Gonca Yalcin is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on contemporary puppetry in the Middle East. Katie Moody is a master’s student in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. This is the first project Gonca and Katie have collaborated together on.
NINA. was a performance project devised collaboratively between Gonca Yalcin and Katie Moody. It consisted of a public workshop and a final performance. The project used Anton Chekhov’s play, The Seagull as a starting point for devising, and used the seagull’s perspective as a point of entry into the text. Through the workshop and throughout the process of devising we delved into different histories of seabirds, and used this to inform the final performance.
The workshop took place at The Deep End in Govanhill in March. We invited the public to come and explore the concept of Unwelt – the world as it is perceived by other creatures – and animal poetics – the idea of engaging creatively with animals on their own terms. We used a discussion of examples of animal poetics and a shapeshifting meditation – where participants imagined their bodies transforming into birds – to inform a creative writing exercise. Together with our participants, we finished the workshop by making our own bird puppets out of found materials.
The ideas from the workshop influenced the final performance, which was called NINA., and took place in August at The Rum Shack. The devising process involved the making of a body puppet over a period of several months. The puppet was an older version of a woman from the original text called Nina, who was identified with seagulls in the play. As our relationship developed with Nina throughout the making and rehearsal process, we explored relationships between humans and nonhumans. In the end, Nina was a co-creator.
Our performance followed Nina as she navigated the metaphor of the seagull that had marked her life. Through this story, the performance explored the tension between the way the seagull had been used as a metaphor in the original text, and their reality. This inspired us to investigate ideas surrounding home and what constitutes it for different creatures, and the making and deconstructing of places. This was reflected in the aesthetic and mechanics of the performance, which involved being open about the way the worlds on stage were constructed in real time.
Gonca’s PhD research influenced and was influenced by this project. The PhD project involves ideas of relationality, care, indebtedness, and co-creation explored through puppetry. The concepts explored in the PhD informed the way we saw and engaged with Nina, and brought us to see her as a separate kind of creature, with different limitations and abilities. Experiencing these theoretical concepts in practice through making and performing with the puppet grounded the research in a new way, and helped us grasp the ideas Gonca had been thinking about. This collaboration between us made these new insights possible.
We would like to say thank you to Thinking Culture for making this project possible, especially Kevin, who supported us throughout the process. It’s great to get the chance to take something growing within the university and expand it to the wider community.
