Karşılaşmalar ve Ötesi / Müzede Sahne, Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul
September 4–7, 2025
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.
Encounters in the Garden, 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.
Encounters in the Foyer 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.