the man to love her. The man insists that he
is only in love with her picture (which he saw before her) but not her. He says he wants to stay in love
208                                                                                             Deniz Başar




with her picture only, since the picture is never changing and constant. This classic scene, with all its
melodrama and aggressively uncommunicative platonic love, is simultaneously played by seven perfor-
mers on stage wearing identical raincoats to each other and characters on screen. The male character is
acted by four performers and the female character is acted by three performers. The performers do not
speak the lines, but the dialogue is heard (and seen) from the TV set. What performers do on stage is
to mimic the exact same choreography of movements that the two characters in the movie scene act,
but because there is a group of them doing this, it becomes a large group choreography. The purpose
of this is to enlarge the scene, and to underline the absurdity of it through the choreographic repetition
of multiple bodies doing the same thing. Once the audience grasps the simultaneous nature of the
scene (with the TV set and performers on stage), they start laughing with a Brechtian defamiliarization
effect, and the scene gets applause from the audience at the end.
      There are also playful engagements with the audience that demolish the – already permeable –
fourth wall completely. For example, at the beginning of one of the scenes, two performers take two
chairs for the upcoming scene from among the audience seats, which in turn results in momentary
negotiations of movement with the sitting audience members to create enough space to take the chair.
In another scene, in which the performers beforehand distributed flashlights, the audience is made
responsible for lighting the stage by turning the flashlights on each time they hear the music play. Each
time the music plays performers’ movements on stage abruptly stops as they try to freeze in a pose; and
each time music is paused the hasty movements of performers are heard from within the completely
darkened stage. The music choice in this scene is a potpourri of the opening scores from American TV
series and films that impacted Turkey since the 1980s such as Dallas, Mission Impossible, The Muppet
Show, Jaws, and SpongeBob Squarepants. Just like other music and movement citations from mostly
American, more broadly Western media, these choices add to the illustration of the palimpsest-like
nature of Turkish modernity, which has grafted many modernities and counter-modernities on top of
each other throughout the last century and half.
      As a part of its audience engagement, cirCUMstances also plays with the gaze of the audience by
returning it, and queers the taken-for-granted assumptions of this gaze. For example, there is a moment
where all the performers come to stage and stare at the audience intensely for almost half a minute, until
they start addressing the audience with soft whispers as if they were talking to a lover in an intimate
space. These whispers are phrases like «my lover, my dear», «my beloved», «welcome my life», «my
dearest, my only one», «what a beauty you are», and so on. As these exclamations of love and affection
overlap in repetition, they slowly engage the audience while simultaneously getting louder. Their body
languages slowly build into gestures that demonstrate they want to squeeze the cheeks of the audience,
pat them, and kiss them. This continues until it gets uncomfortable, and even aggressive in relation to
the traditional passivity of the audience. They move to front stage until the stage light borders their
A Feminist Archeology of Collective Memory in Turkey. A Retrospective Look on Works of Movement Atelier (...)    209




movement and suddenly stop as their own voices – now disembodied and coming as a pre-recorded
cacophony from the sound system – takes over, while they return back to their expressionless faces.
This alienates the audience from the aggressive affection they had just been showered with. In another
scene, all the performers enter the stage from different parts, all of them are wearing only one slipper.
They slowly approach the audience and finally, when they are very close, they take off their slippers
and make a gesture of throwing the slipper at the audience – a very typical reactionary punishment
method for mothers in Turkey. In another short scene, the gaze is turned back to the audience directly
when a performer comes on stage and sets up a camera with a tripod, counts 3-2-1 with her hand, and
takes a picture of the audience.
      In the last scene, all the performers come to stage and dance in cabaret style to a children’s song
recorded in the 1960s. The dance accompanying the song has small and playful vignettes acted by two
of the performers in the middle of the stage, such as one kissing the hand of the other (the gesture of
respect for elders in Turkey) in very exaggerated manners, while the other poses to be superior. The
sections of this song include a clapping game that little girls play with each other in school gardens,
which ends with an additional playful slapping of each other on cheeks as each slap leads the slapped
performer to make a full turn around herself, following the full circular motion initiated by the slap.
The song finishes with the routine sounds of the gramophone after the song is over. The performers
continue the action they are stuck with at the end of the song – the slight wiggling of their bodies up
and down – to the rhythm of the gramophone’s empty sizzles while continuing to intensely stare at the
audience.



International Comparisons

      Quoting the bodies from mundane circumstances is not a new thing in Western contempora-
ry dance. Laermans, in his 2015 book Moving Together: Theorizing and Making Contemporary Dance,
mentions that in the recent years Western contemporary dance relatively institutionalized «the cita-
tion of mundane movements» 23 , which each choreographer from William Forsythe, Anne Teresa De
Keersmaeker to Jérôme Bel 24 , had used differently. Laermans explains the context and practice of this
citing process as follows:

            Our existing potentiality to act corporeally is selectively structured through the various body
        techniques and disciplines that were used in our youth to impart on us how to sit still, walk pro-
        perly or behave civilized. In a similar way, learning to become a dancer is to acquire a thoroughly
        cultured body, one whose generic potentiality to move has been changed into an always particular
        ability to dance. […] An existing potential is therefore by definition marked by a culture’s nor-

   23. Rudi Laermans, Moving Together: Theorizing and Making Contemporary Dance, Valiz, Amsterdam 2015, p. 63.
   24. Ivi p. 63.
210                                                                                                           Deniz Başar




            mative codification of some possibilities as truly human, at the expense of others. The selection
            comes down to complexity reduction, and is at once contingent and unavoidable. 25


        Therefore, it can be said that «[c]ultural forms, norms, and rules subject the body and bring it
about as a dancing body in the process. By negotiating body and cultural practices the dancers are
turned into subjects» 26 . Laemans also mentions that the artistic practice of such choreographers who
quote mundanities of «the cultured» body on stage, creates an «egalitarian spirit that levels down the
hierarchic difference between highly skilled and ordinary movement […] thus linked to an artistic
politics of perception» 27 . This egalitarian spirit truly supports a work like cirCUMstances, considering
that the political aim of the work is to excavate the subconscious of the public memory – making it
quite useful to quote bodies that have constructed precisely that. Elaborating predominantly on the
three contemporary Western choreographers that Rudi Laermans mentions, some parallels with their
works and Movement Atelier’s works can be drawn to theoretically frame the movement and staging
vocabulary of Movement Atelier.
        For example, Jérôme Bel works with untrained bodies and with people of different ages, ethni-
cities, races, and with disabled people. His work was once described as: «No more dancing queens
and princes with Jérôme Bel, but people that are transformed by their dancing» 28 . Considering that
Movement Atelier was the first group in Turkey to use unconventional female bodies on dance stage
like elderly women, the «transform[ation] by their dancing» is as relevant as it is to the case of Bel. As
demonstrated in case of cirCUMstances, elderly female body is rediscovered as a medium of expression
which can show a strong dance presence on stage as much as the young female body; and can even
become a preferable option to demonstrate the erosion of embodied patriarchal private and public
cultures of Turkey, which is one of the major themes of Movement Atelier.
        Reminding that Movement Atelier’s dance performances were a product of the alternative thea-
tre movement in Istanbul, which was primarily signified by the usage of black box stages 29 , it can be
said that the architectural shift in the performance space allowed a different performative experience
as much as a new spectatorship experience in Turkey. The combination of these factors allowed for
different and unprofessional/unconventionally-trained bodies to enter the field of modern dance. Si-
milarly, both Jérôme Bel and William Forsythe graft different dances onto each other, and do not fear
from creating a rehearsal-like atmosphere on stage. Where Bel sequences together ballet movements,
waltzes, and moonwalks in the same piece 30 ; Forsythe would «occasionally slip into jazz and street

      25.   Ivi, pp. 54-55.
      26.   Gerald Siegmund, Jérôme Bel: Dance, Theatre, and the Subject, Palgrave, Basingstoke 2017, p. 6.
      27.   Rudi Laermans, Moving Together: Theorizing and Making Contemporary Dance, cit., p. 64.
      28.   Gerald Siegmund, Jérôme Bel, cit., p. 3.
      29.   Deniz Başar, Performative Publicness, cit.
      30.   Gerald Siegmund, Jérôme Bel, cit., p. 6.
A Feminist Archeology of Collective Memory in Turkey. A Retrospective Look on Works of Movement Atelier (...)           211




dance forms such as breaking and body popping, which are frequently mixed with ballet vocabula-
ry» 31 . When these grafted movements are presented in an unfamiliar theatrical space that does not
architecturally guide the audience gaze in one direction – as Forsythe himself comments – «It forces
you to re-examine those things [that you take for granted, which perhaps you’ve stopped seeing] and
say “… what are these things?”» 32 .
      Also, occasionally, in Jérôme Bel’s career there are pieces in which he built his choreographic prac-
tice solely on literary texts, where literature replaces music as the initial inspiration and shape-giver of
the dance practice. For example, his collaborative work Lenz with Caterina Sagna in 1990 (in Venice),
was based in a novella by the German writer Georg Büchner. Bel defines the process as «[f ]or the first
time I made a direct connection between movement and the text. The entire choreography was based
on language and there was not a single movement that was accidental» 33 . The process described here is
very much in parallel with what Movement Atelier does with literary and social sciences texts, especially
in scenes that are based on texts of literature (like «demonic show girl» style section of the performance
created in response to the meaning and soundscape of Halide Edip Adıvar’s autobiographical text).
Again, in parallel to the political consciousness of Movement Atelier, which excavates public memory
and wide-spread political discourses, William Forsythe’s 1992 piece Alien/a(c)tion in Ballett Frankfurt
was «inspired by the wave of xenophobia that swept across Germany at the time, hatred directed to-
wards Turkish families and other immigrants» 34 . However, among these three Western contemporary
choreographers noted by Laermans 35 , Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s work is the one that is most
directly comparable to Movement Atelier, especially with pieces like Rosas Danst Rosas, which engage
and confront gendered nature of mundane body movements:


             When the dancers in Rosas Danst Rosas touch themselves, running hands through hair, or
        adjusting a tee-shirt, these actions draw attention to the performers’ gender and sexuality. These
        are distinctly feminine gestures; slipping one or both shoulders of a tee-shirt off and back on,
        throwing a head of long hair forward or backward, cupping a breast with a hand. They are repeated
        rhythmically and absorbed into the repetitive unison choreographic patterns. Since the dancers are
        all doing the same, they vividly illustrate the American queer theorist Judith Butler’s (1990) claim
        that gender is a performative act that is learned, rather than constructed through seeing oneself as
        with or without the phallus. In this sense they challenge the dominance and role of the visual in
        the construction of gendered subjects. The occasional looks, smiles and nods exchanged between
        performers, and performers and camera, suggest that they are enjoying themselves and perhaps
        paradoxically illustrate Irigaray’s claim that «woman takes more pleasure from touching than from

    31. Valerie A. Briginshaw, Architectural spaces in the choreography of William Forsythe and De Keersmaeker’s Rosas Danst
Rosas, in Id., Dance, Space and Subjectivity, Palgrave, Basingstoke 2009, p. 187.
    32. Ivi, p. 187.
    33. From Gerald Siegmund, Jérôme Bel, cit., p. 6, translated by the Gerald Siegmund; and the original quote is from:
Pierre Hivernat, C’est Jérôme, in «Les Inrockuptibles», 14: XII–XIII, 1999.
    34. Gerald Siegmund,Of monsters and puppets: William Forsythe’s work after the “Robert Scott Complex”, in Steven Spier
(edited by), William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography, Routledge, New York 2011, pp. 20-37.
    35. Rudi Laermans, Moving Together: Theorizing and Making Contemporary Dance, cit., p. 63.
212                                                                                                              Deniz Başar




        looking» 36 ). The dancers’ looks to each other and to camera signifying enjoyment operate in
        different ways. When looking at each other, it is as if they are saying: “Are you ready? Then here
        we go” 37 , a sense of camaraderie is expressed. Occasionally looks between performers seem to be
        more overtly sexual. De Keersmaeker and another dancer perform the same phrase, one standing
        in the foreground, the other on a raised area behind, they have their backs to each other. They each
        pull their tee- shirt off a shoulder, pull it back on, turn and look at each other half smiling. They
        then slip both shoulders of their tee-shirts off and on and exchange glances again as if sharing a sign
        or code. When dancers look to camera while slipping their tee-shirts off the shoulder or running
        their hands through their hair, they seem coy or narcissistic, but because they repeat the actions,
        they are clearly ‘performed’. Feminine codes are being played with, resulting in a parody of the
        kind of femininity constructed by the visual, that Irigaray claims consigns woman to passivity «to
        be the beautiful object of contemplation» 38 .

      As the second half of the quote explains; this particular gendered solidarity, which is the solidarity
of women living within a patriarchal world is always made visible as a conscious choice in these feminist
modern dance performances. The gazes and nods in Rosas Danst Rosas reveal a shared resilience among
the female performers, which becomes bigger than the sum of the bodies on stage as the audience
slowly starts decoding the «codes» of their gendered and amplified gestures. This shared resilience and
performers’ visibly being very aware and supportive of each other was materialized in cirCUMstances
also; which was technically a very different performance with much more space for improvisation,
compared to tightly structured movements of professional dancers in Rosas Danst Rosas.
      Another reoccurring aspect of audience engagement in cirCUMstances – in parallel with all the
cited Western choreographers’ work – is challenging the audiences with what can be described as «re-
turning the gaze». The gaze of the audience, described as an «uncontrollable multitude and a panoptic,
disciplining Master Eye» by Rudi Laermans, is «anything but neutral» 39 and «[t]he bond between dan-
cers and audiences forged by inner mimicry or meta-kinesis is broken by the gaze of the spectator» 40 .
It is not a coincidence that other Western female choreographers like Yvonne Rainer therefore often
talked about «the “problem” of performance» 41 or «the “seeing” difficulty of movement that had to
be addressed in the performance itself» 42 . One of the ways to address this particular «seeing difficul-
ty» in the gendered preconditions of a female ensemble is simply to return the audience gaze, since
«[t]he looking is profoundly marked by the dominant heterosexual gender script and vastly structures
by the standardized expectations [...]» 43 . In the moments when this masculine and heteronormative

    36. Source of the quote within the text: Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, Athlone Press, London 1985.
    37. Source of the quote within the text: Marianne Van Kerkhoven, The Dance of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, in «The
Drama Review», n. 103, Fall 1984, pp. 98–104.
    38. Valerie A. Briginshaw, Dance, Space and Subjectivity, cit., p. 197.
    39. Rudi Laermans, Moving Together: Theorizing and Making Contemporary Dance, cit., p. 155.
    40. Gerald Siegmund, Jérôme Bel, cit., p. 28.
    41. Source of the quote within the text: Yvonne Rainer, A Quasi Survey of Some “Minimalist” Tendencies in the Quanti-
tatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A, in Gregory Battcock (edited by), Minimal Art. A
Critical Anthology, University of California Press, Berkeley 1995, pp. 263–273.
    42. Gerald Siegmund, Jérôme Bel, cit., p. 28
    43. Rudi Laermans, Moving Together: Theorizing and Making Contemporary Dance, cit., p. 155.
A Feminist Archeology of Collective Memory in Turkey. A Retrospective Look on Works of Movement Atelier (...)                    213




gaze is returned «[…] the collective gaze [that] operates during a performance with an often uncon-
scious effectiveness» 44 is made visible, therefore cannot be taken for granted as «neutral» any more.
Confrontation of this claiming-to-be-neutral gaze in a performance space allows a performance like
cirCUMstances to carve space for the feminine in the public life of Turkey.
      Looking for non-Western international comparisons, I was only able to find few documented
feminist dance works comparable to the body of works of Movement Atelier, where a group of women
simultaneously quote, subvert, and superpose taken-for-granted assumptions, body languages, and va-
rious dance moves of their own societies. The two examples I found were both from diasporic Indian
women’s collectives.
      One of these works is documented in an article by Torsa Ghosal and Kaustavi Sarkar, where a
group of Indian women, dancers, and scholars deconstructed the traditional dance Sakhya. This was
done in order to present a «herstory» of the epic it was based on, through a queer, empowering, and
liberating re-imagining of this dance 45 . Even though Movement Atelier’s works are not based on such
narrative traditional dances like Sakhya, there is a practical similarity in what Ghosal and Sarkar define
in their article (for the context of India) to the practice and political standing of Movement Atelier (for
the context of Turkey). Ghosal and Sarkar explain the working process of making of this performance
as follows: «[…] through Herstories and this article we stress the collective potential inherent in Sakhya.
It unifies five non-uniform body types and disparate dance trainings. The moment becomes infinite in
its shared possibilities » 46 .
      The other – more established – example, again emerging from an Indian female diasporic expe-
rience, is the body of work done by Shobana Jeyasingh. Jeyasingh mostly works with Indian female
dancers and generally performs in «a mixture of vocabulary from contemporary dance and the traditio-
nal, Indian classical dance form of Bharata Natyam», and breaks and grafts «West/East and male/female
binaries […] suggesting the possibility of a rethought, contemporary, urban, female subjectivity» 47
through her choreographies. Jeyasingh also once defined her intention as to create «an icon of Indian
womanhood... appropriate to urban women in the 1990s» 48 . For example, in Duets with Automobiles
(1993), she achieves her aim by blurring the lines of public and private, doing what «she has metapho-
rically described as “making a bedroom” out of the “awesome public building” of the classical language

     44. Ivi, p. 156.
     45. Torsa Ghosal – Sarkar Kaustavi, Baar Baar Sakhi – In Search of the Queer Temporalities of Sakhya, in Niharika Banerjea
et al. (edited by), Friendship as Social Justice Activism: Critical Solidarities in a Global Perspective, Seagull Books, London 2018,
pp. 92-114.
     46. Ivi, p. 108.
     47. Valerie A. Briginshaw, Hybridity and nomadic subjectivity in Shobana Jeyasingh’s Duets with Automobiles, in Id., Dance,
Space and Subjectivity, cit., p. 97.
     48. Ibidem.
   214                                                                                                Deniz Başar




   of Bharata Natyam» 49 . Similar to Movement Atelier, Jeyasingh utilizes literary texts in relation to her
   dance work, such as the references to Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands (1991) in the monograph
   accompanying Jeyasingh’s Romance with... footnotes video 50 .
           The rarity of these non-Western examples makes Movement Atelier’s work unique at the interna-
   tional level, considering that mundanities of non-Western societies are not «cited» very often in the field
   of contemporary dance, despite the «relative institutionalization» 51 of the practice in the West. As a
   final word, it can be said that Movement Atelier not only excavates and subverts the public-masculine-
   official memory of Turkey, but also retells and reconstructs it from the civil-feminine-domestic per-
   spective. Movement Atelier is therefore unique in terms of returning the pressuring narratives and body
   cultures of the establishment, which is the Turkish masculine public history, by revealing its absurdity
   through gazing at it with insistence, creative power and intergenerational female solidarity.



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