Volume 25 Issue 6 - March 2020

has been a success these eight and a half years. Certain things get lost
in translation … which is not always bad. But we keep working on
figuring out the between-the-lines – the unsaid in the said. That took
some time.”
Kalender will be spending March in Alberta while preparing for
the role of the Old Lady in the Joel Ivany-directed Candide at the
Edmonton Opera. (“I will actually be singing the line I am so easily
assimilated,” she laughs.) Back in Toronto in April, rehearsals, with
the same director, begin in a very different project: Against the Grain
Theatre’s final version of the Kevin Lau-composed Bound, the story
of four characters in a brush with law enforcement and the arbitrary
rules at border crossings. Kalender’s character is based on
a true story of a professional Middle Eastern woman being asked
and refusing to remove her hijab at the point of entry into France.
“Border crossings is a topic we don’t talk a lot about in Canada,” she
says, “and when I saw an earlier version of Bound I was grateful that
these guys decided to tackle it.” Kalender became a Canadian citizen
last February, and before that travelled on her Turkish passport as
a Canadian permanent resident, which sometimes made things
complicated. One year, on her way from Canada to Moscow via
Zurich Airport for a singing gig, she was taken out of the queue and
held at the airport because the airline staff in charge were not able,
or willing, to verify that she did not require a work visa for Russia.
When eight hours later they finally realized their mistake – thanks
to a network of frantic phone calls between Turkish and Russian
consular offices across two continents – she was allowed to board the
next available plane to Moscow. She landed in the Russian capital at
4am, and went straight to rehearsals on little or no sleep.
The character she will play in Bound is held at a border for a
different reason, but she and Kalender have one thing in common:
their faith. Kalender is a Sufi Muslim who decided early in life that
the headscarf wasn’t for her. There are countries in the world where
not wearing a headscarf in public will get a woman in jail: where
does she stand on this question? “Actually, when I was university-age,
wearing hijabs in places like parliament and school was
forbidden by law,” she says.
(An aside: I pause here to remind the reader that Turkey’s path to
secularization commenced after the demise of the Ottoman Empire
and the end of the First World War, under Turkey’s first republican
president Kemal Ataturk, and was at times more top-down than it was
productive.)
“But in my school, Boğaziçi University,” Kalender continues, “our
professors didin’t occupy themselves with how you look. So some
people would wear a hat over their scarf, for example … and the
administration didn’t police clothing. But in other state universities,
this rule was enforced. In today’s Turkey, it’s a matter of free choice.
You can wear a hijab in school if you wish.”
“In my opinion,” she says, “to order a woman to put on a scarf or
to take off the scarf, they are the same thing. It means forcing your
opinion on them. And it’s generally men who decide this – while I’m
happy for women to be able to decide that for themselves. If it’s the
government deciding for you, or members of your family, it’s coercion.”
Kalender tried a hijab on for the very first time only last year
– in preparation for the role in Bound. “I had a relative who wears a
hijab visit me recently in Canada. One day we were talking and I told
her about this role, and asked her to show me the different ways of
doing a hijab. She said, ‘Beste I thought you were against it,’ and I told
her, well yes, I don’t think my religion is about that. I am a religious
person – but not a conservative person. I really believe in Sufism. I
believe that we are all one, and that our differences are only as deep as
putting on a label. I don’t believe that I necessarily need a hijab, but if
that’s how you feel most comfortable, then why should I try to decide
that on your behalf?”
There is a lot of the Ottoman Empire in Western European opera
– Ottomans held a place of fascination and fear for centuries – and
I ask her what she thinks about the increased sensitivity around
cultural representation in opera. She’s already sung a Fiorilla aria
from Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia at a private concert, she tells me, and
had fun with it, but hasn’t yet managed to see an entire traditional
production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail. The rewritten
Beste Kalender, Against the Grain Theatre’s Opera Pub Night
at the Amsterdam Bicycle Club, Toronto (2017)
Wajdi Mouawad production at the COC from a few years back she
did enjoy. “The COC took a risk, decided to adopt this new angle, and
good on them. I had heard the buzz about it, that there was namaz
[Islamic prayer] on stage, and all those changes in the production, and
I went in and was glad that someone took this approach.” The original
Entführung is fiction of course, and when it comes to the life in the
Pasha’s harem not exactly accurate.“In Mozart’s opera, the ladies are
in control, but in real life, they would not have been,” Kalender says.
Mothers would have probably have had more influence on viziers than
their harem favourites. As for the stereotypical Turco character in
other operas? “When you create a character, you should endow them
with a variety of features – they can’t be there just for fun and ridiculing.
Something to keep in mind when reviving productions.”
In Mouawad’s production, namaz is performed in Arabic. Would
Ottomans have worshipped in Arabic? “Yes,” she says, and puts my
pedantry to rest. “There were several languages in circulation in the
Ottoman Empire, with Arabic and Farsi particularly influential. With
the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the coming of Ataturk and the
Turkish Republic, the official language was reformed and unified. Up
to that point we were using Arabic letters; after Ataturk, we switched
to Latin letters. If someone spoke to me in Ottoman today, I would not
understand them.” How is the empire looked upon in today’s Turkey?
Is it being fantasized about? “Yes. Certain political groups still talk
about it. But I think what reignited interest in Ottomans more than
anything else is this hugely popular TV show that went on for years.
Magnificent Century – a quality, historically informed soap opera set
in the court of Suleiman the Magnificent.” I tell her I knew about it
even before Elif Batuman wrote a long piece on it in The New Yorker
because the show was extremely popular in all the Slav countries in
the Balkans – countries that were colonized by the Ottomans, some
for several centuries. The mistrust of all things Ottoman/Turkish and
the legends of heroes who fought for liberation from the empire were
inbuilt in all the national poetries in the region – but this TV show,
when it was on, emptied the streets. It was something akin to mania,
I tell her. “It was a good show! And wasn’t Suleiman’s main woman of
East European origin?”
“The lady who designed tiaras for the show designed the tiara for
my wedding,” Kalender says. “My big, fat Middle Eastern wedding!
No, I don’t do things by halves.”
Lydia Perović is an arts journalist in Toronto. Send her your
art-of-song news to artofsong@thewholenote.com.
DARRYL BLOCK
14 | March 2020 thewholenote.com