Göksu Kunak opens the season with the crash performance “Innocence”

By the time the car wreckage lying on the stage is used that evening, their story has already been told. The queer performer Göksu Kunak stands in a tight, black leather dress in front of a large image of flames that repeatedly changes from stillness to flickering, and reads the course of the explosive events from a sheet of paper in a Siri voice as soft as cotton wool. And slowly her strangely disparate text blocks from historical backgrounds and cultural-theoretical associations build up an accident that happened thirty years ago in Susurluk in northern Turkey and shook the foundations of (not only) Turkish democracy.

At that time, three men, both powerful and shady, were sitting together in a black Mercedes when a truck rammed them, killing two of them and tearing the mask off the friendly face of the emerging democracy. The men were the internationally wanted contract killer, drug dealer and leader of the nationalist Grey Wolves Abdullah Çatli, the former police chief of Istanbul and a conservative politician whose close ties reached into the highest government circles.

The figure of Çatli in this car in particular not only reveals the embarrassing cooperation of individual state officials with the drug mafia, but also something that is called the “deep state” and refers to the dirty underbelly of an entire state apparatus. It is not only Turkey that casts such shadows, but the whole of Western Europe, including the USA, and this is particularly clear to Çatli, because he served several Western secret services as a covert fighting machine and always miraculously escaped legal consequences.

A screaming warning to Claudia Roth

Göksu Kunak is now taking this crash apart once again in a fascinatingly dazzling, essay-like hybrid performance to kick off the Sophiensäle season. Even the mere report of the accident stretches towards far-reaching feelings that do not simply recite the event, but rather examine it in a larger, contemporary historical context and at the same time incorporate a capitalism-critical, queer-theoretical reading.

After the Susurluk wreck on the screen, the wrecked car in which Lady D. died shortly afterwards appears, and later the glass-headed Britney Spears stormed out of another car to fend off paparazzi. Nothing about these associations seems forced, because with all these crashes, presumptuous, hypocritical perspectives of power have been revealed and shifted, which Kunak and the five wonderful co-performers now bring to dance in increasingly ambivalent, allegorical body images. The mechanical lecture performance thus becomes a choreography with debris that tells the story of the accident as an act of liberation from lies, political and sexual oppression and ends in a rock concert.

In its performative rigor, “Innocence” is a season opener that is as sharp as it is bold and – supported by the Performing Arts Fund! – a screeching warning to Claudia Roth and her scandalous plans to cut funding for the independent scene, which will make such emancipatory work impossible in the future.

Innocence. Until 14 September, 8 p.m. in the Sophiensälen, Tel.: 2835266 or sophiensaele.com