Corrosion: The Tragedy of a Being Trembling Between Existence and Nothingness
“We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
As someone who trained under Şahika and Esat Tekand at Studio Players and has closely witnessed Şahika Tekand’s stage language, I anticipated a kind of mental game when I went to see Erosion, written by Tekand and performed by Yiğit Özşener at Battersea Arts Centre. I was already familiar with Tekand’s theatre, with those moments born from the deep darkness of the stage, constantly destroyed and reconstructed through light and sound. Yet this time there was no chorus, no ensemble exchanging the elements of theatre. This time, all the weight and the rhythm of energy and control were placed upon a single body, Yiğit Özşener.
Throughout the performance, we, the audience, felt as if we were inside a laboratory experiment, watching, under localized light, a figure anchored to a chair at the center of an open cube, trapped in the vortex of his own thoughts. An invisible authority spoke like a mechanism of surveillance, commanding, directing, controlling. “Fold your arms.” “Turn right.” “Cross your legs.” This voice did not address a human being, but a subject worn down by the system, detached from his own existence.
Under the cold light, Özşener’s body became an instrument of measurement. Every breath revealed how deeply control had settled into the body; every pause exposed the fine line between submission and resistance. As the performance went on, Özşener became both the product and the victim of the system. He was no longer playing a character, only trying to remain existent. Each word was a cluster of meaningless sounds, each silence a pause where we tried to locate where meaning and freedom might hide within the darkness.
We, the spectators, were trapped inside the cube with the character. Uncertain when the light would flash again or when the voice would appear, we remained under the discipline of time and authority. The words trembling in the shadow of fear occasionally tried to rebel, yet always dissolved within the same circular boundaries. At some point, I stopped trying to follow the meaning. Because every question and every search for an answer seemed condemned to remain within the limits of what was constructed. I too became like the character on stage, nailed to my chair, tracing the echoes of the voices inside my head, unable to move beyond them. My existence had become equal to nothingness, deprived of the power to act, and under the weight of thought I had become like air pressed into a balloon, ineffective and invisible.
Yiğit Özşener’s character kept speaking amid this void, as if he had hung his emotions somewhere far away and was left only with fear and anxiety, struggling to exist like a two-dimensional creature. With every fading light he seemed to know he was sinking back into darkness and non-being. And when the play, unlike familiar narratives, refused to reach a conclusion, it left us, just as its set, light, and sound had promised, inside an uncanny.
Eda Çatalçam
Theatre Artist / Educator Mavi Productions – London
