HAYDAR TANZT / HAYDAR‘IN DANSI

Haydar – who sings and plays the bağlama himself – writes his book about this, a life’s work. But Haydar is unable to complete it. On the night of 6 February 2023, like tens of thousands of others, he falls victim to the gigantic earthquake in the border region between Turkey and Syria. And yet: trapped in his flat, Haydar manages to send some last messages to his mobile phone. This reaches Songül, a colleague, in Berlin. But why? And what is stored on this mobile phone?

With Songül, we learn voicemail by voicemail about what happened in Turkey at the time, about the songs and myths in Córdoba in Spain, Konya in Turkey, Tunceli/Dersim in Anatolia and about the culture and oppression of the Turkish Alevis, who make up around a fifth of the Turkish population at 20 million. We dedicate this piece to the Alevi historian Dr Mehmet Yıldırım, whose burial and death we learned about during the great earthquake tragedy. Like the fictional Haydar, he was also a historian and acık, a singer of folk songs with the bağlama.

One year after the earthquake, HAYDAR TANZT / HAYDAR’IN DANSI connects a concrete fate on behalf of those tens of thousands at the time and tells of the culture and history of the Alevis from Dersim, interwoven with the musical diversity of Arab-Andalusian and Anatolian-Alevi folk music.