With the inauguration of the presidential system in Turkey, theatre as an institution is at a historical crossroads. By 15 July 2018, just before the controversial emergency law was lifted, two decrees restricting the autonomy of artists working at state theatres, operas and ballets were issued. The first decree replaces a law from 1949 which secures autonomy over budgeting and programming.Footnote ¹ The second places all state theatres under direct control of the president. During the summer, the institutions were temporarily closed until they were harmonized with the new political system. With this structural change, a lengthier political process of shifting powers and centralization is being consolidated. But there has also been a more fundamental epistemological shift going on in Turkey's ideological consciousness, which is deeply rooted in a history of the public sector and of state institutionalism.

This latest institutional rite of passage is worrying for at least two reasons. First of all, the president, government officials of his party (the AKP, aka ‘Justice and Development Party’) and pro-regime news media have occasionally used theatre artists as part of a strategy to discredit any attempt to criticize the present government's policies. Such populist attacks have partially paralysed the professional theatre sector in Turkey and desensitized the public to the point where the current restructuring could be executed without much resistance. Second, plans to completely restructure art institutions had already leaked in 2013, just before the Gezi Park protests erupted.Footnote ² The draft foresaw a re-evaluation of public art funding, as well as the abolition of the structure of state theatres, symphony orchestras, and opera and ballet companies, with the exception of a small specimen of each institution being preserved and/or privatized.Footnote ³ It became clear that the AKP government was preparing for substantial changes that would ultimately pave the way for privatization of long-standing institutions. Moreover, a new board of state-appointed members would decide all arts funding. This would turn artists into subcontracted workers under tight government control. The bill was met with great concern: nationwide street demonstrations (the largest one on 25 May 2013, three days before the Gezi Park protests erupted), and a trumped-up media campaign ensued which mobilized public debate before the bill could even pass through Parliament.

The ill-famed bill has not to this day been enacted but the grounds for today's restructuring were prepared. Now that state theatres fall under the responsibility of the presidency, changes can be implemented without much opposition. Lemi Bilgin, who was the State Theatres’ director general between 1998 and 2013, has recently stated that one could always say no in the past.Footnote ⁴ This has now become impossible.Footnote ⁵ Besides, an informal space of anxiety and uncertainty was created, which intensified after the attempted coup (2016), when an indiscriminate witch-hunt blazed through state institutions. Ever since, the state art institutions have been in limbo, with interim deputies who did not know how to gauge future prospects regarding repertoire choices or even job security.Footnote ⁶

On one occasion after the attempted coup, twenty permanent artists of the Istanbul Municipal Theatre were suddenly dismissed, yet fifteen were reinstated after loud public condemnation. Other targets were less lucky: almost all academic teaching staff at Ankara's oldest theatre department were dismissed at the beginning of 2017. Across Turkey, artists who were arrested were practically all Kurdish,Footnote ⁷ or were involved in the Kurdish peace process.Footnote ⁸ Kurdish art institutions were raided or closed down, including the Mesopotamia Cultural Centre and all its branches, the Kurdish Institute of Istanbul (an NGO), the Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality City Theatre, and Batman and Hakkari's municipal theatres.Footnote ⁹ Yet recently Turkish artists have also been sentenced for publicly criticizing the government.Footnote ¹⁰

What is in fact at stake today is freedom of the arts/artists and the position of theatre as a space for art production, critique and education autonomous from the political realm. These ideals have already been under increasing pressure in the past few years.Footnote ¹¹ For example, in 2012 the mayor of Istanbul amended the regulations concerning City Theatres run by the Metropolitan Municipality ‘to increase the influence of civil servants in selecting the repertoire and to better control the artistic content of the theatre’.Footnote ¹²

The political establishment has also systematically targeted state artists in the press, thereby creating a climate of caution and self-censorship, even when the state theatres still had reasonable sovereignty over the repertoire and artistic programmes. A significant example manifested when, in 2012, an anonymous visit by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's daughter Sümeyye to the Ankara State Theatre's production of Genç Osman (Young Osman) led to a public statement against the ‘arrogance’ of the theatre establishment, which is ideologically ‘Kemalist’ (in the once revolutionary, republican spirit of founding father Mustafa Kemal Atatürk).Footnote ¹³ That the play directly refers to an Ottoman past before the Turkish republic through the figure of a reformist sultan as protagonist, who rails against the military and religious leadership in favour of the security of the Turkish people, adds an extra dimension for the Erdoğan family. Erdoğan has often portrayed himself as a reformer of the republic by pushing the military back into the barracks, while part of his and AKP's political success is a narrative of neo-Ottomanist revival.Footnote ¹⁴ Sümeyye seemed to be triggered when state actor Tolga Tuncer heckled her in an improvised skit for chewing gum during the show. She stormed out of the theatre and wrote a public letter that condemned them for allegedly discriminating against her because of her veil. Her father in turn took the opportunity to heckle the privileged position of the Kemalist artists by warning them not to ‘bite the hand that feeds them’.Footnote ¹⁵ The then minister of culture, Ertuğrul Günay – who later fell out with Erdoğan – also emphasized that theatre artists had ‘no right’ to ‘interact’ with their audiences. He did say that the AKP is in favour of artistic freedom, but that this freedom has its limits when it comes to what is deemed ‘proper decorum’.Footnote ¹⁶

The campaign was clearly meant to curb the privileged position of state artists rooted in secularism and Kemalism in a time when powers within the state were already shifting.Footnote ¹⁷ As was expected, the psychological consequence was complicity to remain silent. However, complicity as common survival tactic has a longer history of interiorization in the ideological state apparatus of Turkey, creating its own set of limitations to artists’ response-ability vis-à-vis political interfering. In fact, in the Levinasian ethical meaning of the word, response-ability is the understanding that criticizing or opposing power is not only an exposure of self/me to the other. The self is also, in a way, hostage to the other, and its responsibility ‘so absolute that I am responsible even for the other's responsibility’.Footnote ¹⁸ Hence, when faced with Erdoğan's populist shaming, many state artists may have felt the need not only to protect themselves, but also to feel responsible for the whole community, and thus to hold their tongue until the agitation blows over.

On a deeper sociopolitical level, scholars and journalists have tried to explain and criticize the compliance of state institutions through other concepts, such as postmodern authoritarianism based on electoral majoritarianism, in which ‘the majority legislates a particular way of life and uses the state apparatus to impose its choice of morality, lifestyle and value system’Footnote ¹⁹ through top-down passing, and (statist) communalism – a shared sense of social morality based on the state's hegemonic attitudes. The latter has been defined in different contexts, mostly antagonistic to the nation state context.Footnote ²⁰ According to Özkırımlı, however, ‘statist communalism’ has shaped Turkey's hegemonic political culture. The ‘unity’ that is created is artificial but not permanent, which creates an environment where difference is at best ‘endured’ but any individual or collective attempting to seek autonomy, inside or outside society, is seen as an existential threat. Because of internal competition between communities to get close to the state in pursuit of power and privilege, individuals restrict their viewpoints, while mistrusting any outsiders.Footnote ²¹ This would tentatively explain why journalists, scholars and artists, particularly in state institutions, who have criticized the state are currently targeted, pressured to leave or under surveillance even by their colleagues and peers.

Communalism within Kemalist history could be said to function as a social contract that, at certain times, xenophobically excluded specific ethnic and cultural identities, such as Armenians and Turkish Kurds, but also religious Sunni Muslims – which Erdoğan's daughter appealed to earlier – to secure (and impose) a predominantly secular society. But from its inception it thereby also nurtured autocratic tendencies that could turn against Kemalism itself. In such a deeply rooted political culture, nonconformity spells real risk for artists when they speak back against wrongdoings. One Kemalist dance artist remarkably managed to speak back without retribution: Erdem Gündüz resisted and escaped the regime's coercive tactics through his legendary Standing Man act in the midst of the Gezi protests.Footnote ²² Looking back at it today, it seemed in the first place an admonition and a call for introspection among Kemalists. In a rather nonchalant pose with his hands in his pockets, Gündüz stared right back into the eyes of Atatürk, who was depicted on a huge banner draped across the facade of the Atatürk Cultural Centre (AKM) on Taksim Square. The latter building – once a pivotal symbol of Kemalism and secularism – was already reduced to a carcass of the past, closed for renovation since 2008, but there were already strong rumours that it would be destroyed (which happened in May 2018). It was at the time also used as a makeshift police station overseeing the area. Gündüz was not arrested, as no law prevented his peaceful individualistic vigil. Despite the surrounding police coercion, the state seemed to muster the tolerance to endure his dissenting act. Its strength was the subsequent adaptation and multiplication by thousands of people in various other locations.

Gündüz's gaze towards the lone founding father should not remain unobserved. He stood there as if he was beseeching him for an urgent reply, to break the silence once and for all, as if he were asking, how did we get here? Or even more pressingly, how to move from here? These questions can and should be asked in the present context of a disintegrating state theatre in Turkey. The challenge will be to redefine theatre as an institution from within its own complicit history with that of an autocratic state. One thing is clear, however: Turkey has already come a long way and although the future seems uncertain, a new generation will step up. Artists will find new ways to relate to audiences, even if the state prohibits it.Footnote ²³ The problems will not be solved when we only focus on the day-to-day policies of an art-unfriendly regime. We need a discursive and epistemological change in the theatre that focuses again on making a society rather than confirming the status quo of polarized and opposing communities. State institutions may disintegrate, but theatre and performance have the potential to redefine their communal outlines. It is in crisis that theatre artists in Turkey will find each other again. Now is the time!