Tiyatro Oyunevi presents "Gavara"

a play from the stories of Nihat Genç adapted, directed and performed by Mahir Günşiray.
"Gavara" is at the tea house of Ayça Damgacı, with Claude Leon's stage design and Yüksel Aymaz's lightining by the accompaniment of Ozan Emrah Aksoy and Onay Şahin's live music.
As you sup out your tea... Admire the performance...
The stories from the most heterodox author of our literature world...
Nihat Genç' stories are on stage for the first time!
After the censoring attempt at Hakkari through seizing a décor element, namely a flynet, Gavara meets the audience again.
While the audiences are supping out their tea in a tea house, a storyteller maybe suddenly appearing everyday at a different place, shares his country's stories, his observations and experiences as he performs.
The stories comprises the ludicrous and tragicomic cases experienced by this country's men, adolescents and boys within the pincers of circumcision, bridal chamber and military service. The audience experiences the adventure of the deaths, despair, love in this country and the chance to express him/herself with the storyteller.
With "Gavara" project Tiyatro Oyunevi tried to approach to the sincere and cordial connection aspect of story telling tradition, which used be very common all over these lands but tending to disappear lately.

Critics

• "Gavara" from Tiyatro Oyunevi under the direction of Mahir Günşiray, written, directed and performed by Günşiray inspired from the stories of Nihat Genç, is one of the most important plays of the season by all means. With a striking expression it sets out the oppression our people face and obliged to surrender. It's a chain from sexual oppressions to political onesÉ We an also define it as a poem about the destiny of the people of Turkey. Günşiray has introduced a perfect work both as a director and an actor. Just as he did at the Gogol adaptation "The Marriage".
  VECDİ SAYAR (Cumhuriyet, CAT'S-EYE)

• Manhood Stories from Tiyatro Oyunevi
  In a rainy Tarlabaşı evening we're about to see a play about the life story of one of the transvestites we meet on the road of ISM 2. Kat or silent deaths of the poor women-children-men we saw all the way through.
  Composed of Nihat Genç's stories, the play's name is 'Gavara' It's a word used in North Sea region meaning "a cheerful and a bad trouble". Mahir Günşiray and Ayça Damgacı are the performers. Stage is designed as a coffeehouse, between the tables and chairs. Stage designer Claude Leon explains the reason as for "to have cordial connection with the audience". Just as the first teas served are still warm, the story teller who's going to narrate his life and some people occupy in his life, appears before us. It's highly possible to meet yourself or someone you know at least at one of the stories. We're accustomed to some of the stories from the third pages of newspapers; some of them are the ones we're even afraid to talk about. The tragicomic story of a hero circumcised by a stamp scissor, his first sexual experience; people stuck in a slum or a small Anatolian town, a military service memory, the 'cold' death of another soldier or shanty children. Since they were written in a country where poverty, underdevelopment and repression are experienced heavily, they 're sorrowful and displeasing stories.
  Günşiray had preferred not to imitate the characters but to narrate the 'impressions that these characters had made him feel'. He set forth a successful storytelling and acting performance.
  It was also examined that whether he's a meddah or a storyteller. To him, storytelling technique is more used in the play. Becoming the characters in the play instead of imitating them and the heaviness of the feelings are some of the details that strengthen the performer's judgment.
  As you would remember, last summer during the Istanbul-Van Art Bridge activities, in Hakkari the play was prohibited for a décor element had the colors of 'Kurdish flag'. The police had seized the décor element during the rehearsal and the performers had been taken to Government Security Court.
  EBRU ILGAZ, EVRENSEL KÜLTÜR DERGİSİ

Why are these stories told at a coffeehouse?
Ayça Damgac½ interviewed Tiyatro Oyunevi on Gavara
Ayça: Storyteller and "meddah": these two terms are sometimes considered equivalents. Meddah to us is an actor who amuses people by his imitations during the entertainment nights of Ramadan. Yet, when we think of a storyteller, imitation is not really what comes to mind; for the main focus in storytelling is to tell, to communicate, and to pass on the story. What are your thoughts about these two different terms? I believe that these terms are very significant to Gavara. The fact that the setting of the play is a coffeehouse, and a warm connection with the audience is established during the performance of the play suggests that there' s an exploration of the traditional. But what layers did we add to this? How did we try to formulate the meddah aspect and the storytelling aspect in the play? Did we aim at creating a play in either the meddah or the storyteller style? What would you like to say about this?
Mahir: It would be more accurate to say that Gavara makes particular use of the storytelling techniques. Therefore, it was not our concern to explore either the meddah or the storytelling as a form, or to try to figure out different ways of adapting it to our period. I believe that such discussions are widely present in our theatre scene today. What I ask myself while working on such a production is "Why do I want to tell stories today, and why the stories of Nihat Genç?" And then, forgetting all history of theatre I ask; "How am I going to perform it?" I tried to shape the play on a couple of different layers: when I'm playing the storyteller at the coffeehouse, the parts in which this storyteller tells his own life, the parts where he talks about the different people he has encountered, the moments when he's acting these people out, the stories he tells from the mouths of these other people. Sometimes he speaks of himself in third person. The storyteller puts on the part of the person he' s telling, and continues to tell the story through that person's mouth.
Elif: And thus multidimensionality is created. Being both on the outside and on the inside is also a characteristic of the meddah. However, the storyteller in this play surmounts the cliché imitations of the meddah, and a solid form of theatre is achieved. I think the most important thing after all is that the actor stands at the core, behind which exist the characters he performs.
Ayça: The fact that Oyunevi has taken on a project focusing on storytelling shows a yearning for sharing texts that have strong contexts. I believe while presenting these texts to the audience, Oyunevi calls them to think with it, imagine with it, leaving spaces for the audience to reflect and fill in. If you'd like, we can also talk about our take on this play as a coffeehouse project, and why these stories are told at a coffeehouse.
Mahir: How should the setting and the audience placement be in order to create the feeling that anyone could get up at any moment to tell a story; so that the play will have access to life, or rather, it will be better communicated that these stories are already a part of life? For this project, the warm and friendly atmosphere in coffeehouses could provide a setting that would allow a positive energy exchange between the audience and the actors to take place. A coffeehouse, which is one of the settings where people in many different countries meet, get closer, and converse has become one of the few places where we can actually relate to each other in flesh and blood. Even though the advancing technology and the communication devices have made it possible for more connections to be made, this distanced bonding is a direct attack on our adjusting bodies. People today have trouble at forming genuine relationships. This situation has troubled theatre for the most part, where being genuine and real is most essentially needed. Theatre-of course depending on the way it' s done-is a setting where you are with other people, and you can' t possibly forget about yourself, where you will always consider yourself as if you' re living with other people. But we are running towards death in everything we do now. Therefore, it's becoming harder and harder to exist in theatre and a number of people are breaking away. Theatre, apart from solely struggling to continue as an art form, has a political mission to stand firm against the damage that technology causes to the human body. Hence, creating the setting through telling stories at a coffeehouse is of concern to us also in relationship to the way theatre should be handled. But the reason this project takes place in a coffeehouse is not because stories were told at coffeehouses in the past. Furthermore, we are not establishing a real coffeehouse here. The plastic covers with rose prints that were put on the tables were not used to create an authentic atmosphere; on the contrary, they were used to make sure that we would not stray from a theatrical point of view. What I wanted was to decorate the setting, to create a warm and friendly atmosphere. Claude was also saying "Yes, we should decorate, but at the same time, we should not decorate." And so, we should not decorate just to decorate. That's a very important distinction.
Claude: One of the things I love the most in this play is the hooks we use to hang clothes on. In the beginning, the clothes are hung from the hooks, yet as they are being used in the play, the hooks remain bare. This reflects the gradually increasing toughness in the play. Also, we should make it very clear that this place is not a real coffeehouse. Everything in this place is made of paper. The decorations on the walls are made of crepe paper, and they look as if they were made and hung in two seconds. One could say the same thing for the kahve oca¶½ . Everything has a portable look to it.
Ayça: This is the first time Tiyatro Oyunevi is working with a Turkish author and again for the first time on storytelling. I would like to talk a little about the difficulties you have faced as an actor.
Mahir: One of the difficulties I' ve had to work on was the layers of the actor. Where is Mahir? Will the audience see Mahir? On the second layer, will they see Mahir, the actor? In that, will they see the actor playing the storyteller? And will they see the character in the story that the storyteller is telling? While they are watching that character in the story, to what extent will they see the storyteller, and to what extent will they see the actor? Making these distinctions, and forming each one as a different layer is quite hard. Some of the stories have traps in this sense. For example, in the "Sergeants" story, I fell on to the commonplace. There was something to it that got closer to what the stand-up comedians, or the comedians who call themselves meddahs do. In other parts, I maintained the storyteller figure more easily. Here, the storyteller figure is not a specifically defined character about whom one can say, "the storyteller has such a character, he' s a such and such person". It' s a hero with a different structure where these questions are not important and do not need to be asked. By a hero, I mean a person, a figure who has witnessed the whole epoch. It is the voice at times of life, and at times of death. It's like a storyteller who has attained wisdom, but not like one who attains wisdom and becomes a know-it-all. But this idea did not quite work. Because Nihat's stories are like human landscapes from my homeland. There are very warm and vital things in them. There are very surprising leaps in his stories. How does a story start and end? Just like our play. It starts with a ludicrous event like the "Circumcision" story, but it ends with the story "Cold" where we witness the funeral of a soldier. Of course, again, Nihat sets this up; "Until the taboos about the circumcision-wedding night-military service trilogy are broken, nobody should claim to be a man," says he. The play also starts with a circumcision story, then comes the first experience with a girlfriend-sort of similar to the wedding night-, then a military service story, and then getting a job as a doctor. The taboos are broken, and subsequently, having studied medicine and having been transferred to a community clinic, our character loses his sense of belonging as he fails at adapting to this new environment. The man at the beginning of the play is a person who has experienced this detachment. We are starting the play with the man upon whose shoulders the blame has been put, and who actually is the storyteller at the coffeehouse: the storyteller at the beginning of the story who in the slums, listens to the anonymous sounds in the cold silence of the nights, who witnesses the lives of the kids of slums, who come across the funeral of a soldier in the backyard of a mosque; someone who looks, sees, hears, observes, records, forgets-not, and shares with others that which he does not forget. But as was the case for the play "Forgetting", the audience, if they would like, could consider these stories separate and independent from one another. During a discussion we held after the play, I saw that the audience interpretation worked either way. Some people saw a continuity in the story, and thought that the man in all these stories was the same man; yet there were also others who said "No, it was not the same man, that's how I felt, too, at first, but later it turned out not to be."
Claude: There's a structure to being a man on this land. We paid attention to it while making the costumes as well. The outfits a man wears in his life and the objects he uses put this forward quite clearly; like the circumcision costume, and the soldier costume we used.
Mahir: Yes, actually, in this play we witness what happens during the childhood, youth, adolescence, and the adulthood of a man living in this country. The man shares his life experience with the audience. He opens himself up to the audience. He carries the weight of both his past and the past of the country he has been living in: the stories, the facts, and the dreams. Sharing and representing it is the single most valuable thing he can do.
Banu: On the whole, the part that impressed me the most was the part with the marionette. I felt like I was about to cry. And eventually I did cry. I don' t know to what extent this is right. I understand that this effect on the audience is not intended, but I cry whenever I watch the marionette part. The story is very powerful, the marionette is controlled very skillfully, and the scene becomes poignant. Was this effect intended? What's Tiyatro Oyunevi' s attitude towards this?
Mahir: When it comes down to feeling the emotions on stage, I remember Lorca' s words on the subject: "Stage is where the emotions are felt. There, one can cry, one can laugh." We believe that the way this is done is more important. I don't think there's anything wrong in putting something on stage that might awaken emotions in the audience. Tiyatro Oyunevi, with the productions it has put on so far, might not have made the audience feel the need to cry. However, this was not an explicit choice. We did what the plays required.
Claude: There' s something I like a lot in this play. Nihat Genç is someone who verbalizes through writing. Verbalizing, in fact, means risk-taking. The person who verbalizes in this play is the storyteller; and he's verbalizing to break the taboos. He's doing it to question a lot of things. That's a risky and dangerous situation.
Elif: This play is like a "reminder" after the "forgetting" theme.
Mahir: As an actor, I don't see any other way than to not forget, I mean, what I will say during the two hours of performance.