Birds

The Birds project focuses on issues of gender, human rights and freedom. The project consists of three stages: prison theatre workshops, a theatre play and a documentary film. The theatre workshops were carried out by the project manager, who is a theatre director and academic, with six female prisoners in the E Type Closed Penal Institution in Bahçecik, Trabzon. The performative theatre play called Birds, inspired by the experiences of the workshop manager in the theatre workshops and the letters written by the incarcerated women about their workshop experiences, was staged at the Hüseyin Kazaz Cultural Center, a former prison in Trabzon, with the participation of released female prisoners and accompanied by video recordings. The play included former prisoners as well as professional theater actors. The play is a multi-layered, performative narrative consisting of fragmented monologues, voices, and movements, based on the metaphor of “birds” in Aristophanes’ play Birds, where the women’s shared history is processed through themes of freedom and captivity with an intuition from the collective unconscious, without touching on the personal stories of the women prisoners. The final leg of the project, a feature-length documentary film called Voices, focuses on three women prisoners who attended these theater workshops while in prison and have recently been released. The women’s journey from psychological/physical captivity to imaginary freedom is told through a theatrical performance. This experimental documentary, where fiction and reality, theater and cinema intertwine, expresses the experiences of women prisoners in the theater workshop they attended while in prison and the changes they experienced through interviews and audio recordings, while also gaining a performative quality through professional theatre actors. This story, in which sounds and spaces take on a character, extends beyond the boundaries of the prison, passing through abandoned monasteries, plateaus, crowded streets of the city, corridors, and the sea, and extends to the shared history of women. In this multi-layered narrative where history, journey and body come together through performance, women’s passion for freedom despite all kinds of “captivity” turns into a provocative voice with the power of theatre.

The Birds project aimed to show women prisoners that they can be active participants in real life, not passive spectators, by enabling them to be direct participants and producers, and to support their integration into society as healthier, more self-aware women. This project, which emerged as a result of the empathy established with prisoners and with the aim of contributing to them in the social and artistic fields, aimed to develop women’s means of self-expression through performance and to encourage them to participate in society as equal individuals after their imprisonment. The fact that the project brought people from very different walks of life together has shown the power of pluralism and solidarity.

The festival process of the documentary film Voices continues. It is planned to be screened especially in festivals with gender and human rights themes.