Stage at the Museum: Ten years in play

Stage at the Museum (Müzede Sahne), has spent a decade re-evaluating the dynamic between performance and the museum, anchoring each edition around a distinct thematic premise at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum. Ahead of this year’s iteration, conceived under the theme Transformation Through Play (Oyunlarla Dönüşüm), we sat down with artistic director Ayşe Draz to discuss the festival’s ten-year trajectory, its current curatorial framework, and the modes of spectatorship it invites

Interview: Maya Çelem

Ayşe Draz. Photo: Munise Erden

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Stage at the Museum, and your fourth edition as its artistic director. Your engagement with the program predates your curatorial tenure, having begun as an invited artist. Looking back today, how do you trace your evolving relationship with the festival?

When I first participated as an artist, I experienced firsthand how a museum could be activated as a stage; however, I had not yet fully fathomed its spatial affordances, ingrained conventions, latent potentials, or logistical frictions. In retrospect, I only genuinely began to treat the museum space as a stage over the past two years; the first two years were primarily an encounter, a phase of mutual orientation.

Throughout this period, I witnessed an evolving audience: familiar figures from our neighborhood returning faithfully each year alongside new acquaintances sparked by events like Silent Disco that have grown into lasting friendships. A genuinely diverse and expanding public is taking shape. I deliberately gravitate toward the Turkish word seyirci (an engaged fellow-traveller who sets out to behold alongside others and co-constructs that act of beholding) rather than a passive izleyici (viewer, a detached consumer of images). Consequently, my first year was primarily spent observing both the audience and the museum spaces; noting what the audience looked at and when, identifying the moments they realized their own bodies were part of the performance, and gauging their willingness to engage. Subsequently, I began to ponder how to shift the audience's body from a position of passive observation to that of an active participant, a co-actor situated within the viewing experience. As I explored the museum as a stage and envisioned new possibilities for it, I strove to liberate both performance and the museum from their respective boundaries and conventions, seeking to establish a kind of permeability between the two. 

My four-year journey was shaped by this curiosity and intellectual inquiry gradually evolving into responsibility and curatorial accountability. As a guest artist in the past, I was preoccupied solely with the relationality between my own work and the museum. Now as artistic director, I ask how artists from varied disciplines might each articulate their distinct visual and performative voices, drawing divergent resonances from the identical space, and how we might collectively craft an experience with the audience. The axis widened from “I and the space” to “we and the space”; from a monophonic gaze to a polyphonic spectatorship. What made this expansion possible was my commitment to creating space for cross and inter-disciplinary practices and my belief in the potential of collaborations with artists from various fields to subvert entrenched definitions. Even as each edition accrues thematic layers, the process mentally unfurls like an outward spiral around an essential core: How does the museum, traditionally founded on conservation, permanence, and static display, host an irreproducible, ephemeral moment? How do these distinct temporalities and spaces infiltrate one another, and what occurs at the site of that rupture?

My inquiry found a fertile ground at an institution like the Sakıp Sabancı Museum,  which has already created space for performance art, featuring diverse artists ranging from Marina Abramović to Yoko Ono, embracing that intangible and ephemeral medium. As these questions circulate in my mind, the spiral both widened and deepened. Stepping into my fourth edition,  I find myself embedded within this ten-year institutional memory, an inheritance that feels profoundly generative while demanding relentless vigilance.

During your tenure, you have mediated structural shifts both in the program and in its relationship to the audience. Yet each edition generates its own empirical insights and discursive lines of questioning. In retrospect, what foundational archives or continuities have endured across these iterations?

Rather than forgetting or erasing previous editions, my priority has been accretive; each year builds conceptually onto the last, to the extent that specific events have now solidified into the program’s tradition. Formats such as Encounters in the Foyer preceding the main acts, site-specific interventions dispersed throughout the garden, and moderated post-performance artist talks are no longer peripheral but they constitute the structural backbone of the program. They extend the experience beyond the performance itself, allowing the encounter to unfold over time rather than being confined to the moment of the play. Another enduring anchor is the Soundscape workshop conducted across four years with Dr. Oğuz Öner. Every year, it transcribes a new acoustic layer over the museum's auditory map, yielding a long-term sonic archive embedded within institutional memory. Last year, we extended this sensory cartography to olfaction. In that sense, each iteration inscribes a trace that provides the scaffolding for the subsequent year.

I believe therein lies a productive tension; striving for longitudinal continuity while resisting the temptation to ossify the curatorial frame. It requires re-evaluating the material, semantic placement, and orientation of that frame every single season. Neither the space, nor the audience, nor the works are static; annually, I ask myself: How can we reconfigure the conditions of this encounter anew? The most vital takeaway has been learning to deploy accumulated experience to propose a fresh framing - perhaps with divergent materials, toward unfamiliar horizons - and relinquishing the fear of precariousness or conceptual failure.

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From left to right, top to bottom; Şâzân Assembly, Star, 9/8 Apocalypse, Under the Castle

This year’s edition unfolds under the theme Transformation Through Play. As an engine of speculative imagination that interrogates existing boundaries of reality, play sits at the foundational core of performance. What conceptual and dramaturgical coordinates did the notion of “play” make available to you? What transformative agency does it propose?

Play is an elemental dynamic of performance; alongside ritual, it is one of the two foundational pillars of performance. As Johan Huizinga elucidates in Homo Ludens, play is an instinctual culture-forming mechanism; a force that generates its own autonomous temporalities, spatial rules, and parameters, severing both performer and player from everyday functionalism. What compels me conceptually is this; play suspends actual reality, opening an operative space to ask “what if?” It allows us to rehearse alternative possibilities, if only speculatively, enabling the body to register that the world is neither self-evident nor immutable, and that its governing codes can be radically rewritten. 

Roger Caillois’s expansion of Huizinga was equally instructive in shaping the curatorial framework this year. Play is not merely defined by rule-bound codification; it institutes a terrain where rules and freedom, calculation and chance, order and vertigo (ilinx) coexist. Play sets parameters, yet within those deliberate constraints, it cultivates autonomy; much like a performance that sets its own rules and then creates space for the unexpected within that. Performance facilitates transformation precisely by avoiding didactic dogma, inviting the participant into an active play. The transformation induced by play is rather visceral and direct for the practitioner; for the spectator, it surfaces sometimes as an imperceptible perceptual recalibration, at other times as an ontological rupture. The transformative potential championed across this year’s program is deliberate in its humility;  it is not a grand, spectacular transformation, but an invitation to reclaim playfulness as an existential affordance; perhaps even a subtle mode of resistance in our contemporary climate.

Spanning theater, contemporary dance, and live art alongside discursive workshops and participatory situations, the program occupies disparate thresholds of the museum campus. What kind of experiential trajectory awaits an audience navigating varied formats and intergenerational approaches?

Audiences will encounter an embodied, multi-sensory trajectory as they navigate the museum's gardens and topographic micro-sites. In fact this is precisely what I love most about performance; its radical resistance to being (institutionally) captured and its deliberate intangibility. You cannot possess it; you can only experience its dramaturgical flow through your physical presence, occupying its sensory “here and now.” 

Curating a season is far less about selecting finished works than it is about choreographing spatial flow, temporal cadences, and the phenomenological dramaturgy of the spectatorship experience. I refuse to isolate the experience to the prompt of curtain call; it must extend into its before and after. Through our pre-show Encounters in the Foyer, visitors discover a reflective threshold to attune their perception before entering a work. 

On one hand, the Fıstıklı Terrace hosts rather classical works grounded in rigorous dramatic and choreographic structures: 9/8'lik Kıyamet (9/8 Apocalypse), Yıldız (Star), Şatonun Altında (Under the Castle), and Bir Kadının Kavgaları ve Dönüşümleri (A Woman's Battles and Transformations). On the other hand, the stage diffuses to an obscure nook in the foliage or an outdoor staircase. Melih Kıraç’s Yakın Zamanın Kaybı (Loss of Recent Time) infiltrates various areas of the museum, continually renegotiated with each situational encounter; meanwhile, Şule Ateş’s Şâzân Meclisi (Şâzân Assembly) stages its premiere outdoors on the grounds. The audience’s walking pace, their chosen line of sight, the rustle of a tree or the museum’s foliage, the acoustic landscape of the Bosphorus, the shifting angle of the sun, or even the emergence of the moon all become part of the experience and collaborators within the mise-en-scène.

I maintain that performance does not necessitate an alienated, separated stage severed from the audience. When an analytical and critical distance is sustained, vernacular everyday spaces instantly transform into stages. Matthias Lilienthal’s recent programmatic gesture upon returning to the Berlin Volksbühne, installing a massive swimming pool on the public square with free admission, operates within this exact consciousness. It was a gesture that interrogated urban infrastructure and privatized leisure while opening an immediate performative arena within everyday life. While I would not draw a direct comparison, what invigorates my own practice is precisely this attempt to carve out an open, collective stage directly in the heart of the institution, if not the street.

This edition equally resists ocularcentrism by mobilizing the ear, the olfactory system, and the body. Oğuz Öner’s Soundscape, the Kuş Collective’s workshop, and Homemade Aromaterapi’s olfactory sessions deliberately disrupt the visual dominance of the museum, opening it toward multi-sensory apprehension. I have intentionally structured these access points across varied operational registers and ages. Audiences aged seven and above encounter traditional ortaoyunu folk theater, puppetry, and mythological narratives courtesy of Anuşka's Workshop—one of Turkey's foremost experimental puppet companies. Conversely, in Begüm Erciyas’s Letters from Attica, the spectator completes the work entirely through their own vocal and bodily instrumentation. Rather than imposing a monolithic, normative mode of viewing, the objective is to trace a wide participatory spectrum where visitors calibrate their own degrees of proximity, allowing the museum to be perceived not as a static vessel for spectacle, but as a living ecosystem in which we breathe together.

This iteration operates in dialogue with the concurrent institutional exhibition Yoko Ono: Insight and Instructure at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum. How do you anticipate these distinct institutional expressions cross-pollinating?

Yoko Ono is an artist whose practice fundamentally depends on the visitor to activate, execute, and conceptually realize the work. Decades before performance and feminist art had even been institutionally coined, she articulated one of their most radical prototypes with Cut Piece. In Kyoto in 1964, seated motionless on stage with a pair of scissors, she invited members of the audience to step forward and cut away fragments of her garments. By placing her physical body in radical vulnerability, she instantly stripped the audience of detached spectatorship, implicated them in ethical responsibility, and reconfigured them as accomplices. Simultaneously, the gesture made starkly visible the objectification, systemic consumption, and enforced passivity mapped onto the female body. I interpret Ono’s instructional approach as establishing an open-ended game: she articulates a structural score, leaves an invitation, but relinquishes control over its ultimate materialization entirely to the participant; it is like a game with rules but no boundaries. This participatory ethos provided my curatorial compass, prompting me to program works where the audience completes the performative architecture through their own voice, breath, and spatial occupation. Ono's ethos mirrors the core thesis of Stage at the Museum: my deliberate insistence on seyirci over the passive izleyici, positioning the spectator as a co-creator whose presence substantiates the conceptual logic of the piece.

As Jacques Rancière asserts in The Emancipated Spectator, spectatorship is never inherently passive; an immobilized viewer constantly translates, re-authors, and speculatively reconstructs what they perceive, operating already inside the field of action. Within our selection, this lineage resonates most directly in Begüm Erciyas’s Letters from Attica. There, the participants whisper to each other fragments of a prisoner’s epistolary correspondence in a manner akin to an auditory game of telephone. Whispering phrases from person to person, the visitor becomes an accomplice, vocalizing a collective narrative of solidarity and transforming their own body into the primary site of choreographic execution.

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From left to right; A Woman's Battles and Transformations, Letters from Attica, Mitolojik Hikâyeler

In a prior essay on the festival, you observed that when performance is imported into the museum, the museum is symmetrically displaced onto the terrain of performance. How does the museum distinguish itself from conventional theatrical architecture?

For me, the stage is constituted not by a physical perimeter, but by a shift in perceptual awareness; a deliberate act of framing. Viewed with critical distance, a stair step or an untamed corner of a garden can transform into a stage. Yet, while looking can designate a stage almost anywhere within everyday space, the ingrained semiotics, cultural habits, and spatial expectations of that space  inevitably infiltrate the work, becoming read as stage signs themselves. Space and performance reciprocally define, transform, and re-signify one another. The museum ceases to function as a traditional repository, and the performance exceeds the autonomy of its own self-contained world. This  dialectic is precisely what distinguishes the museum from a conventional performance venue. Whether theatrical or choreographic, a live performance work usually constructs its world within a neutral, empty space or a “black box”; the museum, however, is never truly empty; it arrives at the encounter with its own rhythm, habits, and frameworks. Even when devoid of objects, it does not mimic the theatrical void of the black box; it asserts itself as a white cube. I examined this tension between the black box and the white cube during my doctoral research, tracing how an artist like Tino Sehgal migrated from the black box of the performing arts to the white cube of the visual arts. As Brian O'Doherty demonstrated, the “neutral” white gallery is scarcely innocent; its silence is saturated with historical and institutional ideology. This is what renders the museum compelling: the moment a performing body occupies the white cube, the institution’s engineered silence is revealed as an intentional political choice.

The Sakıp Sabancı Museum is a venue imbued with meaning thanks to its architecture, history, gardens, collection, permanent collection, ongoing temporary exhibitions and its location in Istanbul on the Bosphorus. Yet, when mobilized as a stage, it opens itself to new collaborations and encounters. I compose the performative framework directly inside these layers; performance establishes a dialogue with a sculpture on site, the rustling of trees, the Bosphorus in the background, or the contemporary art on display. The museum is not just a static backdrop, but a layered spatial collaborator that acquires new meaning through the performance; a space capable of both dispersing and multiplying.

Contemporary practices are saturated with participatory works attempting to emancipate the passive viewer, yet participation often degenerates into hollow formalist convention. What, in your view, distinguishes an authentic, transformative participatory encounter?

Superficial participation often resembles opening a door just wide enough to feign hospitality while blocking actual entry. Authentic participation requires granting total admission: it necessitates having anticipated multiple potential trajectories, while actively yielding to absolute unpredictability. Declining participation altogether remains an entirely legitimate artistic choice. Many rigorous works assign the audience an immaculately calibrated, fixed position within a predetermined visual regime; there is no inherent lack in that. My frustration arises when an artwork feigns an open social contract it has no intention of honoring; promising agency while delivering a scripted illusion. I have no issue with an audience member functioning merely as an extra in an artist’s rigid scenario, provided the work does not masquerade as an open laboratory or promise more than what it delivers.

As Rancière insists, making an audience “authentically” active does not require assigning them manual labor. The stationary spectator is already an active agent, constantly translating and interpolating signs. Consider early modern theater or Shakespearean era; in the open-air Elizabethan playhouse, when Romeo and Juliet kissed beneath the afternoon sun, there was neither painted moon nor starlight on stage. The audience conjured that nocturnal garden purely through spoken text and imaginative labor. A seemingly passive audience has always been operative, completing the artistic proposition in the mind. Participation must therefore be conceptualized not as a binary, active versus passive, but as a fluid continuum. The crucial ethical pivot is alignment, consistency; what does the dramaturgical contract promise, and what does it structurally fulfill? If you demand an urgent decision from a spectator, signaling that systemic agency resides in their hands, yet that decision alters nothing within the work's trajectory, the contract is broken. I find this ethically troubling because the audience is treated as a guinea pig within an experiment whose conclusion was foreclosed from the outset. 

Transformative participation occurs when the artist courageously assumes the structural risk of that promise; the moment when the audience's intervention genuinely could steer the work in an entirely different direction or where the artist might lose any control. Yet we must also remain nuanced regarding the scale of “transformation.” The performer undergoes micro-transformations across every execution; for the audience, transformation can manifest as anything from a profound upheaval to a subtle shift in awareness. So long as there is consistency between what is promised and what is delivered, transformation belongs on that same continuous spectrum. A moment of subtle realization can constitute a transformation just as real as a jarring, radical rupture.

When a program sustains itself for a decade, it naturally establishes its own archive and institutional lineage. Reflecting on Stage at the Museum today, what core essence defines it for you, and toward what future trajectories do you envision it evolving?

I would characterize Stage at the Museum as a temporary yet profoundly real neighborhood; a polyphonic community where familiar faces return each year, continuously diversified by the incoming public. I say "temporary" because it manifests for only a few concentrated days; I say “real” because the relational encounters forged across those days leave lasting marks on our collective memory. Over ten years, the borders and inhabitants of this neighborhood have shifted, yet the instinct for gathering remains intact.I am also delighted to share an institutional development; in collaboration with the Sakıp Sabancı Museum, we have decided to uncouple Stage at the Museum from being exclusively confined to an end-of-summer festival. Across the autumn and winter months, we will reassemble within the interior galleries of the museum, presenting interventions conceived in direct dialogue with concurrent exhibitions. As an organic extension of the Sabancı Foundation’s decade-long commitment, Stage at the Museum will continue to establish its stage throughout the entire year.