YEN! : WORDS PLAY ON THE AQUARIUM AND FALL IN ON HER RED DRESS

In the midst of sounds, words, colours, forms and light - on top of each other, next to one another, side by side. In an atmosphere where one cannot tell who is watching whom - when there is no place for the lies of everyday life…


Written by Özgün Tanglay
ozguntanglay@yahoo.com
Edited by: Tim Hailey and
Prof. David Cedric Bennette


Genco Gülan's new project, entitled “YEN!” (New!) started outside and then moved inside the Pera Museum as part of the 16th International İstanbul Theatre Festival, May 2008.

During this interactive performance, I was sometimes right by the side of an aquarium, staring at the girl in the red dress on whom words were dancing, and at times walking through this “work” on display, or putting myself in front of the light, feeling close enough to the artists' bodies to touch them. In this performance where I wandered, no dividing lines using the spatial partition called “stage”, had been drawn between the audience and the performers , so relativising the question of who was watching whom.

Where should I start trying to introduce the work? If I was a copywriter attempting to advertise my product, I would have called it “a festival of sound and light”. But the event under discussion was an anti-show in the truest sense, an atmospheric chaos, despite the aesthetic values it incorporated, and the intense revelry it created, by its explosion of colour. “YEN!” might have been defined using cliché sentences, but that would have rendered clear that it had been misunderstood; for the work itself was making a stand against those fixed, rigid definitions. Sounds, words, colours, forms and light were superimposed, juxtaposed and there was no place in this work for deceit and the lies of everyday life.

The performance started with a young lady dressed in white, singing arias outside the museum’s main entrance, while holding Marcus Graf’s new book “Genco Gulan: Conceptual Colours”. The medium of her voice transformed these lines into music.

“YEN!” became here an object of interest and even scorn to the people who happened to be passing by: one man swore while walking past, another went on his way to Beyoğlu, clapping and laughing, while young men in football uniforms went past saying “What's this mate?” A young member of the audience was showing kindness to a homeless kid, asking “Look, do you like it?” Meanings, understandings, emotions, efforts and ideas gliding by each other and hanging suspended outside the entrance of Pera Museum.

The show was staged at the entrance level of the Pera Museum. When we entered the gallery, the actors had taken their places on pedestals and were already improvising slowly. Clashing objects of difference were present: beautiful, senseless, ugly and meaningful exclamations; sounds, women, men, costumes, lines dividing up the face, digital projections, colors danced together in the evening air.

The endless fight of two actresses unified by a single blue costume continued throughout the performance. A girl on skates skated incessantly while reading aloud from a technical book about colours she held in her one hand, smiled tirelessly, all through the duration of the performance. A man and a woman continued running non-stop on treadmills. And we, the audience, kept watching them and they us…reciprocally for the duration of the performance.
All that was uttered was losing its meaning, all meanings were rapidly gliding away from one another. The environment was chaotic and the elements could neither be added to nor subtracted from each other; they only had the power to create chaos together. This was a performance. A NEW! performance. No answer corresponded to the questions drifting in the air. This was a performance and nothing here overlapped - neither time-wise nor meaning-wise. No act belonged to its context. Songs, treadmills, words… Consequently neither did the colours, and not even the audience. They were not where they were supposed to be and neither were the actor! Was this because in the global world the true location of all that is dislocated is unknowable?

Each body here was of a different colour, yes, but the colours were not on the same plane. Some were in motion, some stood still, some were inside water, some in the air, some were low down, some were high up, some made sound, and some were silent… Technology had also assumed a position in this performance, pointing to its place in time. NEW belonged to this age, not the one before, and it was not an attribute of the forthcoming either.

For a moment I grappled with a sentence “Let life depart”. At that moment I thought the question “WHY?”…seemed misplaced in the context of this performance.

When one of the performers dived into the water in her red dress, the little girl inside me exclaimed: “Look at that, words stuck on a giant red fish!”, probably because the fantastic aesthetic vision of the red dress in the water took her back in time. The motion of the dress in the water was poetic enough in spite of the waving motion of a silk scarf. Words from a projector - that she wrote under the water - were reflected on it and seemed to chill her. I could not take my eyes off for a long while. The image still adorns my cell-phone screen.

To expect a flow of events, to wish for it to have a beginning and an end, to try to confine YEN! with such linear definitions would be a mistake. Just as “space” gains meaning by the functions it takes on, and writes its own history, this performance is like an empty space that is presented to the audience. A box into which you yourself will put the meaning; or a concoction where you will choose the meanings you want from among a dozens others.

If I had not happened to hear the performer, who sang arias while in motion on top of an exercise device for the duration of the performance, say “Oh my, I'm going to have extremely shapely legs” when the performance ended, I could easily have said that all the actors were conscious of what they were expressing with their bodies. But I guess they all were beautiful worldly toys created by the artist.

The festival brochure says “The subject is electronic colors which multiply when added to the natural ones. The show uses six of the colours frequently used in machines: blue, red, yellow, green, grey, and pink. The show works by making use of and transforming these new colours and technologies.” I have not touched on these subjects. This is a more original reading, a perspective based on the feelings and sensual experiences I went through while watching the performance. I am sure that other watchful eyes will have different things to say about YEN!, because it certainly gives anybody who sees it the opportunity to do so.