In the summer of 2018, the theatre company Hemhâl, which I co-founded with Nezaket Erden and Hakan Emre Ünal, travelled to a small village in southern Turkey. The main reason for our trip was to realize Nezaket's dream of taking her widely acclaimed solo performance, Dirmit, Dear Shameless Death, to the village where her extended family live. Furthermore, we thought that this performance could resonate with the villagers since it is an adaptation of a Turkish novel by Latife Tekin which talks about the struggles and internal conflicts of a migrant family moving from a small rural village to the big city.

The villagers, the majority of whom had never seen any form of theatre before, expected something like a popular entertainment piece, similar to what they were used to seeing on television. As such, they found this staging, which was structured as a monodrama employing the tools of storytelling without any decor or props apart from a pot plant, to be challenging and intriguing. After the performance we did not really know how to evaluate this experience since there were no historical accounts and examples of such cultural experiences that we could refer to. There had been no such theatrical activities in this particular village, although there must have been similar ones in others, but they were not recorded. Therefore I decided to document our endeavour in great detail, not only for my personal archive, but also for the community and for other artists in order to contribute to the formation of a collective history for future reference.

A few days after my return to Istanbul, I was talking about this unique experience to my friend, who is not familiar with the performing-arts scene. Upon noticing my bewilderment at our endeavour, she told me about a striking experience she had in Assos – a tiny town on the northern Aegean coast of Turkey – where the Assos International Performing Arts Festival was organized annually by Hüseyin Katırcıoğlu between 1995 and 1999.Footnote ¹ I was familiar with this avant-garde festival, but I did not know much about what sort of an experience it would be to be a part of it. At the time of the festival my friend attended the performance of a Japanese butoh dancer during which an old villager, pulling along her cow, approached the dancer just to observe him up close. The dancer carried on his performance without interruption while at the same time recognizing the woman's presence. As the butoh dancer went on transforming his body artistically, the villager woman's interaction with him transformed the festival audience and the villagers into a community. They collectively participated in this authentic moment, the value and impact of which surpassed the artistic context of the performance as it infiltrated into real life.

I called Nezaket and Emre, with the assurance that they were familiar with the festival, to tell them the story so that we could evaluate our experience through another perspective and recognize that something more than just the artistic success of the performance was at stake. However, although I was disappointed to hear that they had no knowledge of the festival, I was not surprised for I knew very little about it myself. Then I thought of the recently increasing number of small performing-arts festivals taking place in small towns and villages and how, during my attendance at one of them (the Datça Festival) as a guest artist, I had realized that the younger generations knew nothing, or very little, about the experience of older ones, and how as members of a performing-arts community we have a very limited collective memory. It is rather ironic that while our artistic work creates communities, the lack of collective memory, which would otherwise empower our society, hinders it.

One has limited access to the fairly short and recent history of the performing arts in Turkey since there are no substantial archives or records even in the case of state-funded public institutions. In most cases of old theatre companies or venues that no longer exist, such as Bilsak Tiyatro Atölyesi or Tepebaşı Deneme Sahnesi, be they independent or subsidized, most of the works, records and experiences have disappeared with them. This definitely plays a role in how we develop artistically. Just consider that the international performing-arts scene would not be what it is today were it not for the existence of audio-visual recordings, photographic documents or verbal accounts of the avant-garde movements at the beginning of the twentieth century. While we have access to these records, we do not have a clear picture of what happened in the performing-arts scene in Turkey fifty or even twenty years ago since there has been no systematic documentation. What we can find in the archives, if there are any, is either too fragmentary or not easily accessible. For example, I am interested in forms that challenge artistic categories such as theatre and performance art, and although I know such experimental work was carried out in Istanbul in the 1990s by various artists, their documentation is too discrete and fragmented. Therefore I either fear that what I experiment with in my work might not be as novel or unique as I think it is, or I feel that my work fails to engage in a dialogue with similar works that took place in the past, which also has repercussions on the dialogue it establishes with the audience.

I believe that the lack of systematic documentation is, even if indirectly, linked to the fact that forgetting rather than remembering has been encouraged in the history of theatre and the performing arts in Turkey. While theatre and the performing arts have ben modelled on Western norms, more traditional forms have been disregarded, forgotten – sometimes to the extent of being erased – and their potential to evolve organically into more contemporary forms has been hindered. This has prevented us from building on the experiences of our predecessors, and made it difficult to define the artistic direction of our work, as well as the identity of our community. Since the nature of the performing arts is already ephemeral, leaving not much material trace behind (if any at all), we need the power of records and archives to construct a collective memory that will empower our community through generations – sociopolitically as well as artistically. As Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook remark in their article on the making of modern memory, ‘Archives … are not passive storehouses of old stuff but active sites where social power is negotiated, contested and confirmed.’Footnote ² Past generations might have thought that they were waging their war through their artistic work and that it sufficed, but today we also have to take the responsibility of constructing a collective memory. We can facilitate this by systematically documenting and archiving our works for future generations so that they can enter into dialogue with us and with our works, so that we can feel we are members of a community. The sociopolitical context we live in today in Turkey dictates that we constantly forget so that the political power can subject our minds to what I define as ‘memory transformation’ while it subjects our cities to urban transformation. Documenting, recording and archiving our work will be a way of empowering our community and resisting prevailing ideologies. However, the irony lies in the fact that our biggest curse is at times our biggest blessing; if it were not for being so conditioned to forget I fear we would not be able to carry on with our lives considering all that has happened in our country since the Gezi Park protests.