Review: MODERN DANCE THEATER ISTANBUL MINI-FEST Liberates at Fulya Sanat

By: Jun. 12, 2017
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A rare event at Fulya Sanat, home of Istanbul State Opera and Ballet's Modern Dance Theater Istanbul (MDTist), is the Mini-Fest, last produced for the stage in 2014, it returned 23-24 May last week with two technique classes, three workshops, a special show and six performances of new choreography.

From boogie to hip hop, the first day's workshops broke for thirteen first-year dance students from MSGSÜ (Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi) to perform Hippies for Sale, a repertoire piece by Gizem Aksu, who designed its concept, choreography and direction. It is based on a group of people who spend their youth in Turkey in the 2010s, and featured music by Hilight Tribe and Berna Efeoglu.

A manifesto accompanied the Hippies for Sale notes in the Mini-Fest playbill. It is a call to hug, to shake, to jump, to provoke the hippie within and move to love.

Cem Bilgin led the Boogie and Hip Hop Battle workshops, in collaboration. As a dancer, he works on the outer circle of MDTist, an example of why the Mini-Fest is an opportunity for more people to appreciate the company's creative community as a whole.

To dancers, and to choreographers, the body is art. And as is true with every art, it also conjures philosophy, and spirituality.

MDTist company dancer Huri Murphy is an emerging yoga teacher, and total enthusiast of the ancient Hindu practice. She's applied its poses specially for dancers. At 10:30am, to begin the second and last, and fullest day of Mini-Fest, Huri woke a silent crowd of fifteen on the Fulya Sanat stage, which she elegantly converted into a yoga studio, ambient soundscapes and all under soft theater lighting.

By 2:30pm, the number of dancers onstage doubled for the last course of the day. After a composition workshop by MDTist dancer and young choreographer Kamola Rashidova, the company's artistic director Beyhan Murphy walked front and center to lead a technical class. Her appearance was a surprise, as the class was initially scheduled with another teacher.

Next year, Beyhan will celebrate forty years in dance, and she still moves onstage with as much magnetism and power as her dancers, shouting and laughing, and ordering them around with proven knowledge, slapping arms and legs, and moving to the beat with a youthful charm that exudes the London of the 1970s, where she cut her teeth. Her company, MDTist, is her canvas, full of bright colors and broad strokes. The new choreographers featured at Mini-Fest, as with those across the country, and the entire international dance community, are indebted to her for the twenty three years she's given to modern dance in Turkey.

The stage went pitch dark. Eko, by Deniz Özaydin began the evening by setting a gloomy, mysterious tone. MDTist dancer Beril ?enöz drank in the depths under an existential swarm. A fog machine blasted out clouds, as the seven dancers assumed god-like poise over the unearthly climate. The eighth of his choreographic works, Özaydin's Eko had a cyclical narrative that gave its audience chills.

Rachmaninov -- String Quartet No. 1 is the title of a dance by Kamola Rashidova, specifically set to the effect of musical purism. It has no story, no point, it is simply an expression of her love for Rachmaninov. Originally trained at Tashkent State Higher School of National Dance and Choreography in her native Uzbekistan, she later enrolled at the prestigious PARTS in Brussels before joining MDTist. She danced the first movement of String Quartet No. 1, Romance, with Ayhan Karaagaç. Her choreographic talent showed as dancers Buse Ercan and Beril Senöz leapt into the second movement, for Scherzo, and the mood swung high and suddenly from one dramatic extreme to the other with deftness and grace.

MDTist dancers Buse Ercan and Mert Öztekin performed 6'19' by Ebru Cans?z, a senior ballet dancer in Istanbul State Opera and Ballet, the parent company of MDTist. It's a solemn duet, a meditation on the gravity of trust in the fleeting nature of human relationships, weighed and checked by time: six minutes and nineteen seconds. Artfully deploying floor lights, and costuming the dancers in austere, futuristic garb, she choreographs with a signature aesthetic. 6'19' will have another audience June 20 at Moda Sahnesi.

Tabula Rasa tested the ground as none other with the only solo work of the evening, choreographed and danced by Gizem Bilgen to the music of Motion Trio's Silence. Her eight-minute piece began with her under a spotlight, as one "pressed between mysteries," she wrote in her artist's statement. Her modern dance expressed the basic stubbornness of the body as an unstoppable repetition that has compelled her perpetually onward into dream and experience.

Wildly contemporary, recalling the historic iconoclasm of Balanchines' Agon, or Cunningham's anything, choreographer and dancer Isil Derya Günes has only been with MDTist for a year and she is giving new life to Turkish choreography. To Mendelssohn's String Quartet no.2 op.13 in A minor, she conceptualized and choreographed Hâl/Status with a singular wit, characterizing the absurd and fantastic as she reimagined the body as it moves and falls, as it sounds and acts under the light, and the darkness of the stage. Emre Olcay's performance was especially eye-catching, as he drew communicable emotion from the abstract.

After intermission, One by One, the sixth and final choreographic work of the evening went onstage for fifty minutes to conclude the festival. None of those fifty minutes were wasted. It was a tragicomic tour-de-force choreographed by Evrim Akyay, in a fantastically modern duet with Melissa Ugolini. They twisted and churned over the nonverbal meaning of relationship: masculine and feminine, you and I, mine and ours. Even their dialogue, seemingly impromptu, was crisp and fast as they wound their bodies up to untangling. They were as irresistible as the laughter that leaked and fumed from the audience as the pair exchanged mixed emotions through each spastic and thrilling movement.

With every workshop, class and performance completely free-of-charge, the MDTist Mini-Fest is a goldmine for seasoned professionals and for the newest faces in dance in Istanbul. More, it opens potential for newcomers to speak in their voice, in the language of the body moving to the latest art of the stage. And it is a welcome community, although close-knit, inclusive, where daughters and mothers teach separate subjects, where newly engaged couples dance as collaborators, and where young families learn the rhythm of each festive step.

The Turkish version of this review was translated by Ay?egül Ülde? and published by Art Unlimited in Istanbul.

https://www.unlimitedrag.com/single-post/mini-fest

This is a piece of Real Translation, as its writing was intended for translation, and it was written in collaboration with the translator in real-time throughout the writing process.



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