‘Doesn’t Every Dying Person’s Last Breath Touch the Living?’ Breath performance and the politics of asphyxiation in contemporary Turkish theatre

Theatre’s aestheticized repertoires of breathlessness entail important potential for the study of the politics of asphyxiation. Despite their significance, however, the theatrical practices of breathlessness are relatively undertheorized in the literature, especially outside of Western Europe and North America. Combining archival and ethnographic research, my essay will show how Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay’s tuberculosis (meta)melodrama Melek (dir. Jale Karabekir, 2013 and 2020) provides the aesthetics of breathlessness with new meanings constitutive of modes of pneumonic belonging. Set in a room at the Cerrahpaşa Hospital in mid-1930s Istanbul and loosely drawing upon the diaries of Turkish actor and tuberculosis patient Melek Kobra, Melek is a monodrama about Kobra’s last breathing moments. The play was initially produced in Istanbul in 2013 by the feminist independent company Tiyatro Boyalı Kuş (Theatre Painted Bird) and in 2020 by the İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Şehir Tiyatroları (Istanbul Metropolitan Municipal Theatres), Turkey’s most established public theatre company. Grounded in different contexts, both productions reactivated Melek’s affective archives of breathlessness. The centrality of breath in the Turkish state’s suffocation policies during the 2013 Gezi Protests in Istanbul rendered the utilization of performance as a site for processing pneumonic struggle highly relevant. Amidst the breath management politics of the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2020 production blurred the boundaries between contagious actuality and theatricality. Bridging the political with the personal, the theatrics of breathing in both productions were informed by director Jale Karabekir and actor Yeşim Koçak’s experiences of TB. By re-enacting repertoires of breathlessness across practitioners, audiences, and contexts, Melek offers a fruitful case study for examining how breath’s aestheticization serves both as respiratory violence and resistance against it.