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Lick But Don’t Swallow!
Theatre
75′
April 7th 2012, Saturday | 15.00
Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University
With Surtitles in English
Copyright biriken
Lick But Don’t Swallow! by Özen Yula tells about the dream of a porn star to save herself and the world. The play handles the painful realities of our own time via the heroine, whereas it reveals a dramatic critic of the feeling of emptiness created in contemporary society. The project created and performed by the collaboration of biriken collective with the actress Ayça Damgacı is an examination of non-hierarchical co-existence of video, text and performer where the actors goes back and forth between “performer” and “character”.
The play is on one side wandering through today’s painful realities through our heroine Leyla; on the other hand, it chooses a platform where it cancels out everything it tells about, denies the reality surrounding us, and where the only reality is hedonism. As such, porn offers a world without any problems, where all the problems can be solved with pleasure. Trying to install the world problems into that construct is to make both aspects nonfunctional, to empty out both pain and pleasure. This “emptiness” is the only truth for us that we can feel.
This reality, while effecting the political and social developments, sneaks into our lives, our rooms, even into our TV and computer screens. It defines our lives. In Lick But Don’t Swallow! we hear about the desperate situation of the world that is described by the statistics and is transmitted to millions of people by the news bulletins updated any moment. Leyla passes this on to us in a place where she was not supposed to be and in a way that is far from the “political correctness” which may in fact be an art of lying.
Written by Özen Yula
Directed by biriken (Melis Tezkan, Okan Urun)
Performers Ayça Damgacı, Hakan Ummak, Koray Kadiraga, Melis Tezkan, Okan Urun, Kerem Can Dum.
Set and Video Design biriken
Light Design Metin Çelebi
Camera Cenk Örtülü
Project Assistant Ferdi Çetin
Co-production Bimeras | iDANS (TR)
biriken and Ayça Damgacı give special thanks to Andrew Boord, Aydın Silier, Başak Özdoğan, Cenk Oğlakçı, Giancarlo Marcopoli, Gurur Ertem, Mahir Günşiray, Mark Levitas, Muharrem Yılmaz, Yeşim Özsoy Gülan, Asi Film, darmaha, GalataPerform, Haymatlos, Kumbaracı50, Tütün Deposu, Tiyatro Oyunevi.
Past shows:
- Jan 4 – Jan 15, 2012, Under the Radar Festival, La MAMA Theater, New York, USA.
- May 4, 2011, Heidelberger Stückemarket’11, Theater und Orchester Heidelberg, Germany.
- Oct 30, 2010, International Contemporary Dance and Performance Festival (iDANS 04), garajistanbul, Turkey.
biriken is an interdisciplinary art collective founded in 2006 by Okan Urun and Melis Tezkan.
- 2011 to tina / what’s love got to do with it?
A video art project by biriken, starring Ayça Damgaci and Boysan Yakar. to tina / what’s love got to do with it? is an essay on the individual, social and current interpretation of concepts like love, sex, and relationship.
- 2008 – 2009 Treachery in the Near East
Written by Özen Yula, directed and performed by biriken. Treachery in the Near East is a political play about the quiet anger of a Nobody.
- 2007 – 2009 people as places as people
The people as places as people project took place as a video-installation, an installation performance and a net art project. It’s a tentative of recreation of a certain “myspace” in real space-time.
- 2006 Now there is a hole where once stood our house.
Written, directed and performed by biriken. Interdisciplinary stage project combining performing arts and video. Now there is a hole where once stood our house deals with woman condition.
Ayça Damgacı was born in 1973 in Istanbul. She studied Theatre in Istanbul University and acting in Sahika Tekand Studio Players. Between 1998-2010 she acted in several plays in “Tiyatro Oyunevi” such as, Don Quixote (Cervantes), In the Penal Colony (Kafka), Marriage (Gogol), Blood Wedding (Lorca), The Night in Front of the Forests (Bernard Marie Koltes), Oblivion (Joel Jouanneau, Enzo Corman, Eugene Durif, Eric- Emmanuel Schmitt), The Round of Pleasure (Werner Schwab), Gavara (Nihat Genç), TOL(Murat Uyurkulak), At the Doors of Europe (Augustine Iglesias), Waiting(Birgul Oguz), also with different theatre companies Sinful is the Tongue (Nihal Geyran Koldas), A Trial in Istanbul (Kerem Kurtoglu).
Acted in TV shows and feature films as Do Not Forget Me Istanbul, aylavyu, 72. Kogus, Gitmek-My Marlon and Brando where she has several national and international awards. Also the lead vocal of the band Gocebe Sarkilar (Nomadic Songs) world music.
Özen Yula was born in1965 in Eskisehir, Turkey.
8 books (short story collections, novels, essays) and 18 plays in 5 volumes have been printed since 1993. His plays have been translated to English, German, French, Italian, Finnish, Polish, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Japanese, Arabic. Different productions were shown in England, Germany, Austria, the Nederlands, Bosnia, Cyprus, Egypt, Japan. He got several Theatre Awards as the best playwright including Afife Jale twice.
His reading theatre performances or theatrical performances were held in Chartreuse-Avignon, Theater Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz-Berlin, Theater Weimar-Malmö, Municipal Theatres-Cyprus, Mauro Avogadro Group-Torino, Teatro di Rifredi-Florence, Martin E. Segal Theatre-New York, Zenica State Theatre-Bosnia, Theatre Frankfurt-Frankfurt, Kellertheater Winterthur-Switzerland, Maison des Metallos-Paris. He worked as a co-playwright for several international projects including Free Theatre-Minsk, Schaubuehne am Lehniner Platz-Berlin, The Internationalists-New York, European Theatre Collective-Helsinki. Also as a playwright or director his plays were shown in last Bonner Biennale in Germany, kontext:europa inVienna, Istanbul International Theatre Festival, Toga Festival in Japan, Cairo International Experimental Theatre Festival, Turkish-Holland Theatre Meeting in Amsterdam, Ohrid Summer Festival in Macedonia. Several thesis have been written on his theatre in different universities in Turkey and Europe. His play Treachery in the Near East has been a part of the playwriting classes at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
He spent 9 months in 2010 as an “artist in residence” at Cleveland Public Theatre and guest lecturer at Cleveland State University as a part of the “Creative Fusion” program funded by Cleveland Foundation, where he developed two world premiere plays: codename:EXILE and Don’t Call Me Fat.
Perform2012 
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