The Asklepion Project
Gulce Oral and I have been developing work in Turkey! We are creating a huge and exciting site-specific project celebrating local women in the area for the Bergama Theatre Festival 2024. Puppets, movement, games, interactivity, all in an ancient historic healing site!
See below a trailer of the project we did in Troy last summer in collaboration with Canakkale University.
Below is a trailer of how this all got started! Gulce and I worked in Turkey with students at Canakkale University on a site specific show for Troy. This was a fast workshop (8 days!), where we developed monologues (collaboratively written by the performers, Gulce and I) around a common theme. Each actor was put through a physical process looking at their undeveloped feminine characteristics, then they met with and studied an influential woman in their lives, then from this material, we created a ‘goddess’ like story/character. We wanted to bring the woman back to Troy! (The Troy Museum has 5000 years of history and very, very few women are mentioned, yet, there are these ‘goddesses’ everywhere.) Where are the women? How does this erasure happen? Does it continue to happen? Rather than look at history, we felt it was important to try to SEE the women in our lives now that perhaps go unnoticed. The caretakers, the mothers and grandmothers, the nurses, the women who feed us… It was such a powerful process of discovery and change for all of us, that we are now creating a ‘process’, rather than a product, that can be taken anywhere… we are still creating this process, but it will inform the work we do that will be installed at Asklepion in 2024.