In the Wake of Kıssa: Postdramatic Theatre and The Shifting Cypriot Stage

Kıssa III (Future)- April & May 2026, featuring four plays: PRODADDY, ZOLTAR, XENON, PYGMY. Designed by Salamis Ayşegül Şentuğ-Tuğyan.

Experiencing art in North Cyprus has entered a new stage recently. Looking back at a five-year time span, patterns are shifting; Millennial and Gen Z artists are actively experimenting, spicing up the local art scene and challenging how we engage with creative expressions. There is no doubt that the society is ready to take in new experiences, and the collective theater project Kıssa by Sokolektif,  is at one of the forefronts of this movement.

Having been an audience member of this show for three years now, I have closely observed the evolution of its concept. What began in 2024 as a collection of plays, without a strict thematic backbone in its first edition, has beautifully evolved into a focused, themed experience. In its current edition, Kıssa III, tackles a massive universal topic: The Future. Yet, as an enthusiastic spectator with a passion for, but limited formal knowledge of, the dramatic arts, a striking realization hit me during this edition:

The experience is fractured. Moving from one room to another, transitioning between four entirely different worlds in a single night, I felt a distinct sense of randomness. There is a sharp fracture between the four pieces that prevents the audience from settling into a singular, cohesive "one-hour mood." But as I sat down to read the scripts for Pygmy, Zoltar, ProDaddy, and Zenon, I began to ask myself: Is this fractured structure a flaw in transition, or is it a deliberate aesthetic choice? Does my intuition have a theoretical backbone?

The Evolution of a Brave Experiment

To truly appreciate where Kıssa stands today, we have to look back at its inception in 2024. It was a remarkably brave move to launch this project. The first edition was born out of a shared poetic impulse, formed after four local writers read the poem "Hatırlamayı unutmak" (Forgetting to Remember) by Seyyidhan Kömürcü. By the second edition, the project matured into a tighter, more thematic framework, centering around the vast concept of "Relationships", ranging from our connection to ourselves, to the past, and to the "other." Now, Kıssa III has arrived on stage, confronting the ultimate unknown: The Future.

Although the core blueprint has remained identical across all three editions (four short plays packed into a single, intense one-hour show), an audience member who has attended from the beginning can clearly observe a profound evolution and transformation. The project has shifted from a conceptual curation of separate plays into a singular, themed experience. The casting has evolved, the formats have developed, and the artistic ambition has grown.

Yet, this evolution has not been without its practical battles. It is a shame that finding a proper venue to fully execute this vision has always been a constant hassle for the group. We cannot deny the impact of "place" and spatial geography on the final quality of a performance. Theater is visceral. Even if the text, acting, and direction are flawless, if the physical space lacks the minimum requirements for comfort, acoustic isolation, and visual access, the immersive experience remains compromised. The team is fighting an uphill battle against infrastructure.

But perhaps the biggest missing piece in Kıssa’s journey isn't spatial; it is academic. Three years in, a formal introduction to this specific form of theater is still missing in our cultural dialogue. The audience doesn't always know what they are stepping into. To many, Kıssa might be perceived as just another night of entertaining, conventional theater. Without proper framing, spectators can easily leave the venue feeling confused rather than challenged.

Now that we are in the third year, it is time to finally raise the critical question: Are we witnessing an arbitrary, accidental placement of four random plays that result in a fractured structure? Or is this a highly purposeful, curated orchestration of a fractured experience?

A little bit of research prove that this structure is coming from somewhere! In fact, what feels like "brokenness" is a highly recognized contemporary theatrical movement.

The Theoretical Backbone: Postdramatic Disorientation

To answer whether this fracture is intentional, we have to step away from traditional theatrical rules. For centuries, Western theater relied on the "Aristotelian" dramatic arc: a linear plot, psychological realism, logical cause-and-effect transitions, a uniform mood, and a clear resolution. The text was always the absolute master of the stage.

However, in his seminal 1999 book Postdramatic Theatre, German theater theorist Hans-Thies Lehmann argued that contemporary performance has undergone a massive paradigm shift. Postdramatic Theatre does not mean "after the death of drama"; rather, it defines a style where the written script is no longer the supreme ruler of the performance. Instead, the text is treated as just one equal element alongside light, sound, space, and physical presence.

Lehmann describes this structural style as paratactic or syntagmatic. Instead of building a smooth, continuous bridge from one scene to the next, different worlds, tones, and realities are placed violently side-by-side without logical transitions. It is a theatre that prioritizes affect over meaning. It doesn't want you to comfortably trace a storyline; it wants to evoke a visceral, psychological state.

This movement is deeply anchored in experimental theater history. You can see its roots in early masterpieces of the Theatre of the Absurd like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (where plot is entirely replaced by a static, loop-like existence) or Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (which shatters cohesive language and traditional character logic). More modern, textbook examples of Postdramatic Theatre include Peter Handke’s controversial Offending the Audience (where characters completely abandon a fictional story to confront the audience directly) or Sarah Kane’s devastating 4.48 Psychosis (a script written without designated characters, stage directions, or linear plot, existing purely as a fractured, poetic landscape of a mind).

It seems to me that Sokolektif is experimenting with Postdramatic Theatre. By forcing the audience to mentally reboot every fifteen minutes, Kıssa’s creators are intentionally rejecting a comfortable narrative. The future, after all, isn't a single, cohesive path; it is a fragmented, unpredictable explosion of possibilities. The structure of the theater experience mimics the very nature of how we view tomorrow: scattered, uncertain, and jarring.

Furthermore, when looking closely at the text, an unmistakable thematic echo unites these four pieces: the terrifying reliance on technology and the deep ache of human isolation. Every single play features a lonely entity trapped in a loop, desperately arguing with an unfeeling machine or AI:

• Pygmy clashes with the AI In Vocatio.

• The anxious millennial Player argues with the mechanical arcade fortune-teller Zoltar.

• Gülşah negotiates her motherhood with the automated parenting system ProDaddy 011.

• Zenon desperately begs a robotic operating cell system to recognize he isn't "carbon."

The "mood" is broken, but the underlying psychological thesis is completely unified.

High-Concept Intellectualism vs. Grounded Reality

However, the reason the fracture feels so intense in this edition comes down to a stylistic divide between the scripts. The plays split into two distinct pairs, creating a tension in the mind of the audience.

On one side, we have High-Concept Absurdism in Pygmy (written by Salamis Ayşegül Şentuğ-Tuğyan) and Znon (written byTutku Tuğyan). These scripts lean into heavy academic, philosophical, and metaphorical frameworks. In Pygmy, a 12,000 year-old extinct manic dwarf hippo shouts Latin phrases ("Homo homini lupus!") and fires off meta-commentary about Gemini and the buffer zone. In Zenon, an ancient philosopher argues about Aristotle and Plato while claiming to be an alien inspector from an Inter-Galactic Council in the year 2107.

At times, these two pieces can border on feeling a bit pretentious because they require the audience to do intellectual homework. They rely heavily on allegory to comment on the Cypriot identity crisis. If the audience doesn't immediately grasp the historical or classical references, the experience can feel detached and self-indulgent. I think, that is a fracture that may disturb the experience as a whole, even though the format is already fractured intentionally.

On the other side, we have Grounded Satire and Realism in Zoltar (writthen by Erdoğan Kavaz) and ProDaddy (written by Şaziye Konaç). Zoltar works beautifully because it taps into a universal contemporary anxiety, which is our obsession with therapy, podcasts, and "quantum nonsense" to control an uncontrollable future. However, it is not easy to follow the actor and his monolouge, due to lack of acustics.

But it is ProDaddy that truly steals the heart of the local spectator. It is hyper-local, immediate, and written precisely for the Cypriot audience. Even though it is set in the year 2046, dealing with advanced reproductive technology, it grounds itself in visceral, recognizable Cypriot details: dating at the "Zefyr Café," joking about traditional toxic families, and capturing the overbearing nature of a Cypriot mother dragging her daughter to a secret date. It balances future anxieties with a deeply relatable cultural mirror.

When moving through the rooms of Kıssa, we are forced to violently shift our brains from a deeply emotional, relatable local story (ProDaddy) to an intellectual, symbolic puzzle (Pygmy or Zenon).

Is the Cypriot Audience Ready for the Fracture?

This brings us to a critical question for our evolving art scene: Has the Cypriot audience been properly introduced to this format?

The honest answer is probably no, but that might be exactly what makes Kıssa so vital right now. Historically, our theater landscape has been dominated by traditional formats: classical texts or standard situational comedies in institutional municipal buildings. Audiences are culturally conditioned to sit quietly in the dark, watch a linear story unfold for 90 minutes, clap, and leave.

Kıssa violently disrupts this comfort zone. It demands physical movement, hyper-stimulated focus, and the acceptance of ambiguity. This is where the friction lies. While older or more traditional theatergoers might resist this format because they are trying to decode the show using outdated rules, Millennial and Gen Z audiences, who grew up consuming hyper-fragmented digital media, are inherently wired to understand this exact type of "broken" structure.

Ultimately, the structural fracture in Kıssa is a perfect reflection of the transition Cyprus itself is going through. We see a clash on stage between hyper-local, deeply felt contemporary realities and abstract, high-concept intellectualism. Just as the plays intentionally skip seamless transitions between these worlds, the Cypriot audience is in a transition period of its own; learning to move away from comfortable theater into an era of intense, experimental, and sometimes jarring artistic experiences.

Kıssa doesn't hand-hold the audience through this artistic evolution; it throws us directly into the fire. I am looking forward to experience Kıssa IV, hoping that the endevour will continue and the audience will obtain more education on such concepts.

References

Beckett, S. (1954). Waiting for Godot: A tragicomedy in two acts. Grove Press.

Esslin, M. (1960). The Theatre of the Absurd. The Tulane Drama Review, 4(4), 3–15.

Handke, P. (1969). Kaspar and other plays (M. Roloff, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Includes: Offending the Audience)

Ionesco, E. (1958). The Bald Soprano and other plays (D. M. Allen, Trans.). Grove Press.

Kane, S. (2000). 4.48 Psychosis. Methuen Drama.

Lehmann, H.-T. (2006). Postdramatic Theatre (K. Juers-Munby, Trans.; 1st ed.). Routledge.