Dengbej, Govend, and Women's Voices

Amed is not merely a city with a long history. It is a place where the preservation of cultural memory constitutes a daily political and social practice. For the Kurdish population, language, music, song, dance, and oral storytelling are not only forms of cultural heritage but also vital means of preserving a collective identity that has long been subjected to processes of assimilation, exclusion, and repression.

As part of my artistic research in the city, I attended rehearsals for Moraşîn, directed by Ghotbedin Sadeghi and premiered at Çand Amed Culture and Congress Centre and for  Edûlê, directed by Recep İçen and premiered at Mordem Huner’s theatre.

In this text I discuss these two theatrical productions that were in their final rehearsal period during my stay in Amed and premiered after my departure. I attended rehearsals of both performances and had conversations with members of their creative teams. These encounters evolved around the dengbêj storytelling tradition, govend dance, and the changing role of women in both traditional stories and contemporary Kurdish theatre.

Moraşîn

The performance draws upon one of the best-known Kurdish epics, Genc Xelîl, which has survived through the oral storytelling tradition of dengbêj.

The original epic recounts the story of the legendary hero Genc Xelîl, whose journey revolves around love, separation, and the trials he must overcome. While the traditional narrative centres on the male hero, Moraşîn shifts the focus to the woman who searches for him, transforming her from a secondary figure into the protagonist of the story.

Rather than presenting the epic as a historical reconstruction, the performance uses it as a framework through which to address contemporary questions of displacement, migration, memory, loss, and, above all, the place of women in history.

During my conversation with actress Elvan Koçer, one of the performers, I learned that the performance does not retell the story of Genc Xelîl. Instead, it follows Moraşîn, a woman who embarks on a long journey in search of her beloved. Along the way she encounters other women, each carrying her own story. The dramaturgy unfolds through seven journeys, seven encounters, and seven narratives inspired by the lived experiences of women.

What particularly struck me in this play was the role of dance. The seven choreographies are rooted in govend, the traditional Kurdish communal dance. Yet these choreographies function far beyond folkloric representation, they become dramaturgical devices. Each dance marks a different stage of Moraşîn's journey and embodies a distinct narrative. The past is therefore presented not as something static to be preserved but as a living practice capable of generating new meanings in the present.

Watching Moraşîn brought me back to a question that has occupied my doctoral research: what happens when artists return to the past? What exactly do they retrieve? A historical event? An identity? An archive? Or an opportunity to rethink the present?

The dances on stage do not simply preserve fragments of tradition, they activate them. Through the theatrical presentation of govend and dengbêj the community renegotiates its relationship with oral and embodied history. In this sense, the past functions not as a closed historical archive but as an active field of creative negotiation. 

Edûlê

The questions raised by Moraşîn continued to resonate during another rehearsal I attended in Amed, this time for Edûlê, a production based on the Kurdish epic Derwêş û Edûlê. Like Moraşîn, the performance does not seek to reconstruct an epic tale as historical evidence. Instead, it revisits the dengbêj tradition in order to ask what it might mean within contemporary Kurdish theatre and, more specifically, how women's voices can be reclaimed within an oral tradition that has gradually become associated primarily with male performers.

The epic tells the story of Derwêş, a Yazidi Kurd, and Edûlê, a Muslim woman, whose love is impossible due to religious divisions and war. In the traditional dengbêj narrative, the dramatic focus gradually shifts from their relationship to Derwêş's heroism in battle, while Edûlê remains a relatively marginal figure. It is precisely this narrative that the performance seeks to challenge by placing Edûlê at the centre of the dramatic action.

After attedning a rehearsal, I had a long discussion with the creative team: the director Recep İçen, the dramaturgs Serhat Manış and Civan Demiralp, the actors Barış Işık and Kêko Ûrmîye, and the actress Esra Ekinci. According to them, the choice of Derwêş û Edûlê was not primarily motivated by the story itself. Rather, it emerged from a broader artistic investigation: how can the dengbêj tradition be translated into contemporary theatre? Traditionally, the dengbêj performs alone, carrying the memories and experiences of an entire community through a single voice. The performance therefore explores whether this solitary voice can become collective on stage. Can a chorus assume the function of the dengbêj? How can collective performance communicate memories and emotions that have traditionally been transmitted by a single storyteller?

As the dramaturgs explained, the strength of the dengbêj tradition lies precisely in its collective nature. Although each story is performed by one individual, it has never belonged to a single author. These epics have circulated orally for generations, constantly changing through retelling. Every performer reshapes the narrative, adding or omitting details while preserving its emotional core. In this sense, the dengbêj already speaks with many voices. The performance seeks to make this collective process visible by developing a theatrical language in which every performer also becomes a storyteller and a carrier of memory. 

This approach is inseparable from the history of Kurdish culture itself. As the artists observed, Kurdish cultural memory has been transmitted primarily through oral tradition, largely because of the historical suppression of the Kurdish language and the limited institutional support available for preserving and promoting Kurdish cultural production. Oral storytelling therefore functions not simply as artistic expression but also as a strategy of cultural survival. The many variations that characterize these narratives create spaces for reinterpretation rather than demanding fidelity to a single authoritative version.

Like Moraşîn, Edûlê also reconsiders the role of women within this inherited tradition. Although historical accounts suggest that women once occupied a more prominent place within the dengbêj tradition, today it is largely dominated by men. The creative team understands this transformation as reflecting the broader patriarchal structures that have shaped the contemporary society.

For this reason, the performance deliberately reconstructs the epic's perspective. Rather than following Derwêş's heroic journey, it retells the story through Edûlê's eyes. A figure who occupies only a brief place in the traditional narrative becomes the central dramatic subject, transforming not only the protagonist but also the meaning of the story itself.

Esra Ekinci described Edûlê as a character defined by contradiction rather than by a single identity. She is grieving yet resilient, vulnerable yet determined, deeply loving yet capable of resistance. The performance refuses to reduce her either to a heroine or to a victim, instead allowing strength and fragility to coexist throughout her emotional journey.

Her songs trace this transformation. In the opening song she warns of the approaching war and calls upon the community to act. In the traditional version of the epic, she offers herself as a sacrifice to whoever will go to war and defend the community. The performance omits this explicit exchange, trusting that audiences familiar with the story will recognize the reference while allowing Edûlê's own voice to emerge independently of that sacrifice. In the second song she expresses the depth of her love while confronting the reality that war has already separated the two lovers. Her final lament becomes an expression of grief, asking how one can let go of someone who will never return.

For director Recep İçen, Edûlê also carries contemporary political resonances, evoking both the history of Rojava and Kurdish women who continue to resist through struggle and self-determination. Yet the character is never reduced to a political allegory. Instead, she was developed through improvisations, allowing the performers to discover her voice collectively rather than imposing a predetermined interpretation.

Perhaps the most revealing moment of our discussion concerned what it means to embody such a character today. We reflected on the challenge of performing female strength while simultaneously expressing grief, vulnerability, and pain. The role asks the performer to imagine forms of agency that women are often denied in everyday life. Theatre thus becomes not only a space of representation but also a space of rehearsal, a place where alternative possibilities of womanhood can be explored and enacted.

Again, like Moraşîn, Edûlê demonstrates that returning to oral tradition is not simply an act of preservation. Instead, the past becomes a living archive through which artists negotiate questions of gender, memory, and collective identity in the present. 

Contemporary choreographers and theatre-makers increasingly return to historical works, traditions, and cultural memory not to reproduce them faithfully, but to reinterpret and recompose them within new artistic, social, and political contexts.

Rather than merely transmitting inherited stories, these performances transform them, allowing voices that were once marginal to become central. In doing so, they reveal that both the dengbêj tradition and govend are not fixed cultural monuments but dynamic and evolving practices through which contemporary Kurdish theatre continues to imagine new futures.

Referenced Theatre Performances 

Ghotbedin Sadeghi. (2026). Moraşîn.  Premiered at Çand Amed Culture and Congress Centre as part of the 11th International Theater Festival in Amed, Turkey. Produced by the Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality City Theatre (DBŞT).

Recep İçen, (2026). Edûlê.  Premiered at Mordem Huner’s theatre in Amed, Turkey. Produced by BANkültür, Şaneşîn Performans, Mordem Huner, and Theatre Antract.