Soküm Çalışmaları Bağlamında Tiyatro ve Kültürel Aktarım: Sahne Sanatlarındaki Kırgız Destanları Örneği

Abstract

The products of the Kyrgyz epic saga tradition are the common cultural heritage of all Turkic noble people. The main material of our study is the theatre texts inspired by the Kyrgyz Epic sagas, which are the products of this common heritage, and the stage theatres created by transferring the epic texts to the stage. The content of the theatre texts and opera librettos written based on the epic Kyrgyz sagas consists of the events, characters, and messages in the epics. Within the scope of this thesis, research was conducted by visiting state and private theatres in Kyrgyzstan, and only 48 works staged as theatre, opera and ballet were examined among the works identified. In the first part of the thesis, a conceptual framework was created; the theatre, opera, and ballet work we identified were listed, and the statistical data and results we obtained were presented in the findings section. The theme of “Theatre and Cultural Transfer in the Context of SOKÜM Studies”, which constitutes the main title of our thesis, was addressed specifically in Kyrgyzstan in the second part. We examined the theatre and opera texts using folkloric and theatre text analysis methods in the third part. Discussing the stage plays created by transferring the epics to the stage without making any additions to their texts can be found in the fourth section. The third and fourth sections provide information on the identity of the works, their staging history, and the characters in the works and summarize of the content of 38 works in detail. We observed that the Kyrgyz Epic Sagas were transformed into stage artworks by the Kyrgyz and used as effective tools for transferring and preserving the culture. The theatre and opera texts that contain the cultural heritage products of the Kyrgyz were determined to be extremely original and that these works have the features of narration and animation simultaneously. It has been observed that the performers of the works that directly refer to the Kyrgyz epics and have both dramatic and epic features are theatre artists, storytellers, akıns, komuz players, and epic singers who continue the oral tradition. As a result, we emphasized and suggested in our thesis that these works, which are far from other theatre forms with all these features, and have both non-epic and dramatic epic features, should be included under the title of “Kyrgyz Epic Sagas Theatre” and “Kyrgyz Epic Sagas Theatre Tradition” in Turkish Folklore and Stage Arts studies.