BOZAN Oratorium – With an hommage to Poetry by Theatre and Music

A protest cry against chaos and disorder

By Heidi Trautmann

To describe my impression and feelings when I sat in the auditorium on April 05 at the Near East University was that of listening to the antik sybils proclaiming the oracles and the rhythm of the music, the beat hammered in my head. The words that reached us, the words spoken by eight actors and actresses from the LBT (Nicosia Municipality Theatre) were by poets and writers that themselves had gone through hardships in times of war, trouble and disorder when poetry was the only outlet for their sorrows, resistance or even longing. With its rules of discipline poetry is the proper tool to aim with concentration at the wound that is hurting, be it by war or love.

Nazım Hikmet, Luis Aragon, Ahmed Arif, Orkun Bozkurt, William Shakespeare, Serkan Uçar, Bertolt Brecht, Mahmut Anayasa, FatvaTukan, Hasan Hüseyin, Feriha Altıok, Aliye Ummanel, Neriman Cahit, Faize Özdemirciler and Fikret Demirağ.

The music is composed by two young musicians Hüseyin Kırmızı and Cahit Kutrafalı; they must have been listening to the recitals of the poems many times to find the tunes, the rythm, the meaning, to words of sadness or resistance, or of love. Can Sözer did the coordinating and Oskay Hoca directed the 20-musician-orchestra LBO (Nicosia Municipality Orchestra).

Yaşar Ersoy, the grey emminence of theatre, who did the directing, said that they worked on this music project for three months, which I can easily believe. It is the very first time that such project has been done in Cyprus, to combine three disciplines of art and to work together in a fight against disorder and chaos all around us.

The LBT equip: Özgür Oktay, Döndü Özata, Hatice Tezcan, Izel Seylani, Umut Ersoy, Arkin Sayar, Erol Refikoğlu, Yaşar Ersoy.

Orchestra and actors all clad in black in front of a black curtain and the instruments went along with the words, the volume rising or dropping, whispering or hitting. Absolutely well done, and in the rows of the audience only very few smart phones on the laps of the audience were lighting up. We were all captivated.

Thank you all for this experience.

I did not find the English translation for the poems recited, written in Turkish, so I end with some lines by Shakespeare and Louis Aragon.

There is no happy love - Louis Aragon

Louis Aragon (1897-1982), a French poet.

man never truly possesses anything
neither his strength, nor his weakness, nor his heart
and when he opens his arms his shadow is that of a cross
and when he tries to embrace happiness he crushes it
his life is a strange and painful divorce

there is no happy love

there is no love which is not pain
there is no love which does not bruise
there is no love which does not wither
and no greater than you the love for the country
there is no love which does not live from weeping
there is no happy love
but it is our love to the two of us

Sonnet LXVI Shakespeare

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
   Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
   Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

The poetry by our Cypriot poets is available in local bookstores.