Birds

July 2022 - March 2023
TRABZON

The Birds project focuses on human rights, freedom and gender issues. The project consists of a theatre play that will be staged with six female prisoners in the E Type Closed Penal Institution in Trabzon and a documentary. Based on the metaphor of "birds" in Aristophanes' play Birds, a collage-like theatre play will be staged that includes female prisoners' longings and dreams for a better and liveable world, and constructive and healing women-themed stories, and the whole process will be turned into a medium-length documentary film.

Theatre activities in prisons in Turkey are mostly in the form of a theatre group coming from outside and putting on a show. The Birds project aims to show women prisoners that they can be active participants, not passive observers in real life, by enabling them to be direct participants and producers and to support them to be included in society as healthier, self-aware women.

The idea of a theatre play and documentary project held with female prisoners is born during the quarantine days that we all lived through the Covid-19 pandemic and has been inspired by the fact that we all try to make our voices heard through art, even in those moments when we have limited access to the outer world. The healing power of art has helped us all in this process. This project, which emerged with the aim of contributing to the social and artistic fields as a result of the sympathy established with the prisoners, aims to develop the means of expressing themselves through performance, and to encourage them to participate in society as equal individuals after their conviction.

The documentary is planned to be screened at festivals and other prisons on March 8, International Women's Day.

Troy, Lost Paradise, 2019, Tbilisi
Photo: Zuka Pirtskhalaishvili

Gamze Tanrıvermiş

Born in 1983, Gamze Tanrıvermiş works as a theatre director, actress and academician. Following her education in acting in Istanbul, she worked as an actress and assistant director at Istanbul State Theatre for 2 years. She moved to Tbilisi in 2013 to study theatre directing and lived there for 6 years. Her projects include Troya performed by female actors who left Abkhazia due to forced migration which has documentary features, Paradise Lost, the play, a one-woman play adapted from Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, and a medium-length documentary film, which is in the editing stage, about Karapapaks living in Georgia. Tanrıvermiş, who carries out theatre, performance and documentary films on themes of gender, identity, ethnicity, immigration, existentialism and creativity, works as a lecturer in the Department of Performing Arts at Trabzon University State Conservatory and continues to produce projects on the axis of Tbilisi-Trabzon-Istanbul.

This page is published on 23 June 2022.