Audio Choreography: Permeable Structures / Gazhane

Audio Choreography is an auditory interface for a choreography to be activated by participants–choreography here is defined in an expanded sense. It instructs the participants to engage in movements, actions, sensory explorations in public (semi) spaces. Theinterface sets into motion both the interoception and the extremities (limbs, mobility). It gives semantic, somatic, and sonic cues to facilitate curiosity in the participants for their immediate surroundings. But it also stimulates an imagery of the broader ecological, urban, and industrial layers of a place. Some of the directives gently provoke participants to test the limits of their freedom in the actual environment. The choreographic and acoustic directives trigger the corporeal creativity of the body while remaining flexible for varying contexts and encounters. 

Audio Choreography explores the different possibilities of Hasanpaşa Gasworks participation in urban life as a cultural campus. It takes visitors on a journey through this architectural and industrial heritage with audio guidance. This choreographic interface, which activates the participants, allows Gazhane’s transformation from a power plant to a cultural campus to create new questions for our perception of space, energy and body. It emerges as a vital method for re-enchanting the industrial heritage and enables participants to question the meaning of these sites of legacy for our contemporary moment. We generate an embodied and collective experience of revisiting the cultural memory and finding new ownership of space. Thus, we challenge the stabilizing effect of “museumification,” establishing new relationships with the remnant objects and other objective/objectified information on display. 

The Background:

We have been working on the Audio Choreography series that takes place in urban areas and industrial heritage sites since February 2021. Upon commission by the BIPOD Festival, we started this project to create a collective movement under the socially distanced days of COVID-19, where anybody from anywhere on the planet Earth could listen to our suggestions and be the author of their choreography (“Audio Choreography: Walk,” May 2021). We sought to trigger a richly sensorial yet non-representational response to the ecological crisis. The participant-centered dramaturgy affords diverse perspectives into these globally-shared concerns, which we still prioritize. We later developed a site-specific interface for the industrial heritage site of Istanbul Hasanpaşa Gasworks (“Audio Choreography: Gazhane,” October 2021-May 2023). By adding a movement workshop as a primer for the audio experience, we discovered its immense potential for increasing the corporeal awareness and engagement, exploring the social choreography, and critically interrogating the notions of industrial architecture and heritage. After each performance we invited the participants for a feedback session, who frequently reported enjoying this new mode of using the body to explore the space despite not having any previous experience with movement. 

Concept: Filiz Sızanlı, Mustafa Kaplan

Workshop: Filiz Sızanlı, Mustafa Kaplan, Melih Kıraç

Choreography: Filiz Sızanlı, Mustafa Kaplan, Eylül F. Akıncı

Voice: Eylül F. Akıncı 

Dramaturgy: Eylül F. Akıncı

Sound Design: Sair Sinan Kestelli