The Ankara State Opera and Ballet (ADOB) will organize public concerts, musicals and organized pieces in districts across the city in an effort to bring opera and ballet to the attention of the public.
ADOB’s head and art director Aykut Çınar said the 2013 season had been welcomed in with a concert held last month and that their teams were preparing performances with excitement. “I think people remain distant from opera and ballet as they do not know about them,” Çınar said, adding that performance tours for the new city had been organized and tested in the cities of Kayseri, Sivas and Bolu.
Çınar said art-lovers showed great interest in opera and ballet and that this interest had influenced what they organized for the next year. “We are thinking of ways to be more visible to the public. We even started to search for outdoor areas where we could organize concerts. We want to organize large-scale public events. Our aim is not to hold traditional concerts but to plan and design differently and hold boutique events that would also include dance shows, concerts and stage plays,” he said.
ADOB will organize 205 events for the season, a number exceeding 350 when taking into account operas and children’s plays in the Leyla Gencer Children’s Opera.
Çınar also said a concert for New Year’s Day is in the works. “We want to meet our fellow townsmen from Ankara wherever we organize the event,” she said.
Çınar said Turkish people had became familiar with opera relatively recently. “The problem is the reflex of rejecting the unknown. As long as a work is presented with good examples and competent artists, I think Turkish people would not reject it. Turks know about the quality of voice since they express their sorrow and joy through singing songs. As long as it is introduced well, opera would encounter no problem in this country,” she said.
(For original story http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ankara-ballet-aims-to-entertain-public.aspx?pageID=238&nID=35067&NewsCatID=384)
Reported by Hürriyet Daily News
