Paper Presented on February 7, 2016 in “Festival of Original Theatre: Staging Realities”, organized by Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies in University of Toronto What Allegory Means for Reality: A Case Study on the Play Funeral of the Acrobat Funeral of the Acrobat is a play written by Firuze Engin and directed by Berfin Zenderlioğlu as a production of IkinciKat theatre in Istanbul. The play was written and produced under unique circumstances that couldn’t come together before the summer of 2014. IkinciKat is a blackbox stage run by young theatre artists settled in the heart of cosmopolitan Istanbul, in Beyoglu. IkinciKat is one of the stages and ensembles that I referred as the “second generation” in my Master’s thesis where I attempted to write a history of theatres in Turkey which differentiate from commercial or institutional theatres; ideologically and artistically. It is important to keep in mind that Funeral of the Acrobat, just like all the theatre works produced by these groups, had been a selfsufficient one. Now I will describe the background of the artistic project that Funeral of the Acrobat was produced in. This is a project that started with IkinciKat theatre company’s initiative as an attempt to do theatre in the summer season, which is known to be a dead season for theatre in Turkey. The project was named as #Tomorrow’sPlays. Sami Berat Marcali, as the artistic director of #Tomorrow’sPlays project, first gathered a group of theatre artists from Istanbul. They were four playwrights, four directors and a group of actors who got invited. There had been an open survey on internet with the spectators of IkinciKat who are signed to their email-news bulletin. Through the survey audiences picked the major theme of this summer theatre project as “transformation” among the four optional themes. Later the directors, authors and actors were clustered into four groups with lottery. This resulted with four plays, among which two of them, including the Funeral of the Acrobat, made it into the actual theatre season. Through this semichance based process, one of the most interesting projects in the contemporary theatre field of Turkey became possible as Firuze Engin, a young Turkish playwright woman from Western Turkey got matched with a young Kurdish woman director, Berfin Zenderlioglu. Berfin Zenderlioglu has an extensive directorial and performing experience from Destar Theatre and their stage Sermola Performans, which she runs with her partner Mirza Metin. They are the first well-known Kurdish theatre group who perform in Kurdish to Turkish audiences by using surtitles. Their aesthetic is a praxis-based one enrooted in their political theatre background, and they use practices of physical theatre, Kurdish story telling tradition called dengbej (which is like a musical version of the meddah performance I will describe later), and they usually operate in a theatrical tone of magic realism. In staging they generally use shadows, transparent panels, echoes, harsh whispers and real water as elements of play-making. Their staging techniques correspond to a remixed version of Artaudian and Grotowskian theatre among Western theatre theories. On the other hand, Firuze Engin is a playwright from the North West regions of Turkey known as Trakea, where the ancient city of Troy is in. She had her bachelor’s   1 degree in Theater department in Ankara University, with a degree in dramatic writing. She is one of the founders of Bereze Theatre group who specialize in children’s theatre, object theatre and clown. As a writer, the characters she writes always have a playful and lovable silliness. Engin’s tone flows with a childish and naïve narrative on the surface level but as a very strong dramatic writer, she manages to build this playfulness into something bigger then itself, always towards an allegory of contemporary Turkish society. These two women, one from the Westest end of the country, the other from the Eastest end; managed to make a modest masterpiece together. Zenderlioglu’s dark tone and experience with surrealist, physical stagings made Engin’s colorful, playful and lively characters grounded in their habitat. But beyond its local importance, the play is a very important counter statement against the Anglocentric current of the contemporary theatre world. I feel the need of defining this paradigmatic difference of the Funeral of the Acrobat from the beginning, before I analyze the story in parts and its relevance to contemporary Turkey. Funeral of the Acrobat stands in a place that is very true but vastly different from any authentic realism that the Western theatrical approach would nearly-automatically function in. Hans Blumberg gives a reference point about Western arts systems in the following quote: “At no time in the history of Western aesthetic theory has there been any serious departure from the tendency to legitimize the work of art in terms of its relation to reality.” (Blumenberg, 30) Theatre tradition in Turkey, on the other hand, never had such an obsession or at least not in this framework, which is important. The Funeral of the Acrobat is a selfdefined narrative text that narrates an urban transformation story in the microcosm of a small fictional seaside town in Western Turkey called Yapildak. It is staged with an unexpected mash of Western dialogic theatre and Anatolian solo performance tradition of public storytelling called meddah and motives adopted from traditional shadow puppetry. Two performers use the meddah technique to embody the eleven characters each including the narrators, where they tell and act the story without a fourth wall. Meddah differentiates the characters through body language and voice, and through the variety of usages he invents with a cloth and a stick. Traditionally meddah is a low class comedia performer, who travels in cities or through towns and gives performances in coffee shops or open market areas. The documented meddah performances are always presented by male performers but there is the potentiality of women performers who performed in domestic spaces which went undocumented. By using a woman performer, Seda Türkmen, as one of the meddahs, the Funeral of the Acrobat bravely queers the tradition as in several occasions both performers act the opposite sexes. In meddah tradition, meddah stands in the middle of a circular or semi circular audience and he tells a comedic story embodying the stock characters as he continues. This performing tradition also has close connections to the performance tradition known as orta oyunu, which can be translated as center play. In this form a group of performers act a comedic story with semi-improvisation through playing stock characters surrounded by audience members. It can be said that center play is a comparable theatrical form to the Italian Commedia Dell’Arte.   2 In the Funeral of the Acrobat, two meddahs who share the stage; act in front of a set designed with shadow images appearing in light screens behind them. Two meddahs sometimes go behind these screens and become a part of the shadows of the story and dissolve in this allegorical landscape. When the two performers act as a part of the shadow background, they pose like the famous shadow puppet characters, Hacivat and Karagöz. Especially in the scenes where they are acting as shadows they use the profile poses of these traditional shadow puppets and act the way these puppets act. Funeral of the Acrobat is acted without a fourth wall, just like the traditions it withdraws its technical material from. On the night I watched the play, one of the audience members needed to change her seat because the air condition was dripping water on her. The players asked if she was okay while they were still in character and waited for her to change her seat. Or; I was sitting in the very first seat when one of the performers started telling a very absurd part of the story with great seriousness. I laughed out loud and performer Ibrahim Haracoglu who had been narrating at that moment, turned to me and said: “oh no, it is not funny at all” without breaking the character, which made things even funnier. On the other hand Funeral of the Acrobat has a concrete dramatic structure with a chain of events layering from the most personal to the most super-structural where the fictional Western Thracian village Yapıldak slowly becomes a microcosm of the transformation of the Turkish society in the last decade. The name of the town Yapıldak, which means something like “to make”/ “on the process of making” comes from the foundation legend of the fictional town. Supposedly, the town was burned down by “enemies” many times but it was rescued and re-build each time. At the end of the play, Yapıldak gets destroyed completely to make a closed luxury gated community. Framed by the macropolitical changes in Turkey, especially the fast neoliberal land development policies of the current government; the audiences watch how the lives of the little people, and the micropolitics of their daily life change and adapt, without them even realizing what they are actually sacrificing. In a sense, Yapıldak exists in the same parallel universe of the planet Solaris of Stanislaw Lem, country of Uqbar of Jorge Luis Borges, or the town Macondo of Gabriel Garcia Márquez where allegory devours life and creates a habitat of truth beyond the stagnating pornography of our contemporary and mediatised “reality”. Funeral of the Acrobat is an allegorical text and an allegorical performance that captures an essence of a vast change that many people in Turkey go through together. And how does allegory work? What does it mean? And most significantly, what does it mean for capturing the reality? What does allegory do to our collective or singular experiences in the narration process that makes it unexpectedly accessible and relatable to many people? Here I will argue that allegory, through clearly siding with the metaphysical logic of the fiction, gestures towards two important things about grasping an experience: it underlines the anthropocentric and physical frame of the experience, and also gives an insight about its singularity through its conscious and clearly-stated fictional choices. Hannah “[…] Arendt, borrowing from Kant, calls an “enlarged mentality,” namely the capacity to think outside one’s own private point of view.” (Feldman, 242) According to Arendt this “enlarged mentality” comes with the precondition of using   3 metaphor, or in a sense “extended” metaphor, which is allegory. Allegory is a paradigmatic set of tools that helps people to think poetically and grasp a narrative, a frame, a backbone for their lonesome and fragmented experiences. Metaphors, allegories and more vastly, poetic thinking “[…] do not just enable us to voluntarily transcend the enclosure of our private minds; rather, they connect us to the world without an act of will on our part.” (Feldman, 239) Through framing the singular experiences, allegory functions as a counter hegemonic tool that estranges people to what they already neutralized or could not read anymore because it got way too fragmented in the mashed fluidity of the daily reality. Lastly, allegory works as a great semiotic tool of counter hegemonic fight with its ability to say one thing and mean another, or show a small thing and gesture towards the larger; which functions very well especially with oppressive regimes where artists are censored at best and imprisoned at worst. The play opens with the morning prayer call which is generally around 5 am in the morning. The two players appear on stage as the narrators, and declare that “Yesterday, Rasim Ismet Kocaman, known with his nickname Acrobat Rasim, left this world.” (Engin, translated by me). Then we start getting information from these two narrators on who Acrobat Rasim was. He was 82 years old, had a son and a daughter who are both married and each have a teenage son. After this brief introduction narrators transform into Acrobat Rasim’s two teenage grandsons, Rasim Emre and Ali Rasim who continue narrating what happened to their grandfather. Through their narration we get an insight about the family, the neighbors and the small seaside town. We learn that son of Rasim Ismet, Güray is married to a woman named Marika which indicates that she has Greek-Orthodox heritage. We also learn that Acrobat Rasim who died in the age of 82 was a very good person in his own way, for example he always fed the mad homeless of the town nick-named Püskül (meaning Tassel). Later it is indicated that this is probably a family, which came from Rumelia after the Republic of Turkey was established in 1923, when a majority of the Muslim people living in Greece and Balkans needed to immigrate to Turkey. There are many local jokes that place this family and characters in the contemporary Turkish society and history of Turkey which all give an insight about their possible background. Right before he dies, Rasim Ismet leaves his land title to his two children because he saw a nightmare, which was triggered by his consciousness. Rasim Ismet has been a religious man and he always suffered with the consciousness that he bought these lands for cheap from a Greek landowner who needed to leave fast, right before he immigrated to Greece. From these tiny details in the story we get the bigger frame of states, border changes, wars and forced immigrations which becomes the historical white noise of the entire text. Imaginary town of Yapildak slowly enlarges and the contemporary Turkish audiences start noticing their friends and relatives in this parade of shifting characters. We learn that Acrobat Rasim had been the main source of the town’s semi-resistance to the luxury site that has been being build, which is slowly devouring the traditional town. Acrobat Rasim was a well-loved and trusted man in the town and he was emotionally pressuring people not to sell their lands. He even made them swear that they won’t sell their lands by making them take an oath placing their hands on Quran. The children of Rasim Ismet; Günay and Senay, thought that their father would die in his last sleep that continued for days and they immediately betrayed the promises they gave to their father,   4 and they sold their lands to the real estate agencies. But then, we learn the reason of the nickname of Rasim Ismet, he has the capacity of turning back from death from the edge, he “tumbles” back to life, and that is why he is called Acrobat Rasim. When their father tumbles back to life, Günay and Senay does not have any idea how to explain what they have done to their father. When he over hears them talking, he first swears to his children and then he has a heart attack. He cannot tumble back from his own children’s betrayal. The betrayal continues, Rasim Ismet wanted to be buried in his own garden but now it is impossible, since the land is sold. The play presents a huge variety of details of the material process on how the food is cooked, which cleaning cloths should be used on floor and which clothes are made for different uses, the cleaning brands that should be used for different surfaces… The play deals with death in this absurd earthliness, as the text puts it out itself: “death is a deal of life also”. Islamic motives and death rituals overarch the entire process while these small, earthly, material details, envies and desires of common people present a nuanced variety of how life functions. A very good example of this earthliness can be seen in this short dialogue: Günay – My dear Hodja, I need to ask you something. My dad, when he was healthy, got his teeth done… Should we take his teeth or should we bury him the way God took him? Hodja Izzet – No. We don’t need to take his teeth out. Did he have any golden teeth? Your dad had a golden tooth I think. Günay – Yes he had, Hodja. Hodja Izzet – To prevent waste, we need to take that golden tooth out. (Engin, translated by me) Audience sees all the class distinctions being revealed as the story continues. Only middle classes and upper middle classes will be allowed into the secure Vefa site with their entrance cards. There is a word joke in the name of this closed community also, “vefa” means fidelity to people or things that a person has emotional debts to. Vefa site brings ecological disaster to the area. The enclosed site decided to have a sand beach in a place where the beaches are naturally filled with pebbles. They withdrew sand from the open sea and covered the beaches with sand. This caused whirlpool in the sea, so now no one can swim any further than ten meters into the open sea. Also there are strong summer-end winds in the town; with the unnatural sand on the beach, it becomes a sand storm. Also the site uses perfume-sprinkles in open areas that cast flower smells in the afternoons. What they didn’t foresee is the fact that it would withdraw many flies from the mountain close-by. The chaos in the play leads to a crescendo as the sand storm and the fly attack push everyone inside the funeral home. The people who are left out are the most vulnerable ones. Mad Püskül ends up eating a sand-filled plate since no one notices. The little immigrant boy who works in the graveyard and earns money by keeping the graves clean and by praying for the death when asked to, named Pale Abbas; takes a challenge with himself to swim to the open sea to struggle with the whirlpool. Pale Abbas made a game out of it and even though it is on-purposely left unsaid, it is felt that he probably dies in the whirlpool.   5 Acrobat Rasim’s children’s last betrayal to their father is ruining his reputation by making him into a person who would break a promise that he had given to people, since they can’t face the shame of their own decisions. Town’s people are made to believe that Acrobat Rasim sold his own land to the agencies because of a dream he saw where Hizir Efendi – a cultural Islamic saintly figure – visited him and told to do so; so town’s people immediately decide to break their oath also. To do that, they use the traditions of oath breaking where someone needs to break a piece of bread on top of your head. Marika breaks bread on top of the town’s folk’s head in the funeral home as the sand storm continues outside, so they can sell their land to the agencies. Play finishes with Marika giving birth to her second son who is named Rasim Ismet also, right at the morning ezan on the next day. The stage design made from shadow puppets change and tall apartments, cranes and earth diggers surround two performers. The world that baby Rasim Ismet will grow up in, is radically different than his grandfather’s. Funeral of the Acrobat got the prestigious Special Jury Award in National Afife Theatre Awards in 2015. I am going to finish this speech with Firuze Engin’s words quoted from her improvised speech that she gave in the award ceremony, which actually ties up everything I tried to articulate to you, today. A few days ago my dad, we were sitting and he said “my girl when you go up there, please do not say anything political”. But I will. I feel these days like: yes, there are horrible things happening in our lives, we go to the funerals of many innocent people every day, our public spaces are taken away from us, they are massacring the nature but we are very good-hearted people and we carry an endless hope inside us. We should share this hope with each other on stage or on street, when we go into public. I want to share something with you actually. We fought with arrogance, greed, fascism for so long that now we are slowly building a new world where no one will be humiliated because of their language, religion or race. That is why we should never lose our hope and we should keep fighting with art and on streets. (T. Delisi / Firuze Engin’s speech, translated by me)       6 Works Cited   Amacher, R. E., and V. Lange, eds. New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism. N.p.: Princeton University Press, 1977. Print. Blumenberg, Hans. 'The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel'   Arioglu, Ibrahim Ethem. "Gunumuzde Meddahlik." Diss. Gazi Universitesi, 2011. Print.   Basar, Deniz. "Performative Publicness Alternative Theater in Turkey After 2000s." MA thesis. Bogazici University, 2014. Print.   Engin, Firuze. Cambazin Cenazesi [Funeral of the Acrobat]. Istanbul: NotaBene Yayinlari, 2015. Print.   "Firuze Engin." Tiyatro Bereze. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Feb. 2016. <http://tiyatrobereze.com/en/teskilat/ts_firuze.php>.   Hamilton, Craig. "Allegory, blending, and censorship in modern literature." Journal of Literary Semantics 40.1 (2011): 23-42. Print.   Ikincikat. Cambazin Cenazesi. Vimeo. N.p., 2015. Web. 5 Feb. 2016. <https://vimeo.com/116095202>.   Ito, Kiyoko. "Turk Meddah Hikayeleri ile Japon Rakugolarinin (Nukteli Hikaye) Mukayesesi." Diss. Istanbul Universitesi, 2012. Print.   Jenckes, Kate. Reading Borges after Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History. Albany: State U of New York P, 2007. Print.   Joseph, Betty. "Neoliberalism and Allegory." Cultural Critique 82 (2012): 68-94. Print.   Kronegger, Marlies, and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, eds. Allegory Old and New: In Literature, the Fine Arts, Music and Theatre, and Its Continuity in Culture. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1994. Print.   Machosky, Brenda, comp. Thinking Allegory Otherwise. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. Print. Feldman, Karen. "On Vitality, Figurality, and Orality in Hannah Arendt".   Madsen, Deborah L. Allegory in America: From Puritanism to Postmodernism. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1996. Print.   Ozturk, Selda. "Kadin Kimligi Baglaminda Kulturel Bellek ve Van Merkezindeki Kadin Dengbejligi Yansimalari." MA thesis. Istanbul Teknik Universitesi, 2012. Print.   Puga, Ana Elena. Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theater: Upstaging Dictatorship. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.     7 Tambling, Jeremy. Allegory. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.   T. Delisi. Firuze Engin - 19. Afife Tiyatro Ödülleri 27.04.2015. Youtube. N.p., 27 Apr. 2015. Web. 6 Feb. 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz0L-j3XevU>.   Zenderlioglu, Berfin, dir. Cambazin Cenazesi. By Firuze Engin. Perf. Ibrahim Halacoglu and Seda Türkmen. IkinciKat-Karakoy, Istanbul. 6 June 2015. Performance.       8 What Allegory Means for Reality: A Case Study on the Play Funeral of the Acrobat Deniz Basar February 7, 2016 MAP SHOWING THE BLACKBOX STAGES ON ISTIKLAL AVENUE – MARCH 2012 2015 Afife Awards From left to right Berfin Zenderlioglu [director] Ibrahim Halacoglu [performer] Seda Türkmen [performer] Firuze Engin [playwright] Firuze Engin was given the Cevat Fehmi Baskut Special Award that is given to the playwrights. Reality? “At no time in the history of Western aesthetic theory has there been any serious departure from the tendency to legitimize the work of art in terms of its relation to reality.” (Blumenberg, 30) Amacher, R. E., and V. Lange, eds. New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism. N.p.: Princeton University Press, 1977. Print. Blumenberg, Hans. 'The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel' Meddah In the left and bottom images there is Kıvanç Nalça, acting as a modern Meddah in a performance about the life and works of Anatolian medieval travelling poet Yunus Emre (2013) A medieval miniature image of a Meddah https:// gantep.bel.tr/ etkinlik/yunusmeddah-gosterisitek-kisilikoyun-212.html http://www.hayalleme.com/istanbul-meddahhikayeleri/ http:// www.yakala.co/ istanbul/istanbuletkinlik-aktivite/tekkisilik-meddahgosterisi-yunus--firsati Distribution Of Characters Between The Two Players in the Funeral of the Acrobat Player 1 Player 2 Narrator One Ali Rasim Rasim İsmet Şenay Mayor Toothy Dilek Marika Püskül [Tassel] Hodja İzzet Voyage Muammer Skeleton Hasan Narrator Two Rasim Emre Günay Beyza Şerefe Pale Abbas [local language: “graveyard worker” Abbas] Tayfun Old Habibe Aunt Minnet Çelebi Haşim [local language: “courteous” Haşim] Merve Ortaoyunu [Center Play] http://www.stardoll.com/tr/magazine/post/91230/manevi_deerlerimiz_orta.html http://www.posta.com.tr/yasam/YazarHaberDetay/Ramazan-gecelerinin-eglencesi-Orta-oyunu.htm?ArticleID=40261 Karagöz and Hacivat http://www.suatveral.com http://www.alaturka.info/tr/kueltuer/tiyatro/2278-goelge-oyunu-karagoezve-hacivat http://www.envanter.gov.tr/belge/halk-kulturu/galeri/29584?page=2 Karagöz and Hacivat Stock characters other than Karagöz and Hacivat http://www.masaloku.com/karagoz-ve-hacivat-iskembe-pesinde-konusmasi.htm Karagöz and Hacivat in relation to their 2-d background http://www.karagozevi.com http://mersinetkinlik.com/etkinlik/karagoz-ve-hacivat-golge-oyunu/ Performers mimicking Karagöz-Hacivat shadow puppet tradition Metaphor as Philosophical Language “Metaphors do not just enable us to voluntarily transcend the enclosure of our private minds; rather, they connect us to the world without an act of will on our part.” (Feldman, 239) “[…] Arendt, borrowing from Kant, calls an “enlarged mentality,” namely the capacity to think outside one’s own private point of view.” (Feldman, 242) Allegory as Poetic Thinking “[…] Arendt claims that metaphor is the condition for all philosophical inquiry, insofar as abstract philosophical language borrows from concrete language. […] Such “extended” use of metaphorical language would be precisely associated with allegory in its conventional definition, but Arendt prefers the terminology of metaphor, perhaps because of its closer association with what she calls “poetic thinking.”” (Feldman, 238-239) Machosky, Brenda, comp. Thinking Allegory Otherwise. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. Print. Feldman, Karen. "On Vitality, Figurality, and Orality in Hannah Arendt". Trailer Video https://vimeo.com/116095202 TRANSLATION - Known with his nickname, Acrobat Rasim died. Haaaa…. - Rasim Ismet Kocabas migrated from this world last night. Haaa… - Women gossip… - Everyone talks about this in shadows, in corners… - They talk everywhere…. Acrobat… Acrobat… Acrobat… Funeral of the Acrobat #Tomorrow’sPlays Playwright Firuze Engin [Performers] Ibrahim Halacoglu Seda Türkmen Director Berfin Zenderlioglu Together they sing the traditional Rumelia folk song “Arda Boylari” (can be remotely translated as “Reed Beds [by the River Side]”) Opening Scene Seda Türkmen as “Ali Rasim” [age 14], Ibrahim Halacoglu as “Rasim Emre” [age 15] Seda Türkmen as “Toothy Dilek”, Ibrahim Halacoglu as Toothy Dilek’s daughter “Beyza” Earthliness of Death Günay – My dear Hodja, I need to ask you something. My dad, when he was healthy, got his teeth done… Should we take his teeth or should we bury him the way God took him? Hodja Izzet – No. We don’t need to take his teeth out. Did he have any golden teeth? Your dad had a golden tooth I think. Günay – Yes he had, Hodja. Hodja Izzet – To prevent waste we need to take that golden tooth out. Final Scene Firuze Engin accepting Cevat Fehmi Baskut Special Award in 2015 Afife National Theatre Awards – (27.04.2015)