Ethos of New Stockholm: A City Invented to be Staged
Deniz Başar*, Art Babayants**, and Yana Meerzon***
This conversation took place in June 2024, as a follow-up on the production Wine&Halva, written by Deniz Başar and directed by Art Babayants at L’Espace la Risée, Montreal in May 2024. For all three conversants, migration is both their personal experience and the subject of their artistic and academic research.


The Plays in Question
Wine&Halva, written by Deniz Başar in 2019-2021, tells the story of Farias, a white gay man from a fictional Anglophone North American city called New Stockholm, and Derya, a Turkish woman, who immigrates there to become an academic and, instead, faces institutional discrimination, systemic racism, and incessant gaslighting. The play investigates the labour and process of cultivating an unlikely friendship while asking if and how people can do justice to each other’s experiences and histories when they have almost nothing in common. Using narrative theatre — a style widely known in Turkey and the Middle East — the play employs three performers who guide audiences through the intimate epic of this unusual friendship while also referencing multiple books, theories, philosophical ideas as well as giving space to stand-up routines mocking many cultural clichés familiar to contemporary North Americans.

Autumn in New Stockholm was written between 2020 and 2022 by a group of women immigrant playwrights from Turkey, with Fatma Onat residing in Auckland, New Zealand, Ayşe Bayramoğlu in Melbourne, Australia, and Deniz Başar in Montreal, Canada. The plot of this play revolves around three women who left an unnamed country (possibly Turkey) for New Stockholm. One woman lives in the recent past (1960s), another one is our contemporary (the late 2010s and early 2020s), and the last one lives in our future (mid-2040s). These characters traverse each other’s lives and timelines to explore the meaning of leaving home, belonging, becoming an immigrant, and rebuilding one’s own identity as experienced by women. The play is written as a narrative theatre piece, with the elements of science fiction.

An Exilic Destination
In both plays, as we will demonstrate in this conversation, Deniz Başar stages migration as one’s experience of falling into the Wonderland of strangeness, with the city of New Stockholm – an imaginary place of exilic destination – emerging as her work’s central dramaturgical trope and metaphor.
The first question we turn to is: How did this rich metaphor of “New Stockholm” come to life?
Deniz Başar: “New Stockholm” started as a joke. It was probably 2017. Art and I were at the house of a good friend and her partner, discussing institutional racism, complaining about social interactions in Toronto and how alienating it was to be the “outsider” in that city. Yet, Torontonians always say that their city is a great city, the best city in the world, as if they have been suffering from Stockholm syndrome, as if they are taken hostage by the city and fall in love with it, which can also be seen as a psychological defense mechanism. We framed New Stockholm as a fictional version of Toronto. Two years later, I started working on the play Wine&Halva. At that point, I was already in Montreal and it was a very different experience to the life I had in Toronto. The play was drafted in the spring of 2019, because in late 2018 I had an experience similar to the one described in the last scene of the play, where I took a close friend of mine from Canada to my city, Istanbul. But a close-to-final draft appeared only in the Fall of 2020 after a few workshops.
Yana Meerzon: Should we then say that Wine&Halva (and to a certain extent Autumn in New Stockholm) is a kind of autofiction, a play of fictional nature but informed by your personal experiences as a migrant academic in Canada?
Deniz Başar: Yes, there are autofiction elements in my writing. But I would much prefer my work to be perceived as fiction only, because only fiction is potent enough to hold the deep truths that I’m trying to reveal. By the time I started working on Wine&Halva, I had already been writing plays in English, naming Toronto as ‘Toronto’ in those texts. But for Wine&Halva, I settled on ‘New Stockholm’. I found this idea extremely liberating, because I was not talking about a specific people or their experiences anymore, I was analyzing the emotional realm of being an immigrant in an alienating North American, Anglophone city.
The story of Autumn in New Stockholm is a little different. The three authors — Fatma Onat, Ayşe Bayramoğlu and myself — we all have some similar but, to a large extent, vastly different experiences of growing up in Turkey; subsequently, we also have very similar but strikingly different reasons for and experiences of immigration. One particular overlapping experience is that we all had to start our artistic careers from scratch in the new places we settled.
Kurdish woman playwright Fatma Onat took the initiative of introducing the two Turkish women playwrights – Ayşe and me – to each other to start writing a play in early 2020, during the pandemic. At that time, we only knew of each other’s work, and it took us a year to build the world of the new play, flesh out the characters and discover the plotline. We workshopped it in Istanbul in Turkish and had a staged reading in Toronto in English. We published it as a trilingual book in 2023. Autumn in New Stockholm has not been produced, but there is some interest in Montreal. We will see how it goes.
A Capital of Placelessness
Yana Meerzon: I love the image of New Stockholm. lt speaks to me and my experiences of being an immigrant in the mid-1990s Toronto. At that time there was no such thing as zoom or social media; and I could only call my parents once in a week to let them know that I was doing well — whatever this “well” meant at that point. So I remember very acutely this feeling of being a stranger in New Stockholm and knowing that the city has its own secret, which would never be revealed to me. To a certain extent this feeling has never disappeared, even if it began almost a life-time ago.[2]
Deniz Başar: I didn’t feel like Toronto/New Stockholm had a secret that wasn’t offered to me. This might sound counterintuitive but that would have been psychologically more okay for me. Instead, I felt like the city had no secrets at all. It was simply superficial, it was exactly what I saw of it in the first ten minutes and nothing would change even if I put three decades of my life into it. That’s what scared me most.
Art Babayants: My “New Stockholm/Toronto” had no secrets. When I first arrived there, I felt a lot more connection with it. In my previous place of residence, I was in the closet. And that alienation, the weirdness that you talked about, had been part of my everyday experience for many, many years, so Toronto was the place where I suddenly felt like I could belong. But then I moved to another part of Canada – Regina, Saskatchewan. And there I encountered the New Stockholm described in Deniz’s play. Technically, there was no border for me to cross and no new language to acquire, still I felt nauseous and alienated in the place where mental health issues, drug abuse, and inability to express emotions would bring people to serious actions of self-harm, and even suicide. So, to me New Stockholm is more than just one city, it is the experience of alienation moving from one local to another can produce.
Yana Meerzon: I am grateful to your comment Art that, in fact, for a migrant or an exile, there is always some kind of New Stockholm. It is the space of imagination and exile, something that one longs for and wishes to belong to, but also something out of one’s reach. And so, as a migrant stands at the threshold of New Stockholm, they – much like Kafka’s character from his very famous book The Trial – wait for the door to open but also wonder if they really want to belong to this new world.
New Stockholm Grows with Multiple Writers’ Point of View
Deniz Başar: This reminds me, one of Wine&Halva audience members, also part of our PR team for the show, was a Montreal-based writer, Valérie Bah.[3] They organized a talk-back after one of the performances, which brought together a beautiful and truly diverse community. Val is about to publish their second novel, Subteranne, which also takes place in New Stockholm. Val did a brilliant job of extending this universe of New Stockholm in their own sensibility and political stance in life. It makes me very happy to see how the fictional universe that we invented is spreading into other people’s imaginations and fictions.

Yana Meerzon: In your other play Autumn in New Stockholm, the city comes as a mirage; it remains closed to all foreigners be they asylum seekers, scholars in exile, or international students on scholarships. The ‘fortress’ of New Stockholm remains impenetrable, and so the action of the play takes place mostly at the border crossing. The characters from elsewhere and the guards of New Stockholm are in the limbo of the no man land or the borderland. They have been assigned roles and they cannot stop playing them.
Deniz Başar: Yes indeed, New Stockholm is the central image in that play too, as the name suggests. After I explained the concept, Fatma and Ayşe suggested we use it in our writing since it corresponded to the patterns of alienation we all felt after our immigrations. Starting from the early 2010s we were all emerging theatre people in the theatre field of Istanbul: Fatma worked with an independent Kurdish theatre in Istanbul, Şermola Performans, and Ayşe was a member of a leading experimental theatre company, TiyatroTem. When we immigrated we were already somewhat established artists, but we had to start from below point zero again. All of our cumulative experiences and observations during this process helped us create the magical ‘what if’ for the characters. Each of us worked on a separate timeline of the play and imagined our characters navigating the same dystopian city at different eras. For example, Ayşe’s timeline belonged mostly to the past, starting around the 1960s. Fatma’s started in 2016, whereas mine was in the future. Our characters are women intellectuals from different walks of life — forced into exile, they must make space for themselves, so as to be able to fulfill their potential in the world, in which nothing is simply given to them, nothing — from their reproductive rights to education.
Yana Meerzon: In Autumn in New Stockholm, your character in future, Fetanet, is also trying to find her place in New Stockholm. She is assertive and strong, so she claims the city. What changed between your two protagonists, from Derya to Fetanet?
Deniz Başar: Derya from Wine&Halva is a lot more naive than Fetanet from Autumn in New Stockholm. Derya is a lot more honest, whereas Fetanet knows the game and she comes in to win it. At the customs, when she is asked why she has chosen to study in New Stockholm, she responds with the answer that the customs officer, and the entire system, wants to hear: ‘I came here because this is the best place ever and I always dreamed of coming here.’ Fetanet is okay with lying, because she knows that the system is deceptive. She was the victim of a wrong health regulation system back in her own country. This organized state violence that she suffered through left a stigma on her now-disabled body. So, from a very young age Fetanet learned how to read the minds of bureaucrats and diplomats, while Derya does not have that skill. Derya comes from a certain majoritarian privilege, which allows her to be honest. She can demand what she needs and what she wants. But because she has no skills of deception, she becomes much more vulnerable when facing the authorities as a minority.

Staging of Wine&Halva
Art Babayants: On a similar note, deception, or rather false expectations, was something that I wanted to show in my staging of Wine&Halva at L’Espace la Risée, which ironically translates from French as ‘the place of mockery’. It is an intimate cabaret theatre space with a bar and a small stage. I arranged twelve tables in a circle and staged each scene in various parts of the circle: in the centre, behind the bar, on the stage, in one of the bathrooms adjacent to the theatre, etc., which created a number of surprises for the audience but also responded to the geographical journey of the two characters.

Overall, Wine&Halva, has a prologue, an epilogue and five scenes that happen in different cities, including New Stockholm. The prologue explains the title of the play as three muses cite a poem by Arkadaş Zekai Özger, a queer communist poet who wrote: “I like drinking wine with halva” — a queer gastronomical choice in itself. He then mentions his other love – “allah and cats” without capitalizing the word allah (god) – another queer choice, which sets the tone for the rest of the show.
Both Prologue and Scene 1 are very humorous leading the audience to believe that they are watching some sort of a poetic comedy. Then in Scene 2, the actors playing the protagonists suddenly change: in this scene, Derya and Farias, separated by borders, are communicating through writing letters. The scene introduces a tragic socio-political picture of oppression both in Turkey and in North America. The actors shift roles again in Scene 3 and the protagonists find themselves in New Stockholm. Here Derya experiences a nervous breakdown because of racism and ignorance exhibited by New Stockholmers, and Farias admits to being mentally crushed by his menial serving job and no prospects of escape. Eventually, Derya takes Farias to her beloved Istanbul, where he finally begins to understand the perspective she comes from as he falls in love with this ancient city.
In Wine&Halva, cities like Berlin, New York and Istanbul are the opposite of the sterile North American urban (or suburban) space represented through the metaphor of New Stockholm.
Deniz Başar: For me, it was very interesting to see what impact the metaphor of New Stockholm can produce on the audience. I watched the production several times, and I can tell that many spectators could easily relate to Derya’s journey, which was a happy surprise to me. For example, one theatre professor from Toronto-New Stockholm gave us really beautiful feedback. They were pleasantly surprised to see a theatre play that discussed immigration of an intellectual, specifically an academic. This professor — despite being a trustworthy individual committed to anti-discrimination in my view — is also part of the university system of North America where they seamlessly fit in. So they were able to recognize that the discriminatory structures of academia itself is a major part of Derya’s problems. This professor was also open hearted enough to tell me that while watching the play they saw themselves as part of the problem too. This comment was very special to me, as I want to create work that can help individuals and communities to have some self-reflection to be able to change.
At the same time, I was also sad to see how many immigrant academics – very different from each other and from me – were able to also relate to Derya’s journey. We went through similar patterns of institutional discrimination from gaslighting to humiliation, and some of us were misdiagnosed with non-existent psychological disorders when we tried to talk about it due to the deep-rooted denialism of Canadian institutions when it comes to recognizing discrimination.[4] Many of us were set up to fail, and the ones who failed were blamed for it, and ones who succeeded despite everything were asked to credit institutional support systems that weren’t there.
Contextualizing Deniz as a Playwright
Art Babayants: There is also another reason for almost a categorical rejection of Deniz’s plays in English Canada. English-speaking Canadian theatre, as we all know it, is usually very realism-based and quite conservative. Typically, it has little interest in diverse theatre traditions that migrant theatre artists bring from all around the world. Beyond Western Europe and North America, people maybe know some Russian theatre: maybe a bit of Stanislavsky or Meyerhold, but not much beyond that.
Yana Meerzon: This sounds quite unfortunate: I remember conversations about the dominance of realism on the English Canadian stage back in the mid-90s. One would think that in 25 years things changed and evolved. But – paradoxically – even when we proclaim diversity as our motto, somehow, we end up with the same familiar realism. Artists might be more diverse in terms of their cultural background or race, but when it comes to the artistic work they produce, it seems to me that they often reproduce familiar colonial patterns, which they have set to fight. Perhaps, the problem is our pedagogy, i.e. artistic and academic skills that we teach our students in the university classrooms. But our other problem, I strongly believe, is the performative political behavior, which often masks insincerity.
In Wine&Halva, Deniz, you criticize this performative behavior and you use “white feminism”[5] as an example. I know that this criticism made some audience members angry, with a couple of them even leaving the performance. Do you see any chance of changing this problematic behavior around insincere performances of political agendas for personal gain? At the end of the play, Derya leaves New Stockholm. She refuses to engage with or challenge this behavior any further. But the majority of immigrants stay. So, in your opinion today, how can an immigrant relate to or engage with this performative behavior?
Deniz Başar: That’s a very good question, Yana, and I think it all depends on the options you have. I come from a very problematic country, but I can still go back. But there are people who cannot return to their country, because it is bombed off the surface of the planet, or they can be killed or imprisoned for life if they return. Derya is a character who has privileges, and the play makes a point of showing it. She has to cross borders and is very precarious, but then she also has her personal agency. When I watched the performance recently, I also thought — “What an arrogant young woman! But she definitely knows how to exercise her rights.” For Derya, leaving is both an option and a choice. When she arrives in New Stockholm, she puts in a lot of labour, she does try to open doors. But then she realizes that if she stays, she will be complicit in promoting the ways of New Stockholm, and so she decides to leave. She is not defeated, she makes a choice. This was my position too, especially after I understood that honesty is just making me more precarious against an institution that is simply not honest with me, I had to negotiate with them through being purposefully unclear about my actual standing too (Başar 2021b), and I’m proud of myself for protecting my dignity, but I have also seen what they did to so many people who were more precarious than me.
Yana Meerzon: This brings me to another important marker of your work Deniz, in your plays immigrant characters face one specific choice: to either adapt to the unwritten rules of New Stockholm or to fight them, i.e. to resist the image of the exilic victimhood and stereotyping that goes with it. So, my question is — How do you artistically fight this trope of exilic victimhood?
Art Babayants: I would like to respond to this question through the concept of learning, because learning is one of the most powerful things that any migrant can do when they step on the road. Derya is hungry for knowledge: she refuses to victimize herself and she wants to make friends. But it isn’t reciprocal as New Stockholmers are apathetic towards her and her cultural capital. This makes it impossible to build any dialogue between the old dwellers of New Stockholm and the newcomers.
Deniz Başar: Another answer has to do with how the global theatre community understands what dramatic conflict can be. The general consensus is that the dramatic conflict is about peoples’ relationships and should be presented by the characters themselves. But dramatic conflict is so much more. In Wine & Halva, there is no conflict between the characters. What creates the conflict and tension in Derya and Farias’ relationship is the setting in which they find themselves. They are in a space defined by toxic expectations and cruel optimism, as Lauren Berlant would say (2011). These expectations define their experiences. Therefore, in my play, the conflict is not between two people, but between the environment, in which the characters function; and their own sense of self, including the ways they define their friendship.
Yana Meerzon: To me, this dramatic conflict constitutes the basis of modern tragedy: the conflict is not between people and Gods, like in the Greek tragedy, but between people and systems of colonial behaviour. New Stockholm is a symbol of one such colonial system. In New Stockholm politeness and political correctness mask the truth of cruelty. Yet, the play does not teach us any moral lessons.
Deniz Başar: I cannot teach any moral lessons because I don’t have the answers. I don’t know how to cure my characters because I don’t know how to cure the world. I don’t know how to make systemic discrimination go away. What I can offer as an intellectual and as an artist is to pose multifaceted questions, and I can demand some answers from our larger theatre communities by a way of distributing the burden and responsibility of producing potential solutions.
After my return from Canada to Turkey in early 2021, I started seeing so many troublesome things in Turkey in which I have been complicit since my childhood. Because nobody is pure, and nobody has the right to hold this moral high ground. But once I started seeing these things, I also felt responsible to formulate questions. I am passionate about intellectual labor and I can refer to Hannah Arendt here, who did so much for humanity by proposing a theoretical framework to explain to us the dangers of collective political conformism and by creating the language to speak about it. This is the labor of an intellectual, and it is precious. For generations, Arendt’s work has held this special space to talk about the atrocities carried out by conformist masses, “the banality of evil” as she named it (Arendt 2006). I also want to create something similar, I want to create a true impact, and this is where my own arrogance kicks in. The world can tell me that I’m not the right person to speak about this, because, historically, it has almost always been men, or people from the West. But I can talk about these issues too, and that is what Derya is trying to do and that is where her arrogance kicks in too.
The ancient Greek tragedy is a good reference here as you mentioned Yana. I shared an earlier draft of the text with Turkish actress Sinem Öcalır, who then told me that from an actor’s perspective, this play feels a lot like a tragedy, because in tragedies characters speak their own truth. They can be evil or they can be good, but they always say exactly what they feel, need and know. This is how the characters of Wine&Halva speak too. Everything they say is exactly what they mean.
Yana Meerzon: I recognize a serious influence of Brecht’s tragic theatre in your play, with its own conflict between individuals and society, distancing effects and cabaret numbers. Brecht was a political exile, whose sense of disconnect from reality can be explained through this personal experience of cultural alienation. In his book, Representations of the lntellectual (1994), Edward Said defined this kind of distancing as a plight of an intellectual in exile. In your play, you reclaim this image — an intellectual in exile — of someone who finds themselves in the position of an observer. Yet, today, I would say, this image lost its impactfulness, while your play and production try to reclaim it. Would you like to share your thoughts on this?
Labour of Learning, Friendship as Solidarity
Art Babayants: It’s funny but personally, I was never that interested in the image of an intellectual in Wine&Halva. For me, the attraction was actually in this friendship between two characters: a newcomer and an Anglo-Canadian aka New Stockholmer. Those two put a lot of labour into creating and sustaining their friendship, which is strikingly unusual given how different those two people are.
From what I observe, 90% of Canadian born people and 90% of those who come to Canada stick to the known, i.e. stick to the friends from their own culture, ideology or religion as well as class and language. They choose the food they know and they avoid everything else so as not to put themselves in the position of risk. This was — to some extent — Farias’ position at the beginning of the play. But slowly, by scene four, when the characters happen to be in New York, Farias starts taking risks and stepping out of his comfort zone.
In North America, I think, the fear of taking risks has been exacerbated by this current discourse of safe space, which was misunderstood and turned into conflict-free space, because in Canada, a lot of people have a tendency to think that conflict and safety are not compatible. Conflict is seen as a risk to safety, but then this discourse of safety is used against the most vulnerable — such as asylum seekers, recent immigrants; or even for instance, non-native speakers of English who may have difficulty articulating themselves. This discourse of safety tends to violently silence them because they can’t speak “safe”, which often means “speak white”, i.e., speak like the white Anglophone majority. In a way, this is related to the old Quebec’s fight against Anglo cultural and linguistic dominance (Lalonde, 1968).
Additionally, in Wine&Halva, one of the narrators says: if you want to fly and you have wings, you should fly, even if there might be a wing failure. But if you never try, you will just never fly. Often because of this safety discourse and Canada’s general risk aversion, people who have this opportunity of having wings never take any risk and they never take off, so to speak. So what attracted me to this play is that the two characters dare to follow their own ideas and dreams while also building an unlikely friendship. The play shows that if you dare to go into the risk zone, it will take a lot of emotional labour; but if you never try, you will be a non-flying entity for a lifetime.
Deniz Başar: I like this image very much. But I also want to come back to the status of an intellectual as a privileged person, someone who enjoys reading books and the quality of an in-depth conversation. It’s a huge privilege which definitely asks for criticism, because that’s what intellectual culture is, at the end it has to be self-critical too. But then for some reason this criticism is directed only at the intellectual, not towards governments or corporations, who have the real power and resources to change things. Intellectuals are not technocrats, bureaucrats, and corporate information moguls; they are not always academics or even have higher education. Intellectuals — for me — are people who read and write to rearrange information beyond hegemonic structures, they are people who are nonconformists for a lifetime, they are — at the end — troublemakers, and paradigm shifters. By definition, they are vulnerable in the face of authority since they make authority uncomfortable. That is their real power.

Yana Meerzon: And, ironically, in your plays, Deniz, academia becomes one such institution; and so it emerges as hostile and impenetrable as the city itself, the mirror version of New Stockholm.
Constructing the World of Wine&Halva on Stage
Art Babayants: On stage, we wanted to present our audience with an alternative to New Stockholm.
I decided to decorate the space with photos, maps, and palpable artifacts of and from Istanbul, so as to give our spectators an experience of being in this ancient and complex city. When people come into our theatre, they are invited to enjoy Ottoman-style coffee (often called Turkish, or Greek, or Armenian depending on the politics of a place), to browse through the images of Istanbul hanging on the walls. Some of these images are very touristy or Orientalist in a cheeky way, some of them are serious, romantic and funny. Additionally, in my staging, Scene 3 included a subtle reference to the Meddah tradition — a form of solo comedic storytelling from the Ottoman times. So, in a way, the staging encouraged the audience to be constantly learning new things.

Deniz Başar: My doctoral thesis was about how the Ottoman comedic traditions are reused in contemporary Turkish theatre (Başar, 2021a). Working on this play and then seeing it in Art’s staging was for me almost like a practice-as-research project, i.e. putting into practice what I discovered academically about humor and laughter in traditional Ottoman performances. There are many layers of meaning in Wine&Halva, but they all are meant to be humorous in some way, and Art put a lot of labour to keep these layers. I attended the performances many times, and there was always laughter in the room — sometimes it felt like it was the laughter of affirming an experience, and sometimes it was the laughter of cringe. But there were some nights when we knew that as soon as the audience came in, it was to be a magical night. And sadly, it’s really about demographics. When there was Color in the room, when there were young people, we knew there would be more engagement. We also knew that people of intersectional and queer experiences were to be more responsive too; and many stayed after the show to share and discuss.
Yana Meerzon: I find staging this play as a theatre-in-a-round very fruitful. The setting hints at and evokes an image of New Stockholm at the same time. But it also draws us, the audience, into the action.
Deniz Başar: Art and Peter Farbridge (co-producer) found this well-used cabaret space in Montreal, which suits not only the script but also a vision of theatre that truly excites me. In Turkey, the theatre of the early 2010 was pushing boundaries politically and artistically, and it changed me as an audience member, as an intellectual, and as an artist (Başar 2014). Wine&Halva belongs to this lineage, and I am very proud of being able to bring this kind of audience engagement to Canada. Politically charged audience engagement and solidarity-based community creation is the key for making the kind of theatre that made me a theatre person in the end. This was the experience that I wanted to recreate in my play. But I thought it was impossible to do it in Canada after my first four years in Toronto. So when I felt the same kind of electricity in the room with some of our audiences, my faith in the medium was restored.
Art’s staging — also because of the venue’s natural cabaret style vibes — reminded me of what I read about the dark and ecstatic Weimar Republic performances, right when Brecht was trying out his ideas, right before Nazis came to power. In Art’s staging, this Brechtian cabaret style was beautifully interwoven with the forms of traditional Ottoman performance. We mentioned Meddah before. The other two are Karagöz, which is the famous shadow puppetry tradition, and the third one is Orta Oyunu, which is an ensemble-improv comedy style quite similar to Commedia dell’Arte. Art understood the political aspects of my work along with its playfulness, partly thanks to his own exposure to theatre in Turkey (Ejder 2022). He created a theatrical-performative world for Wine&Halva which stems from the tradition of political theatre in Turkey. As one of the reviewers analyzed brilliantly (Ülgen 2024), what Art created is an Orta Oyunu performance inside of a cabaret stage, which really speaks to my own heritage as a theatre artist and intellectual.

I also find it very precious that Art is Armenian, as modern Turkish theatre was created by Armenian theatre people in the late 19th century. It is a noteworthy historical encounter that today, in early 2020s, in Montreal, there is a similar kind of encounter happening right now, which challenges the aesthetics of the theatrical orthodoxy in Canada, which is Stanislavskian acting and commitment to kitchen sink realism.
Art Babayants: I think this Orta Oyunu staging happened because of the extreme performativity of Deniz’s text — something I love and relate to. For instance, I, as a multilingual speaker, often find it difficult to focus on the meaning of communication because I tend to favour its performative qualities. Wine&Halva comments on this discrepancy a lot, but it also uses many formal elements of performance to make its statements. Here, you can find elements of comedy and Stand Up, doubling of the characters, for the purpose of exposing tokenistic performative behavior. The script resists realism and provides quality criticism of problematic performative behaviour. This is specifically well played in the monologue of a white woman on feminism (Scene 3), when she resorts to crying and states: “My tears are the most useful weapon I have against non-white people.” In Scene 3, which is the New Stockholm scene, Derya, who is played by esi callender in that scene, introduces that monologue and then another actor, Corbeau Sandoval, forcefully takes over the rest of it. This switch created an uncomfortable moment: a white-passing male presenting person playing the privileged white woman throwing in the face of the female presenting actor of Color the following tirade: “I can’t talk to people of color, because they don’t reaffirm my experiences and world views”.
Humor as “the staging of the relationship between vulnerability and power”
Deniz Başar: The key to doing this shift is by diverging from realism, by introducing metatheatricality and humor. Recently I listened to Maria Grazia Turri, who defined humor as “the staging of the relationship between vulnerability and power.”[6] In Wine&Halva, the “white woman monologue” steered lots of emotions in the audience, but here is the thing: Derya delivers this monologue when she is most vulnerable, almost completely crushed by the system, and she chooses to make fun of its loudest executors with all her might and intellect. If people laugh at that point — no matter their ethnic background — it is because they sense the interplay between “vulnerability and power.”
And this is what I find very interesting about the medium of theatre. It creates temporary communities for us to engage with complex political ideas that are very difficult to deal with outside of the theatre space. I encountered theatre that pushed me into changing my political opinions in the early 2010s in Istanbul. It made me a better intellectual and a better human being, for which I’m grateful. This is what I try to do in my own work, and this is what Art’s production did. Because theatre is like a social laboratory: an actor can be saying something which means exactly the opposite of those lines’ meaning through their bodily performance, resulting in an effect that is impossible to achieve in a medium like literature.
But this technique works only when you go off realism. This is exactly how I wrote the monologue on white feminism: I wanted to expose the falseness of this position when everybody defines oneself as a feminist but doesn’t really do anything to challenge and change systemic oppression. My question to these kinds of feminists is this: to which kind of feminist organizations do you belong, and what exactly do you do with your privileged position to dismantle the patriarchal and sexist hegemonies?
In Turkey, if you are a feminist, it means that you are an activist. You belong to an organization, and you give your time and labor to doing something about feminist agenda, such as seeking rights for women, organizing protests, creating solidarity groups and so on. If nothing, you go to protests, which are protests in which you can be taken under custody. It is the same for the LGBTQ+ struggle.
But in Canada, feminism is often used as an adjective, something cool to say about yourself. Anybody can take it on. There’s neither accountability, nor action involved. That is why I wrote this monologue — to expose a dangerous side of such discursive feminism that is mentioned only when it is cool to mention it.
Challenging Political Conformism on Stage
Yana Meerzon: It seems that all these patterns of behavior are indicative not only of performative politics, but also of political conformism.
Art Babayants: The cast and I discussed extensively what political conformism is and how to fight it. Our production begins with the three narrators who use very stylized and theatrical gestures to transport us from the reality of everyday life to theatre. Then, there is a moment when they stop moving and we hear a quote from Maya Angelou on courage being the most important virtue of all. Basically, to fight for a political cause, one must have courage.
But the truth is not everybody has courage. Perhaps, if you are surrounded by friends and genuine allies and have enough resources or privileges, you can be courageous. For me, it was very important to work in a diverse team — the true (non-tokenistic) diversity of the cast and production team made me courageous, gave me strength and courage to resist conformist thinking and behaviour.
Deniz Başar: Art tasked the actors to be always present with the audience, from the moment we enter the space till the very end, when we’re leaving the theatre. As we come in, the performers greet us; during the intermission they tell us our fortune through reading the coffee grounds, and during the stage action they interact with us too. For example, at the end of Scene four, Marcel, the cat puppet is passed from one audience member to another. This flight (as well as the presence of the cat puppet) was the director’s invention. The cat is simply mentioned in the text, but the staging turned the cat into a character directly ‘engaging’ with the audience. All this demands a lot of emotional labor from the company; and in return creates an emotional openness between audiences and us — theatre people.
Yana Meerzon: I think we can extend this idea of resistance within the group to the ways you worked with the space of the production. You performed in a cabaret style black box theatre with a very small proscenium stage — but the performance spilled way beyond this tiny proscenium stage, forming an Orta Oyunu circle instead. This choice presented your actors and your spectators with the challenge of intimacy. So, when you say that you wanted us (spectators) to see each other’s reaction, an intimate space like this one becomes your ally. It is also very interactive, specifically when the audience passes the cat puppet — Marcel — from one person to the next. This action, this game, re-enforces the sense of the community based on proximity and intimacy.

Deniz Başar: I would like to add something about the intimacy of the space. In one of his texts on directing, Eugenio Barba states that the bodily-emotional effect that makes an immediate impact on the audience has a limit in terms of physical distance, it lasts only 10 meters. After 10 meters this bodily transfer stops. Let me find and read the comment to you:
“The movement of another person evokes the onlooker’s own experience of that same movement. The visual information generates an embodied kinaesthetic commitment in the spectator. Kinaesthesia is the internal sensation of our own movements and tensions, as well as those of others, in our own body. This means that the tensions and modifications in the actor’s body provoke an immediate effect in the body of the spectator up to a distance of about 10 meters. If the distance is greater, this effect diminishes and disappears.” (Barba 23)
That’s why I like working in these very small spaces: you can play with the intimacy and you can produce this bodily effect. Art did it brilliantly: he used physical interactions with the audience, the prologue and greetings, and novelty of each scene. But he also used this effect of cringe, when we suddenly realize that nobody’s politically safe — the text can bite anybody anytime. Our costume and prop designer Candan Seda Balaban added to this dramaturgy too, together with the performers who did everything possible to keep this sense of intimacy while poking at moments of collective cringe.
NOTE: We collectively thank Ahmet Cihad Sivri for his technical and editorial support to us while we were working on this article.
Endnotes
[1] esi callender is stylizing their name in all lowercase letters.
[2] More on the subject of theatre, exile and subjectivity see Meerzon 2012 and 2020.
[3] See: https://www.valeriebah.com.
[4] Also see Başar 2021b.
[5] The term is used by intersectional feminists, including bell hooks, Angela Davis, Suely Rolnik and Aileen Moreton-Robinson.
[6] From Maria Grazia Turri’s presentation as part of the working group “Unconscious Ways to Assemble a Play: Three Case Studies on Audience Perception in Theatre.” Presented on June 22, 2024. Performance Studies International’s (PSi) 29th Annual Meeting, under the theme Assemble. University of London on 20-23 June, 2024. (Also see Turri 2023)
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report On the Banality of Evil. Penguin Books, 2006.
Barba, Eugenio. On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House, translated by Judy Barba. Routledge, 2010.
Başar, Deniz. Performative Publicness: Alternative Theatre in Turkey After 2000s. MA Thesis. Boğaziçi University, 2014.
—. A Dismissed Heritage: Contemporary Performance in Turkey Defined Through Karagöz. Ph.D. Thesis. Concordia University, 2021a.
—-. “A Survivor’s Guide to Institutional Racism.” Special Issue of Canadian Theatre Review: Theatre and Explosion, edited by Signy Lynch and Thea Fitz-James, Issue 186 (April 2021b). Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011.
Ejder, Eylem. “Learning from Scratch: Istanbul Theatre Through a Canadian-Armenian Lens. Interview with Art Babayants.” The Theatre Times, August 29, 2022. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.
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Meerzon, Yana. Performing Exile, Performing Self. Drama, Theatre, Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
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Turri, Maria Grazia. 2023. “Theatre as Intersubjective Space for Mediation of Collective Identity – Outline of a Psychoanalytic Perspective.” Theatre(s) and Public Sphere in a Global and Digital Society, edited by Ilaria Riccioni, Brill, 2023, pp. 110-21.
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*Deniz Başar is a theatre researcher, puppet maker, translator and playwright from Turkey. She received her PhD from Concordia University’s Humanities Department in 2021, and she was an FRQSC post-doctoral fellow in Boğaziçi University between 2021-2023. In 2014, she received one of the most acclaimed playwriting awards in Turkey for her play The Itch. In 2019, her play In the Destructible Flow of a Vast, Monolithic Moment was stage-read in Revolution They Wrote feminist theatre festival in Montreal. Her latest collaborative play Autumn in New Stockholm was published in 2023 as a trilingual edition (Turkish, Kurdish, and English) and distributed across the Canadian library system.

**Art Babayants/Արտ Բաբայանց is a Canadian-Armenian theatre artist whose stage work comprises musicals, contemporary Canadian drama, devised performances, and opera. His best-known work, a devised collaborative multilingual production In Sundry Languages was presented at Toronto Fringe (2017) and Caminos (2017) and called by NOW ‘a compelling critique of Canadian inclusiveness’. The script of In Sundry Languages was published by Playwrights Canada and by the Canadian Theatre Review (April 2019) and received both critical and scholarly acclaim. In 2023, his first dramatic text Bros/Les gars premiered in Saskatoon at La Troupe du jour and received the Excellence in New Work award (SATA, 2023).

***Yana Meerzon left Russia in 1996 by her personal choice and since then she has been living in Canada. She has been working in the field of theatre and migration since the early 2000s, focusing on the work of those theatre artists who were forced to leave their countries for political reasons (Meerzon 2012), but also children of exilic parents (Meerzon 2019), and cosmopolitan nomads, for whom migration and traveling have become a lifestyle (Meerzon 2020). After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Meerzon published several studies on performative aspects of nationalism under Putin and resistance that politically aware artists used for two decades to fight the regime (Meerzon 2023, 2024).
Copyright © 2024 Deniz Başar, Art Babayants, Yana Meerzon
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #30, Dec. 2024
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
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