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Artistic director Müzede Sahne – Karşılaşmalar ve Ötesi
(Stage at the Museum – Encounters and Beyond), Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul, 2025
Karşılaşmalar ve Ötesi is a performing arts program curated and artistically directed by Ayşe Draz, presented at Sakıp Sabancı Museum as part of the Müzede Sahne series. Setting up an open-air main stage and transforming the museum’s garden and various outdoor spaces into performance spaces, the program brought together works that foregrounded participation, sensory exchange, and collective thinking, inviting audiences not only to watch together but to see, hear, feel, and imagine together.

The main stage opened with Yarın Belki de, a minimal yet charged encounter between two accomplished performers navigating possible, utopian, and dystopian futures. The following evening, Kızlar ve Oğlanlar confronted domestic violence through one woman’s life story, a powerful piece of acting that challenged social taboos and built empathy. The program closed with L’Addition, which premiered at the Avignon Festival in 2023: a deceptively simple waiter–customer scene, repeated with accumulating tension, where power, role, and perception shift continuously into something both comic and unsettling.

Bahçede Karşılaşmalar, curated with Umut Rışvanlı and Yasemin Derme, took place on Thursday and Friday evenings before the main stage performances. The garden hosted performances that pushed beyond habitual ways of seeing and sensing, works that proposed new forms and new ways of being present together. On Saturdays and Sundays, the garden became the site of Bir Gün Buradan Boğaz’ı İzledim, a site-specific project created for the museum in collaboration with writer Murat Mahmutyazıcıoğlu and choreographer Gizem Bilgen, guiding audiences through a journey between past and future in the company of female figures from the museum’s collection.

Fuayede Karşılaşmalar invited audiences to gather before each main stage performance for intimate conversations with Özlem Hemiş and Aylin Alıveren, who offered context and impressions to open up new ways of approaching each work. After performances, brief conversations and Q&As extended the experience beyond the stage.

Children’s programming included Pezzettino by ATTA Festival and the object theatre piece 3’ü 1 Arada Shakespeare, introducing young audiences to Shakespeare through play. Workshops expanded the sensory scope of the program further: Oğuz Öner’s Atlı Köşk Sound Landscape tuned audiences inward and outward through listening, while an aromatherapy workshop developed in collaboration with Homemade Aromaterapi used scent as a guide, opening doors to unexpected encounters at the threshold where sight, sound, and smell dissolve into one another.

For the brochure, click here.

From the press:
SAHA
Tiyatro Dergisi
T24

Photos: Canberk Ulusan


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© AYŞE DRAZ, 2026