Looking Back at 2023

Songstreets

When I started to think about reviewing 2023, the logical first step was to look over what I'd written last December about 2022. That was the year when we issued THE SLIGO MANIFESTO, and my account of the year followed its structure, examining how we were moving towards those new ideas about what Border Crossings needs to do and to be in today's shifting world. Much of 2023 has been about laying the foundations for that emerging model.

The year began by consolidating and polishing the work we'd been creating in 2021-22, particularly the final stages in the prolonged and searching ORIGINS Festival we'd made through that time. BOTANY BAY may officially have ended a year ago, but the process of working through what that huge project had actually achieved was in itself a major undertaking, and it wasn't until the start of March that we published Carolyn Defrin's reflective post on this blog. SONGSTREETS, which we'd also been developing through ORIGINS, was launched in the Spring, and remains available to download and experience. It's one of our most exciting ventures yet in digital performance - Thor McIntyre-Burnie's sound world shifts the experience of walking the streets of Brixton, animating them as Tony Cealy shares histories and dialogues with the locals, with the music brought out by Jessie Lloyd becoming manifest as the soundtrack to their lives. It's been fascinating to live with this work over the last few months, watching how the shifting seasons change the experience, how the cold day of the launch emphasised the challenges facing the community, while taking the walk in summer made it a story of resilience and celebration. 

Early 2023 also saw the final phase of X-EUROPEAN: the project exploring Third Space methodologies in which Border Crossings (Ireland) was the theatrical collaborator. It was only days after we held our last project meeting in Aalen (Germany) that the city of Adana, home to our wonderful Turkish partners at Çukurova University, was hit by a devastating earthquake. İlke Şanlıer's deeply impassioned and pained guest blog post came in the immediate aftermath. Somehow, Adana has re-emerged as the vibrant, busy city it was before (although its neighbour Antakya remains a site of devastation): we are now working closely with İlke and her colleagues on SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA, which promises to be the first of our theatrical creations fully to embody the principles and ideas outlined in THE SLIGO MANIFESTO. We undertook the first phase of development in Turkey during November, and are hugely excited to be starting work with British and Irish actors in January. The next week or so will also tell us whether or not we've been successful in a large funding bid which would enable a second 2024 project - one that would reach performance in the autumn...  

Filming for SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA

So there are definitely reasons to be hopeful as we begin the New Year, though at the same time the great crises facing the world seem to be coming into sharper, more intense and horrific focus than ever before. Cop 28 has ended with an agreement to phase out fossil fuels, and yet the president of the summit himself intends to continue investing at record levels in the production of gas and oil. The war in Ukraine is heading towards its third year, while in Gaza there are unprecedented levels of civilian and child casualties. In the UK, the government remains determined to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, despite the Supreme Court having ruled that this is illegal; and in Ireland we have seen the radical right unleashed on the streets of Dublin in a frenzy of racially motivated violence.

We need the arts. We need our cultures. We need spaces of exchange, depth and emotional sharing; spaces where, in the face of the reductive, shallow sloganeering that passes for a public discourse, we can encounter one another in the fullness of our common humanity. 

Lucy and I experienced this very deeply during our November in Adana, where we worked with Syrian women on our new theatre and film project, SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA. We heard stories of horror, and stories of tenderness. We saw tears, and we heard laughter. While we were there, we also had the privilege to present an online reading of THE GAZA MONOLOGUES, created by our partners in Ramallah, ASHTAR Theatre. In these moving stories, written by young people in the aftermath of a previous conflict, we again recognised the vulnerability that makes people loveable, the simple presence that makes them dear.

As we move into the New Year, it is in cultural spaces like these that we retain our hope to turn the page of history. 

Arrival, Adana, Antakya

Women making bread by the roadside, Antakya

Just over a week ago, Lucy and I arrived in Turkey to begin work on Suppliants of Syria. We're partnering with our old friends from Çukurova University in Adana, where the wonderful İlke Şanlıer combines her role in the Film and TV department with directing the Research Centre in Migration.  It's the perfect combination for a project that combines theatre and film with an active engagement in the ongoing refugee  "crisis". The theme is being lent additional potency by the current situation in Palestine: just after we arrived, a very large protest in support of Palestine took place at the airbase in Adana, where American planes and personnel are stationed. The police used tear gas and water cannon to prevent people entering the base; but that doesn't mean that the government isn't sympathetic to the protestors' expression of solidarity between Muslims.  

We've been able to establish a relationship with the Meryem Women's Co-operative: a fabulous organisation that enables Syrian women to work in areas like gardening and food production. A group of around 20 of them are in the process of becoming our Chorus. We've also been filming and researching in and around the city. I don't want to write too much about this as yet, because it needs time to absorb what we're seeing. Today we went to an area of Adana known as "Little Aleppo" on account of its large Syrian population.  The poverty was very apparent. Many of the people there seem to eke out a living by selling discarded or recycled clothes which they show piled in the streets. Earlier in the week I visited Antakya: the city to the south of Adana which bore the brunt of the earthquake earlier this year. Antakya also has links to Syria: the majority of the pre-earthquake population spoke Arabic, and Syrian maps still show the area as part of their country, which they regard as having been annexed by the Turkish Republic in 1939.  The city is utterly devastated. My friend Ali, who now lives near me in London, showed me round what remained of his childhood home. He often could not work out where he was, because there were no landmarks remaining. He would occasionally stop and examine the remains of a cornice or a metal door, and then say "This must be the old bank..."

And yet, in spite of everything, life endures. Ali's parents had a 100 year old house in the rural hinterland: it was destroyed.  But Ali's father Mehmet, at the age of 69, has single-handedly build a new living space beside the rubble where the old house stood, and on Wednesday night we ate the traditional meal for the end of the olive harvest and the production of the new olive oil on that land.  In the middle of the wreckage, Ali pointed out a plant. "It's a tomato plant", he said. "It used to be on the balcony just above where it is now." Somehow it survived - and is thriving. 

A letter from Turkey

Guest Post by İlke Şanlıer Yüksel

Over the last few years, Border Crossings has been working with partners in Southern Turkey, and particularly the city of Adana.  Only last week, we were in Germany with colleagues from Adana's Çukurova University. Today we received this letter from one of them. With her blessing, we reproduce it in full.

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February 10, 2023

Dear friends, colleagues and comrades,

Thank you all very much for your messages of support. My name is İlke Şanlıer Yüksel. I am an associate professor at the Department of Radio, Cinema and Television at Çukurova University, Adana, Turkey. I haven't slept for days, so forgive me if my English is not perfect. I don't need to tell you the gravity of the situation here, you will already have seen the news images, and I know are already doing all that you can: but believe me, the experience of actually being here is unimaginable. Maraş and Hatay - these two cities have been levelled to the ground. The destruction is so immense that I am not sure if there is even the slightest possibility of reconstruction. 

Adana, the city where I live, was the least affected, but even here one third of the multi-storey buildings in the Çukurova district (population 360 thousand) were heavily damaged. It is impossible to enter the houses. This area is known as North Adana. The ex-mayor Aytaç Durak, who served for more than 20 years, opened this area for rapid construction at high profit. Almost all of the buildings date from after the 1999 earthquake and the resulting regulations, but they were clearly not built in accordance with those regulations. Sarıçam district, which also grew in the last 7-8 years under MHP ex-mayor Hüseyin Sözlü, has high-rise buildings and is in a similar situation. There are brand new buildings, still with PVC coatings on the windows and no people living in them, and they are cracked down the middle. This is the direct result of systemic corruption on an immense scale. Everyone in Adana is on the streets as there are warnings of another earthquake. An incredible number of buildings are damaged. There is no end to this dishonesty. 

In the face of institutional incompetence, our students and graduates are trying to organise their own ways to bring aid. For example, Samandağ, Hatay’s district, still cannot be reached by land. There is no electricity, no fuel. Supplies are exhausted, and there is no drinkable water. They carry water, supplies, and power banks to Samandağ by boat from Adana Karataş. Yesterday, we tired to get permission from the Coast Guard; luckily we got permission, they will also deliver diesel oil by boat so that people can find a way to get out with vehicles. Isn't this extraordinary and awful? The state should be able to evacuate people by ship, but here it falls to a small group of young people. My student Ümit from Samandağ has been digging up dead bodies by hand for days. He is not allowed to bury them, because the prosecutor is supposed to come and identify the bodies, and so far has not made it there. 

We've been giving everything we have in aid for days. The suppliers we know in Adana are distributing the goods in their warehouses. A group of my friends from the faculty are trying to supply baby nappies and formula milk to Adana City Hospital and the Faculty of Medicine. This is one of the less damaged cities, where we are told the health system is functioning perfectly. My sister has not slept for days, she cooks for people who have not been able to go home for days. My brother-in-law is a civilian search and rescue worker, working in the rubble in İskenderun and Hatay.

One of our colleagues in the department went into her damaged house to collect some belongings, and the house collapsed on her in the second earthquake. Fortunately, she was rescued, but now she has no home. Today, we got the news that one of our student’s and his family’s bodies were removed from that collapsed building on the fifth day. Almost all of our students are working class people from poorer families in Adana and the neighbouring provinces. Dozens of them have lost their homes and families: some have lost their lives. We don't know yet if the dormitories are in a condition to provide shelter. We don’t know whether we’ll be able to start the semester at some point. 

Yesterday, two of my students called from Hatay. They don't have even a lira in their pockets: there are no ATMs, no banks, not even the municipality building, which has collapsed. Pervin, another student, is blind, and her mother has a severe chronic heart disease. Her father used to bring Pervin to school every day and pick her up in the evening. For 4 days, we have repeatedly contacted search and rescue, we have found solutions, we have been to the wreckage many times, but the rescuers could not enter the wreckage because they did not have working machines. Last night Pervin’s father's body was found. 

Today I am writing to you in response to Pervin's cry: "I beg you, teacher, I beg you, bring my father to me". Pervin is just one of the young ones who are affected. There are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of children and young people in this situation. 

I don't know how to bear this pain.

I wanted to tell you why I wrote this, both to pour my heart out in a safe place and to tell you that this road will be so long and that help will be needed for years to come. That's why your messages of support are very valuable to us. I am not asking for anything today, but there will be times when we, personally, can’t keep up anymore, and so then I will ask. I am very, very sad, angry, and enraged. Most of all, I am sorry for the remorse I feel because I am worried about the future of my own child and my nephew, while all this is happening.

In solidarity,

İlke

If you would like to support grassroots initiatives to help with the earthquake, then click here for one. We can vouch for this fundraiser being entirely transparent and free from corruption.