1 Turkey’s Artists at Risk: Dramaturgies of Resistance vs. Politics of Fear Dr. Pieter Verstraete I stand in the sweating masses and throw stones at the police soldiers tanks bulletproof glass. I glance through the double-door outfitted with bulletproof glass at the oncoming crowd and smell the perspiration of my fear. I shake, choked with nausea, my fist against myself, standing behind the bulletproof glass. I see, choked by fear and loathing, myself in the oncoming crowd, foam licking at my lips, shaking my fist against myself. Heiner Müller, Hamletmaschine (1977) The latest Hamletmaschine production by The Exil Ensemble, which premiered at the Gorki Theatre on 24 February 2018, brought me back to a life shaping experience when I lived in Istanbul in 2013. Just like Müller’s protagonist, I lived within and between political crises while I was privileged, as foreigner, as white male, as theatre scholar, as somebody in-between. Ich bin ein Privilegierter, Hamlet gesticulates. It was early Spring. On 7 April 2013, I had just participated in the protests against the closure of the historical Emek (i.e. Labour) Movie Theatre, one of the last remaining cosy cinema halls in Istanbul’s busiest shopping street, which was full of youth sentiment and not yet completely integrated in cheap modern-day commercialism. There I experienced my first confrontation with a heavy-handed police force. After the Greek senior filmmaker Costa-Gavras made a speech, we tried to push through the police cordon around the ill-fated street. But that was not to the liking of the authorities. Our intentions to protect something that belongs to all of us were met with pepper gas and a pressured gush of water dispersing everybody in minutes. Costa-Gavras, another one of the privileged, had by that time already been brought to a safe place. One month later, near the end of May, I see myself again in front of the police lines, getting chased by a helicopter and covered in scorching gas-water concoctions. The scene is now the Gezi Park, which is about to get bulldozed, right besides Taksim square, not very far away from the sealed Emek Cinema. Besides ecological and anti-capitalist reasons, which seemed the least significant in the end, the Gezi Park insurgency brought together thousands of citizens, of the disenfranchised middle classes, with diverse grudges against the current regime, among which also a group of artists, some of whom I saw at the Emek protest earlier. What Heiner Müller expresses through the voice of his Hamlet, I experienced in that pivotal moment: I was there and yet I looked from a distance. I was occupying the park with many artist friends, but I had also a panoptic viewpoint from the rooftop of the Simit Sarayı where I went with a befriended foreign journalist when on the evening of 15 June 2013 the riot police emptied the park of all its occupiers. Like Hamlet who does not see his drama unfold any longer but instead lingers around, taking up different positions during what could be the Hungarian riots of October 1956 or any other post-War uprising, I