London Yunus Emre Institute organized Karagöz & Hacivat workshops for 4 different student groups on October 8-10, 2022, in cooperation with the ISTA (International Schools Theatre Association) organization, which has been providing training in theatre schools in many different parts of the world for more than 40 years.

TICKETS SOLD OUT THE DAY THEY WENT ON SALE

Founded in 1978, ISTA provides training to students who choose the theater department to gain different perspectives on theater. Tickets for the program, which includes intensive trainings in 5 branches titled "Jointly Creating Original Theater", "International Diploma Perspective", "Play Texts", "Theater Theory Performances", and "Exploring Traditional World Theater", were sold out in the first days of sales.  

NEARLY 100 STUDENTS FROM AMERICA AND EUROPE PARTICIPATED

TaPS Perspectives 2022, which took place at Conway Hall, was attended by over 90 theater students from many different countries, such as America, Italy, England, Belgium, and Switzerland. London Yunus Emre Institute took part in this organization 4 times with Karagöz & Hacivat theatre under the title of discovering traditional world theatre. 

EVERY STAGE FROM WORKSHOP TO SCREEN WAS EXPLAINED TO STUDENTS

Within the scope of the Karagöz & Hacivat project initiated by the London Yunus Emre Institute in 2018, the history, characteristics, and traditional puppet materials of the traditional Turkish shadow play were introduced in the workshops held by Ada Burke, an award-winning theater actress who completed her training at the Bursa Karagöz Hacivat Museum. After explaining the material information, examples from Karagöz & Hacivat quarrels were animated. At the end of the workshop, the students made their own Karagöz & Hacivat puppets, and at the end of the workshop they acted out a piece from Muhavere, a part of the shadow play. Behind the curtain, the young theater students imitated the voices of Karagöz and Hacivat and performed their own performances, taking into account the characteristics of the characters. 

VOICE CONTROL, PUPPET MANAGEMENT, AND TEXT TRACKING AT THE SAME TIME

The students who took the floor at the end of the workshops said that Karagöz & Hacivat was the most educational and entertaining of the workshops, and although they had played theater on stage before, they were excited to experience the shadow play behind the curtain for the first time. They expressed their admiration for the traditional Karagöz & Hacivat actors' ability to perform many different tasks at the same time and how much effort it takes to move the puppets and follow a text while using a different tone of voice for each character. The students, who had fun modernizing the quarrels of Karagöz and Hacivat and adding their own dialogues, left the workshop with their own Karagöz and Hacivat. 

In their evaluation meeting on the last day of the event, the directors of the event stated that the Karagöz & Hacivat theater was perfectly adapted to their curriculum and that they would like to continue their cooperation with London Yunus Emre Institute permanently.  During the event, which received very positive feedback from all the theater students, the students shared that they would like to choose Karagöz and Hacivat as the subject of their research projects when they return to their countries. With the new ties established, workshop invitations were received from many international schools and doors were opened for new collaborations. 

Within the scope of this project, which was initiated by London Yunus Emre Institute in 2018 to promote Karagöz & Hacivat Shadow Play, one of the most important intangible cultural heritage of Turkish culture, in the UK, more than 30 plays in both English and Turkish were performed for children in primary and secondary schools, various cultural institutions and museums in the UK.