Site-Specific Performance Works of Tuğçe Ulugün Tuna: Examining Spatial Performativity through a Turkish Choreographer’s Perspective

Περίληψη

The term “performance” has become extremely common in various arts, literature, and social sciences activities. Performance theorist Richard Schechner has searched the relationship between theory and practice in social sciences and theatre studies, mainly focusing on Turner's model of “social drama”. Performance progressively got out of its shelter, the cultural institution, and assumed the role of provoking critical questions about the meaning of art in our highly mediated daily lives. Bodily art performance in space demonstrates a reciprocal interaction. Particularly, site-specific performance has even got a higher dependency on space, architectural or natural. Most site-specific indoor or outdoor performances are primarily concerned with unconventional performance spaces, drawing particular attention to the physical qualities of space and its social or historical connotations. Tuğçe Ulugün Tuna is an awarded Turkish choreographer, contemporary dance and interdisciplinary performance artist, body reader, and academician. Tuna is known to exhibit site-specific choreographies in her works and theatre festivals. Some of her conceptual and choreographic creations stand out as works realized in Istanbul for particular sites, such as Machine Body at The Energy Museum Santralistanbul (2008-2009), Wet Volume at Bayrampaşa old prison (2010), Displacement at the old Hasköy Cotton Factory (2012), Show of Strength at St. Pulchérie French School (2014-2019), Body Drops at an old public bath (2017), and Revert produced in an old shoe factory (Istanbul Beykoz Kundura stage, 2022). Show of Strength takes place in a historic high school building and leaves many questions about the body, what the body contains, lives, learns, transforms, changes, accumulates, expresses, and is exposed to. Wet Volume undertakes the architectural space (an abandoned prison) and the body as "wet volumes" and interprets feelings such as happiness, service, shame, passion, desire, fear, and human reaction towards these feelings. Machine Body focuses on the relationship between body and machine, taking
place in the former Ottoman time power plant converted into a Museum of Energy. This study aims to investigate the structures of Tuna’s choreographic works in terms of their particular relations with their location, how the site delivers meanings, how these meanings are interpreted, and how the body exposes these interpreted meanings in the concept of the performance.