Review By Birgitta Johansson
Prayers from three different religions are called out over Järntorget (the Iron Square). On their way between the tram and the central station the comuters can stop for a moment and look into the eyes of human like automats to see dreams and memories.
The festival Black/North SEAS offers theatre, performance, music, video and dance in unconventional spaces. Dates between artists from eleven countries has resulted in fifteen works , with migration, identity, the city, climate and economical inequalities as themes. All of it seen through the perspective of harbour towns and cities.
Amongst the market stalls in Kommersens Fleamarket, one of Turkey´s leading free theatre groups, Tiyatro Oyunevi, present Waiting…. Two women and three men have travelled from their distant homelands and come to Europe. They settle down on the raw asphalt and install their new daily lives.
Expectation glows in their eyes. Turning towards the audience they display their qualifications and future dreams, but disappointment quietens them soon enough. While waiting to be welcomed and accepted, they pass the time in monotonous activities as their doubts grow and dreams are buried.
With a nod to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot the activities grow more absurd, as if the waiting in itself and the loss of hope turns the characters into strangers to us and to themselves.
The physical acting style, at moments clown-like and akin to circus numbers, creates a close connection with the audience. Music and song create shifts in the mood from melancholy to skittish happiness.
The dialogue is for the most part in Kurdish and Turkish but the story is uncomplicated and the actors communicate in an acting style of charisma and warmth while the music speaks straight to the heart.
Glorious Death, directed by Sweden-based Dritëro Kasapi, is about life in the zone between old Europe and the future. Seated at the tables of Sjömanskyrkans café (The Seaman’s Church Cafe) we learn about the life of Gloria through video stories with four people who knew her and the letters of her son. The old woman has recently passed away and the stories are interspersed with the son’s great sorrow over her death. We see Gloria sit at a table in the room. In the depiction of Gloria’s empty life in an English seaside town, that once was a lively holiday resort, another symbolic level of narration is inserted that describes an old Europe in its death spasms. An image of places that have been left to wither when living patterns and economical structures change. But also of those people who have been left behind and of the new settlers from the outside that can blow life into the dead towns with their visions. The montage technique used creates several meanings and ironies, contrasting with the sad quality that the counter-tenor Nuri Harun Ates beautiful voice creates, but also to the nostalgia that is heightened by the speechless presence of Gloria played by Eva Stellby. While Waiting… has a physical expression that stays in the memory, it is the fascinating and flowing narrative of Glorious Death that sticks in one’s thoughts.