Would you like to help Katharsis Performance Project celebrate its 16th year on stage, with its new experimental piece: YOKTUR. ?

Inspired by Parmendies’ “On Nature”, YOKTUR. (IS NOT.) is a new performative-ontological experiment (de)composed and (de)constructed by Fulya Peker in her native tongue. It is currently in rehearsal process getting ready to be presented by Katharsis Performance Project in Istanbul.

Holding on to our everlasting existential entanglement, YOKTUR. folds the path between past-truth and post-truth in half, and it summons —from the realm of dead to stage— the ashes of the grand riddle: Is nothing is?

An amorphous, translucent and buoyant fem-immortal transforms mortals’ memorized schemes of “imagination contented with imagery” into a language autopsy with her luminant/immanent laughter, and sound/body wave frequencies. Will human, watching oneself watching one’s own navigation on the pitch-black threshold between logos and paradox, death and love, is and is not be able to face the phenomenon of “1”, and its conjugate? 

Parmenides' On Nature has been on a voyage through the foggy timbre of the words is and is not for aeons. In this work, Parmenides goes down to the underworld and meets a goddess whom he thinks could supposedly satiate his longing for truth and certainty. However, since Parmenides was a logician, poet and seer, it was inevitable for this rather momentous and momentary confrontation to trigger an insatiable thirst for centuries to come and to lay the foundations of ontology. 

Aside from the recurring distillations based on Socrates-Plato-Aristotle alliance, the text has been accepted as a buoy for alternative philosophical and scientific navigations as well.  It is no wonder that some parmenidean keywords such as every, one, none, only, ever, all are in high demand in the 0-1 era that we are in. On the one hand, this poetic and paradoxical text, with its resilient and unwavering structure calls for an ardent reasoning, on the other with its seductive current, it continues to encourage the mind to lose the anchor of reason, to drift into the void.

For YOKTUR.’s staging process Fulya Peker will collaborate again with arhitect Aslıhan Demirtaş and lighting designer Alev Topal, both of whom she has worked with during Katharsis Performance Project (KPP)’s 2019 production of “Maldoror” in Istanbul.

Economical crises and political climate continue to wound artists in Turkey. It becomes harder and harder to survive, let alone composing and constructing an existence on stage. This might be the last play KPP presents in Istanbul. Hence, your support is vital and will be highly appreciated. The money raised during this campaign will be used solely for rehearsal and performance space rental, design and marketing expenses. No matter where you are in the world, to be a part of this experience, all you need to do is to select or set up an amount and proceed. If you cannot donate now, you can always help spread the word... Contributions on behalf of Katharsis Performance Project may be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Fulya Peker is a New York and Istanbul based theater artist and educator. She has performed in works by Richard Foreman, John Zorn, Robert Ashley, Katsura Kan, David Michalek and Object Collection. Some of her most prominent credits as a writer/director include: Requiem Aeternam Deo, The Void, The Plague, The Red Book, DEM, The Blind!(s), and Maldoror. She is the founder and artistic director of Katharsis Performance Project and Modern Mythologies Project. Her articles on experimental theater, translations, and poems have been published both in Turkey and in the USA. Currently, she teaches at Istanbul Bilgi University and continues to present performances and workshops internationally.

KPP is an experimental theater project founded by Peker in 2007.  With its plays KPP creates metaphorical analogies between physiology and existential philosophy; explores ecstatic states of human consciousness (fear, sexuality, cruelty) through new forms of textual and textural expressions. The vocal and physical patterns of its plays are created according to the graphic-notation based performance methods Peker has developed over the years while staging her Artaud-Butoh inspired experimental plays.