Yağmur Carmel Bayer - BA (Hons) Drama and Contemporary Performance
TONGUESTONGUESTONGUES
I am a Turkish-Brazilian artist who lived in Macau for 11 years, and I’m primarily a theatre maker, writer, performer, and director, working with interdisciplinary and multimedia performance. I am particularly interested in working with ideas of identity, human connection, nostalgia, and global cultures.
My show ‘TONGUESTONGUESTONGUES’ is a work-in-progress, one-woman performance that I will be taking to the Camden Fringe in London this upcoming August 11th-13th.
It is about exploring human connection through communication - or lack thereof, represented through the increasing language barriers that I am experiencing with my multilingual family, and expressed through the use of different styles of puppetry as a medium.
It grieves the things that also begin to fade when a language is forgotten - a family, a culture, a people, in a setup reminiscent of the old Brazilian and Turkish children’s TV shows and puppet shows that I used to watch, before things began to get less colourful. It is a raw documentation of an attempt at reconnecting with a culture long left behind looking at what it means to cross language barriers and what it means to fail through delving back into childhood through the medium of puppetry.
Exploring themes of memory, identity, understanding and colonialism, this show crafts the comparison of how speaking English can transform people into something of a puppet themselves. A puppet for colonialism, a facade. Someone less real, less concrete. Always at arm’s length. I mourn all the different people I could have been in my mother tongues, and wonder who I am becoming now that I am just English.
