11 Sep 2018 | Artistic Freedom, News and features, Turkey, Turkey Uncensored
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Enough is Enough is a play formed as a gig, tells the stories of real people about sexual violence, through song and dark humour. It is written by Meltem Arikan, directed by Memet Ali Alabora, with music by Maddie Jones, and includes four female cast members who act as members of a band.
For Turkish director and actor Memet Ali Alabora, theatre is about creating an environment in which the audience is encouraged to think, react and reflect. His goal is to leave the audience thinking about and questioning issues, whether it be democracy, free speech, women’s rights or the concept of belonging.
Alabora has always been fascinated by the notion of play and games, even as a child. “I was in a group of friends that imitated each other, told jokes, made fun of things and situations,” he says. The son of actors Mustafa Alabora and Betül Arım, he was exposed early on to the theatre. In high school, Alabora took on roles in plays by Shakespeare and Orhan Veli. He was one of the founders of Garajistanbul, a contemporary performing arts institution in Istanbul.
For Alabora, ludology — the studying of gaming — is not merely about creating different theatrical personalities and presenting them to the audience each time. Rather, it is about creating an alternative to ordinary life — an environment in which actors and members of the audience could meet, intermingle and interact. For those two hours or so, participants are encouraged to think deeply about and reflect upon their own personal stories and the consequences of their actions.
“I think I’m obsessed with the audience. I always think about what is going to happen to the audience at the end of the play: What will they say? What situation do I want to put them in?” the Turkish actor says “It’s not about what messages I want to convey. I want them to put themselves in the middle of everything shown and spoken about, and think about their own responsibility, their own journey and history.”
“It’s not easy to do that for every audience you touch. If I can do that with some of the people in the audience, I think I will be happy,” Alabora adds.
It is this desire to create an environment in which the audience is encouraged to take part, to reflect, to think that Alabora brought to Mi Minör, a Turkish play that premiered in 2012. Written by Turkish playwright Meltem Arıkan, it is set in the fictional country of “Pinima”, where “despite being a democracy, everything is decided by the president”. In opposition to the president is the pianist, who cannot play high notes, such as the Mi note, on her piano because they have been banned. The play encouraged the audience to use their smartphones to interact with each other and influence the outcome.
Alabora explained the production team’s motivation behind the play: “At the time when we were creating Mi Minör, our main motive was to make each and every audience if possible to question themselves. This is very important. The question we asked ourselves was: if we could create a situation in which people could face in one and a half hour, about autocracy, oppression, how would people react?”
The goal wasn’t to “preach the choir” or convey a certain message about the world. It was to encourage the audience not be complacent. “Would the audience stand with the pianist, who advocates free speech and freedom of expression, or would they side with the autocratic president?” Alabora asks.
Alabora considered was how people would react when faced with the same situation in real life. “They were reacting, but was it a sort of reaction where they react, get complacent with it and go back to their ordinary lives, or would they react if they see the same situation in real life?”
On 27 May 2013, a wave of unrest and demonstrations broke out in Gezi Park, Istanbul to protest the urban development plans being carried out there. Over the next few days, violence quickly escalated, with the police using tear gas to suppress peaceful demonstrations. By July 2013, over 8,000 people were injured and five dead.
In the aftermath, Turkish authorities accused Mi Minör of being a rehearsal for the protests. Faced with threats against their lives, Arikan, Alabora and Pinar Ogun, the lead actress, had little choice but to leave the country.
But how could a play that was on for merely five months be a rehearsal for a series of protests that involved more than 7.5 million people in Istanbul alone? “You can’t teach people how to revolt,” Alabora says. “Yes, theatre can change things, be a motive for change, but we’re not living in the beginning of the 20th century or ancient Greece where you can influence day-to-day politics with theatre.”
The three artists relocated to Cardiff, but their experience did not prevent them from continuing with the work they love. They founded Be Aware Productions in January 2015 and their first production, Enough is Enough, written by Arikan, told the stories of women who were victims of domestic violence, rape, incest and sexual abuse. The team organised a month-long tour of more than 20 different locations in Wales.
“In west Wales, we performed in a bar where there was a rugby game right before – there was already an audience watching the game on TV and drinking beer,” Alabora says. “The bar owner gave the tickets to the audience in front and kept the customers who had just seen the rugby game behind.”
“After the play, we had a discussion session and it was as if you were listening to the stories of these four women in a very intimate environment,” he adds. “When you go through something like that, it becomes an experience, which is more than seeing a show.”
After each performance, the team organised a “shout it all out” session, in which members of the audience could discuss the play and share their personal stories with each other. One person said: “Can I say something? Don’t stop what you are doing. You have just reached out one person tonight. That’s a good thing because it strengthened my resolve. Please keep doing that. Because you have given somebody somewhere some hope. You have given me that. You really have.”
Be Aware Productions is now in the process of developing a new project that documents how the production team ended up in Wales and why they chose it as their destination.
“What we did differently with this project was that we did touring rehearsals. We had three weeks of rehearsal in six different parts of Wales. The rehearsals were open to the public, and we had incredible insight from people about the show, about their own stories and about the theme of belonging,” Alabora shares.
Just like Mi Minor and Enough is Enough, the motivation behind this new project is to encourage the audience to think, to reflect on their own personal stories and experiences: “With this new project, I want them to really think personally about what they think or believe and where this sense of belonging is coming from, have they thought about it, and just share their experiences.” [/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner content_placement=”top”][vc_column_inner width=”1/4″][vc_column_text]
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Index encourages an environment in which artists and arts organisations can challenge the status quo, speak out on sensitive issues and tackle taboos.
Index currently runs workshops in the UK, publishes case studies about artistic censorship, and has produced guidance for artists on laws related to artistic freedom in England and Wales.
Learn more about our work defending artistic freedom.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1536657340830-d3ce1ff1-7600-4″ taxonomies=”15469″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
10 Sep 2018 | Magazine, News and features, Volume 47.03 Autumn 2018
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Using fiction and stories to influence society is nothing new, but facts are needed to drive the most powerful campaigns, argues Rachael Jolley in the autumn 2018 Index on Censorship magazine” google_fonts=”font_family:Libre%20Baskerville%3Aregular%2Citalic%2C700|font_style:400%20italic%3A400%3Aitalic”][vc_column_text]
Poster for the 1948 film adaptation of Charles Dickens Oliver Twist (Photo: Ethan Edwards/Flickr)
My friend’s dad just doesn’t believe that UK unemployment levels are incredibly low. He thinks the country is in a terrible state. So when I sit down and say unemployment in 2018 is at 4.2%, the joint lowest level since 1971, he doesn’t really argue. Because he doesn’t believe it.
Well, I say, these are the official figures from the Office for National Statistics. His response is: “Hmm.” Clearly my interjection hasn’t made any difference at all.
He raises an eyebrow to signify, “They would say that, wouldn’t they?”.
This figure, and the picture it sketches, doesn’t chime with his national view, which is that things are very, very bad. And it doesn’t chime with the picture sketched in the newspaper that he reads every day, which is that things are very, very bad.
So, consequently, whatever facts or figures or sources you might throw at him to prove otherwise, nothing makes an impression on him. He believes that the world is the way he believes it is. No question.
Like many people, my friend’s dad reads news stories that reflect what he believes already, and discards stories or announcements that don’t.
And in itself, that is nothing new. For decades people have trusted their neighbours more than people far away. They have read a newspaper that echoed their political persuasion, and sometimes they have felt that the society they lived in was worse than it used to be, even when all the indicators showed their lives had improved.
Often humans believe in ideas by instinct, not because they are presented with a graph. In 2005, Drew Westen, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, in Atlanta, USA, published The Political Brain. In it, he argued that the public often made decisions to support political parties based on emotions, not data or fact.
The book struck home with activists, who tried to utilise Westen’s thinking by changing the way they campaigned. Politicians had to capture the public’s hearts and minds, Westen said. He talked about the role of emotion in deciding the fate of a nation and gave examples. When US President Lyndon Johnson proposed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which outlawed racial discrimination at the US ballot box, he used personal stories to make his points stronger, said Westen, adding that this was a powerful tool. In doing so, Westen was ahead of his time in acknowledging just how strongly humans value emotion, and how an emotional action can be driven by feeling and desire rather than the latest data from a governmental body.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_icon icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left” color=”custom” align=”right” custom_color=”#dd3333″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_custom_heading text=”The articulation of ideas through emotional stories, though, is really no different from Charles Dickens sketching the harsh world of the children in workhouses in Oliver Twist” google_fonts=”font_family:Libre%20Baskerville%3Aregular%2Citalic%2C700|font_style:400%20italic%3A400%3Aitalic”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Westen used his thesis to show why he felt US Democratic candidates Al Gore and Michael Dukakis had failed to get elected, and why George W Bush had. Bush, he felt, was in touch with his emotional side while Dukakis and Gore tended to turn to dry data and detail.
That argument about how emotional beliefs or gut feelings are being used to influence important decisions has raced up the agenda since President Donald Trump arrived in the White House, the UK voted for Brexit and with the use of emotionally driven political campaigns to shift public opinion in Hungary and Poland.
Suddenly this question of why people were responding to appeals to emotion and dismissing facts was the debate of the moment. In many ways this is nothing new but the methods of receiving ideas and information are different. Now we have Facebook and Instagram posts, and zillions of tweets to spin and challenge.
One part of it, the articulation of ideas through emotional stories, though, is really no different from Charles Dickens sketching the harsh world of the children in workhouses in Oliver Twist, or Victorian writer Charles Kingsley’s story The Water Babies. Kingsley’s tale of child chimney sweeps helped to introduce the 1864 Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act, which improved the lives of those children significantly.
Fictional stories, like these, have always played a part in changing attitudes, but also draw on reality. Dickens and Kingsley were outraged by the living and working conditions they saw, so they chose to try to effect change by using fictional stories to engage a wider public. And personal stories are also used to illuminate wider factual trends. For years journalists have used a case study as an explainer for something more detailed.
Facts and figures undoubtedly must have a role. Even when it appears there is public resistance to acceptance of data, something such as the fact that if you wear a seatbelt when driving a car you will have a better chance of surviving an accident becomes an accepted truth over time. Public information and published statistics clearly play a part in that shift.
That’s why it is so vital that public access to information is protected and that incorrect facts are challenged. This month, 28 September is the international day for universal access to information, something that concentrates the mind when you look at places where access is limited, or where government data is skewed to such a level that it becomes almost pointless.
Journalists reporting in countries including Belarus and the Maldives tell us their quest for trustworthy sources of national information are almost impossible to find as their governments refuse to respond to media requests or release untrue information. Officials also use smear tactics to undermine reporters’ reputations, so their accurate journalism is not believed. Governments know that by keeping information from the media they hamper a journalist’s ability to report, and in doing so may keep a scandal from the public. If facts and data didn’t make a difference, those governments would have no reason to restrict access.
Freedom to access information goes hand in hand with freedom of the media and academic freedom in creating an open democratic society. But at Index, we constantly see signs of governments, and others, trying to prevent both access to facts and to suppress writing about inconvenient truths.
In this issue of the magazine, we explore all aspects of this struggle to balance facts and emotion, the quest to find the truth, how we are influenced, and why arguments, debates and discussions are so vital.
There’s lots to read, from Julian Baggini’s piece (p24) on why people might fear a disagreement to tips on how to have an argument from Timandra Harkness (p31). Then there’s Martin Rowson’s Stripsearch cartoon (p26). Our interview with British TV presenter Evan Davis discusses whether lies tend to be found out over time, and the likelihood that people will select facts that support their political position.
What’s it like to be a scientist in the USA right now? Michael Halpern from the Union of Concerned Scientists in the USA says scientists are suddenly getting active to push back against a political climate attempting to take the factfile away from important government departments.
Almost every day a new story pops up outlining another attack on media freedom in Tanzania, and in this issue Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein reveals how bloggers are being priced out of the country (p70) as the government uses new fees to close down independent voices.
Then there’s Nobel prize winner Herta Müller on her experiences of censorship as a writer living in communist Romania (p67), and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s poems written in prison (p86).
And finally, look out for our Banned Books Week events coming up at the end of September – find out more on the website. You’ll also find the magazine podcast, with interviews with broadcaster Claire Fox and Tanzanian blogger Elsie Eyakuze, on Soundcloud, and watch out for your invitation to the upcoming magazine event at the Royal Institution in October.
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Rachael Jolley is editor of Index on Censorship. She tweets @londoninsider. This article is part of the latest edition of Index on Censorship magazine, with its special report on The Age Of Unreason.
Index on Censorship’s autumn 2018 issue, The Age Of Unreason, asks are facts under attack? Can you still have a debate? We explore these questions in the issue, with science to back it up.
Look out for the new edition in bookshops, and don’t miss our Index on Censorship podcast, with special guests, on Soundcloud.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row content_placement=”top”][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”The Age Of Unreason” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2F2018%2F09%2Fage-of-unreason%2F|||”][vc_column_text]The autumn 2018 issue of Index on Censorship magazine explores the age of unreason. Are facts under attack? Can you still have a debate? We explore these questions in the issue, with science to back it up.
With: Timandra Harkness, Ian Rankin, Sheng Keyi[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”102479″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2018/09/age-of-unreason/”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″ css=”.vc_custom_1481888488328{padding-bottom: 50px !important;}”][vc_custom_heading text=”Subscribe” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2Fsubscribe%2F|||”][vc_column_text]In print, online. In your mailbox, on your iPad.
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10 Sep 2018 | Campaigns -- Featured, Statements
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Index on Censorship is concerned about the UK’s Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill and believes that the bill should go back to the drawing board.
The bill threatens investigative journalism and academic research by making it a crime to view material online that could be helpful to a terrorist. This would deter investigative journalists from doing their work and would make academic research into terrorism difficult or impossible.
New border powers in the bill could put journalists’ confidential sources at risk. The bill’s border security measures would mean that journalists could be forced to answer questions or hand over material that would reveal the identity of a confidential source. These new powers could be exercised without any grounds for suspicion.
The bill also endangers freedom of expression in other ways. It would make it an offence to express an opinion in support of a proscribed (terrorist) organisation in a way that is ‘reckless’ as to whether this could encourage another person to support the organisation. This would apply even if the reckless person was making the statement to one other person in a private home.
The bill would criminalise the publication of a picture or video clip of an item of clothing or for example a flag in a way that aroused suspicion that the person is a member or supporter of a terrorist organisation. This would cover, for example, someone taking a picture of themselves at home and posting it online.
Joy Hyvarinen, head of advocacy said: “The fundamentally flawed Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill should be sent back to the drawing board. It is not fit for purpose and it would limit freedom of expression, journalism and academic research in a way that should be completely unacceptable in a democratic country.”[/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/4″][vc_icon icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-file-text-o” color=”black” background_style=”rounded” size=”xl” align=”right” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2F2018%2F06%2Findex-on-censorship-submission-on-the-counter-terrorism-and-border-security-bill-2018%2F|||”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]
Laws that protect our rights to read, research, debate and argue are too easily removed. Index is concerned that clauses of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill will diminish those rights and freedoms. It submitted a paper to parliament to ask it to consider changes to the proposed bill in June 2018.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1536334784930-919b120b-ab92-0″ taxonomies=”7324, 28625, 26927″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
