'Öğk' Exploits Experimentally

To say that the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club’s one-performance, experimental production “Öğk,” directed by Cengiz Cemaloğlu ’18, was a failure as a play would be to make a gross mockery of language. Theater did not happen. Cemaloğlu is to be regarded not as a director but rather as a very talented perpetrator of the artistic long con.

Before the incoherent (and in some ways irrelevant) action of “Öğk” is described, it is necessary to explain the circumstances of the play. “Öğk” is a dream reenactment commissioned by an anonymous client of Cemaloğlu’s Reality Theater Co. according to Cemaloğlu. Its website says that the Reality Theater Co. offers “services” that, beside dream reenactments, include “social engineering,” “creative occasion management,” and “private theater services.”  These services all seem essentially to be variations on the idea of getting money from people to “fix” problems and indulge eccentricities by pretending to do things. The performance, held in the Adams Pool Theater, was a private, invitation-only affair, according to Cemaloğlu. All cast and crew members were paid with the commission, as confirmed to the Crimson by Cemaloğlu and HRDC President Magdalene M. Zier ’16, who said that, while “Öğk” was an unusual production, it was in compliance with all HRDC policies.

In short, this was not an open performance for the Harvard community but a private, paid social event, one in which there was apparently little effort to appeal to the public at large. Indeed, issues of publicity were oddly suppressed—cast and crew lists were not available on the HRDC website, and programs with cast and crew lists were not distributed at the performance. These facts raise the question of why Cemaloğlu was allowed to use the resource of HRDC’s Common Casting, which was instituted to make theater on campus fairer and more open. Indeed, Common Casting is the only apparent connection between “Öğk” and the Harvard community, since the affair was funded by an anonymous commissioner and the Pool Theater is always booked by individual producers without any mediation through Office for the Arts or HRDC.

From these circumstances, it seems that Cemaloğlu has successfully gotten around the spirit of HRDC’s mission for his own theater company’s benefit. Only in the performance itself, however, did it become clear that “Öğk” was nothing but an artistic fraud. As previously mentioned, “Öğk” was a dream reenactment, and it proved to be as incoherent and ultimately vapid as most dreams. Jennifer (Elana P. Simon ’18) stood on the stage in a dress composed primarily of shaving cream. She began to dance. A man from the audience (Thomas W. Peterson ’18) stood, stripped to his underwear, and approached the stage. Another man in a suit (Jamie P. Herring ’18) stood, removed his mask, and came to the stage. The rest of the performance was almost completely incomprehensible, mere random dancing with occasional shouted utterances. The work was divided into two acts, but this division was essentially arbitrary, as there was no dramatic movement whatsoever in either of them.

Indeed, Cemaloğlu has delivered what the Reality Theater Co. said he would—a performance of a dream, with no effort to make any meaning or order from the images he was given to use. This sort of operation is the closest thing to a theatrical ready-made, or, phrased in economic terms, the closest thing to money for nothing. Through his Reality Theater Co., Cemaloğlu has discovered a way to acquire funding from his clients without rendering services that are ultimately more sophisticated than organizing logistics, and certainly without presenting any sort of legitimate artistic work.

While the bizarreness and lack of coherent artistic vision of “Öğk” to some extent precluded extreme criticism of its execution, there are problems inherent to presenting a dream on stage. Dream physics do not work in the same way as real physics, and to present the ethereal, weightless movement achieved in the action of dreams requires dancing and choreography well beyond the skill that can be expected of non-professionals. As a result, most of the dance in this show consisted of slow stomping, awkward leaps, and lockjaw-style twisting. The few lines were delivered in loud monotone, giving the impression that the actors had as little understanding of their characters as the audience, or less.

“Öğk” has raised interesting questions, but, like a silhouette, does so by outlining them with negative space. For whom is theater on campus? Should Harvard’s open artistic resources be used privately for payment? What projects deserve HRDC support, and how are those decisions made? As a discussion piece, it has great interest, but as a piece of theater, it was entirely devoid of virtue.