Avant-garde Theater makes a splash in İstanbul with iDANS

The festival, organized by the İstanbul-based Bimeras Culture Foundation, is celebrating its third edition and boasts an expanded program. Marking its opening with the Nature Theater of Oklahoma's “Romeo and Juliet” on Oct 10 at the İstanbul State Theater's Tekel Theater, the festival runs until Oct 31 at the Garajistanbul performing arts platform.
 ‘Without’
One of the most interesting and striking performances of the festival was that of the famous French choreographer Martine Pisani. Presenting a rather different performance from a conventional show, Pisani also has a different background from others.
Pisani presented her performance on Oct17 at Garajistanbul and also held a workshop at Yıldız Technical University. “I agreed to put on a workshop because I wanted to meet people,” Pisani notes.
Pisani's work, titled “Sans” (Without), includes no set decor, no music, no text and no light effects, but has a humorous language. “I don't use music [all the time], I use music when I need it,” explains Pisani. “For me, the most important thing is to be in front of the audience. For that, we try to be as simple as possible, standing on stage and being as we are. But it's not that easy to be so simple and to be in front of an audience and in the meantime deal with the text of a theater [play]. They say that I'm not working with sound, but that's not true because, in the first place, I hear. Hearing and listening comes first: listening to each other, listening to the dance we perform. And the audience can laugh as much as they can allow themselves to laugh.”
The show's title seems to be a reference to the situation of remaining as simple as possible while conveying numerous messages to the audience. “At the beginning it was untitled,” notes Pisani, “because I was waiting for the title, but when we started working, it was without sets, music, light or sound effects. Without these, we worked a lot on transitions. ‘Without' but with a lot.”