LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH A HARP

The name of choreographer Aydın Teker is a recommendation in the Turkish dance world. She not only broke through internationally, but also has, as a lecturer at the Mimar Sinan University a huge influence on young dancers. With one of them, Ayşe Orhon, she made Hars.( the Turkish word for harp).
Hars is consequently a piece for a woman and an unusually strong harp, made of polycarbonate, evidently necessary because  Orhon does not pluck the instrument but misuses it as a sort of climbing frame. In a long series of excersizes she becomes more and more one with the frame.
These excersizes also produce music. Orhon plays the strings with her whole body, even her feet. On the advice of Evrim Demirel, the composer, the instrument was tuned in an unusual way to produce special sound effects.Musically Hars reminds us of the way in which John Cage prepared his piano to produce new sounds. Hars however, offers foremost highly intriguing visual scenes. Sometimes you almost see one of the paintings of Jeroen Bosch, on  which a musician is hanged on the strings of a harp.The harp here is portrayed as an  instrument of torture.
No coincidence: Orhon learned to play the harp as a child, more often than not against her own wishes.
The end of the piece offers the apotheosis of the growing symbiosis between woman and instrument. Orhon slides with her lower body and legs in the foot of the harp and thus changes into a mermaid, but then with the harp as a fishtail. That tail she whirls up and down while she tolls around the stage. This is technically baffling as well as visually fascinating.