You Never Knocked On My Door or Okay, Bigmouth, Join In

Abstract

Tamer Yigit is a Berlin-based musician, actor, film director and theatre maker. His connection with the Research Center ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ started with a few invitations to come talk about his work. In turn, he invited a group of Fellows to a sightseeing tour of ‘his Berlin’. In 2018, his production Berlin-DNA, for which Christel Weiler assisted as dramaturgical advisor, premiered at the Hebbel am Ufer Theatre (HAU). This interview was held in May 2019, after that joint project. His most recent production, Serenade, which opened in November 2019 (also at the HAU), brought Tamer Yigit and Christel Weiler together again.

Notes

1 Literally ‘guest worker’, that is, foreign or migrant workers who moved to West Germany mainly in the 1950s to early 1970s as part of a formal government programme.

2 Thomas Arslan’s film Dealer premiered in 1999. Tamer Yigit played Can, the main character.

3 Desires of an Idiot (or: an idiot’s list of desires).

4 Matthias Lilienthal – artistic director at Theater Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) from 2003–12 – not only wanted the venue to be open for an audience from the Turkish neighbourhood but also initiated the project X-Wohnungen/X-appartements where he invited people from the Berlin–Turkish community to open their doors and let the audience see how and where they lived.

5 Tim Staffel is a Berlin-based writer, well known for his novels and radio plays; Lukas Langhoff, a descendant of the famous Langhoff theatre dynasty, contributed major works to what in Berlin is called ‘migration theatre’.

6 The bee Maya is a fictional character in a two-volume children’s book by Waldemar Bonsels. The first volume, The Adventures of Maya, was published in 1912; the second, People in the Sky, followed in 1915. Tamer Yigit refers to the later respective Japanese– German TV series in 1975 Maya the Bee. Everybody knows her because of her beautiful yellow-black costume. Tamer Yigit appeared on stage in this costume and thus added a kind of self-irony and poetry to his otherwise rough show.

7 Municipal theatre.

8 Gorki theatre is one of Berlin’s highly subsidized municipal theatres with Shermin Langhoff as artistic director; it is well known for the diversity of its ensemble, with directors, actors and actresses coming from Turkish, Russian, Yugoslavian, Syrian and Israeli families.

9 Serenade, which premiered at the Hebbel am Ufer Theatre on 1 November 2019.

10 A system of melodic modes used in classical Arabic music.

11 Literally ‘life-stage partner’, that is, a temporary partner for a particular phase of one’s life.

12 As a montage of various scenes, songs, videos and a mixture of different music genres, Berlin-DNA created a colourful image of Berlin from the perspective of three women – a former street artist, a police officer and a student – together with musicians from Italy, Iraq and Berlin. Whereas the musicians played a minor role, the stage was primarily given to the three women to tell their ‘Berlin stories’ from their very special perspectives.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tamer Yigit

I prefer to work with non-professional performers. However, in the midst of each production/rehearsal phase, I ask myself: why the hell am I not working with professionals? They always show up on time at the rehearsal stage; they have their costumes ready; they know their lines weeks in advance; they do stretching, yoga and whatever else might be necessary before a rehearsal. You don't have to call them afterwards; you don't have to get anyone out of the holding cell; I don't have to explain what I'm doing or what theatre actually is. Everything would be damn easy. Obviously, though, I love the harder way. I'm attracted by the unexpected moment during rehearsals, from which a naïve and unpretentious playing emerges - an intuitive playing without calculations, which arises from a deep trust that the performers build up with me as the director. Often I can't say for sure whether their playing will work on stage in the end or not. But to see, at the premiere at the latest, that I was right, that I succeeded in reconquering the stage with these so-called ‘authentic’ people, without having exposed them, is a great inner triumph.