During the five-day event, the Akbank Children's Theater will perform “Who is the happiest?” while the Akbank Puppet and Traditional Shadow Theater will stage “Karagöz Palace.” “Who is the happiest?” is a play that questions who is the happiest, who is the most powerful and who is the biggest among many traditional Turkish fairy tale characters, such as Dede Korkut, Keloğlan, Kavuklu, Pişekar, Karagöz, Hacivat and Nasrettin Hodja, the play's director, Hayrettin Aslan, explains. “Every child wants to grow up. But a happy childhood spent with love and care is the basic foundation for a healthy adulthood. We lived in a very rich fairytale culture in our childhood. Now, in the current age, technology offers many new characters which cease to exist quickly, but our stories that have been handed down through the centuries are still very much alive,” Aslan said in an interview with Today's Zaman. The main character of the show, Sırma, travels across these fairy tales and at the end she learns a secret: People do not play games anymore because they have grown old but they only grow old because they stop playing.
“Karagöz Palace,” on the other hand, highlights the disadvantages of abandoning one's education, Akbank Puppet and Traditional Shadow Theater director Tacettin Diker explains. “Karagöz ends up not having a job, and Hacivat helps him to find one, as usual. Karagöz starts to work in a hotel and serves the customers. He gets very tired, but customers keep coming and asking for things and he cannot sleep. When he laments about his situation, the manager of the hotel reminds him that if he had studied better when he was a child he would not have to be in a situation like this, and Karagöz promises him he will learn how to read and write.”
Apart from these performances, the festival will also include various workshops and studies bringing together children and artists. Diker will give a workshop titled “We are Playing Shadow Theater” in which he will be teach how to play the Karagöz and Hacivat characters and how to write dialogue for shadow theater.
This will be the third European tour of the Akbank Children's Theater, which was founded 37 years ago. “We would like to be wherever there is a child,” says Aslan, adding that it is very easy to reach children because their imaginations are so strong. “The posters about our plays that were printed in Austria say, ‘Kids, have you ever watched Karagöz and Hacivat?’ and ‘Have you ever watched a children's play in Turkish?'” One of the actresses in the play, Sibel Aslan, who speaks German, will summarize each act beforehand in German.
Apart from Turkey, Germany, Italy and Slovenia will also participate in the festival, which will run through Sept. 5. For more information, visit www.akbanksanat.com.
