caner teker in conversation with Antoine Simeão Schalk

b2b / nothing new

Between Bridges, Berlin – 2026

Antoine Simeão Schalk: Hi caner, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. We’ve been meeting informally as you’ve been developing this work during your residency at Between Bridges, so this conversation grows out of those ongoing encounters rather than a single finished presentation. When I last saw the work, roughly ten days into the residency, what stayed with me was a tension between intimacy and opacity: two bodies appeared to grapple with an unnamed element while withholding its precise meaning. Through repetition, proximity, clothing, and gestures of concealment, an unknown or unseen presence became almost palpable. As the work continues to unfold through a series of scores until December, I would like to begin from where it is now.

For now, the work is called b2b / nothing new. What does ‘nothing new’ mean for you: repetition, exhaustion with novelty, the return of older material, or something else?

caner teker: b2b / nothing new is a choreographic study on self-defence and affect. i take modules from earlier pieces, trans–, grounds for refusal, KIRKPINAR, rip them out of their original context, vary them, repeat them. “nothing new” is not exhaustion with novelty. it is a refusal to reinvent myself on command. the question is simple. when identity becomes a currency, what happens when you go bankrupt? the body does not reinvent itself. it returns to itself. repetition becomes resistance. “nothing new” is that return. you hold your ground instead of manufacturing the next new thing.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: You are researching a series of scores that will be presented at different moments throughout the residency, while a presentation has already taken place at PACT Zollverein. How do you understand the relationship between these iterations? Are they stages of one work, autonomous studies, or traces of a process that may never settle into a final form?

caner teker: for me these are runs of one score-system. not separate works, not finished stages. the score is the core. its fixed elements are its identity, its open elements move between runs. right now it is a loop. variable, durational, tied to whatever site it lands in. what you saw is a trace of a process, not something settling into a final form. it began as a solo study this year, and b2b / nothing new pushes that method into a duet. the realization is happening this year, at my between bridges residency in berlin, where the score gets built and shown without production pressure. the work does not get finished. it gets honed. every time it meets a public it sharpens.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: How are the scores being developed through your exchanges with dramaturge Joshua Wicke and performers Martin Hansen, Emil Ertl, Noumissa Sidibé? What enters the work through these different forms of collaboration?

caner teker: the scores develop through two kinds of exchange. joshua wicke works as dramaturge. he holds the structure and we talk it out for hours, what stays fixed, what stays open, why. martin hansen, emil ertl and noumissa sidibé are the cast for different runs. each of them is the second body in a different pass. that is the point. the archive speaks through both bodies at once, and the execution is never the same twice. the score keeps its identity through its fixed elements, everything else shifts depending on who i am in it with. that difference is the core of the piece, not a side effect.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: The work seems to be organised around something that cannot be fully seen or named, but whose effects are registered by the bodies. How do you choreograph a presence constituted by what remains absent?

caner teker: the absence is the starting point. the absence of the enemy, of the work, of the thing you brace against. self-defense makes it obvious. you defend yourself, but there is nobody there. so who are you defending against? it is shadowboxing. you throw everything at an opponent who is not in the room, and the fear, the precision, the readiness are all real. elsa dorlin describes lives that are “lived on the defensive,” and she asks: “what does violence do to our lives, to our bodies, to our muscles?” that is what i choreograph. a body that stays on the defensive when the threat is absent. a body whose defense is what makes the threat appear.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: Covering the face appeared both to conceal a person or an element. How do you make sense of absence?

caner teker: covering the face follows the same logic and pushes it further. you cannot read the one being defended against, and you cannot read the one defending. both go unreadable. the absence doubles. i am not giving you a face to resolve it with. that is not on offer.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: Clothing seemed capable of activating and deactivating a presence. How are you thinking about garments as choreographic agents, and about the social identities or expectations that become attached to a dressed body?

caner teker: costume has always been central for me. garments by olivia ballard, or my own, things that sit between life and work, between the trivial and the costume costumes shape my pieces, so to re-activate the material i have to put them back on. the garment switches a presence on or off. but a dressed body is never neutral the moment i am dressed, the orientalist gaze is already reading my body, deciding what it means before i move.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: The abject, discomfort, grasping, and the unknown became important terms around the showing. What interests you in keeping the body close to something it cannot comfortably assimilate or understand?

caner teker: what interests me is the struggle, and the relational. i keep the body close to what it cannot assimilate on purpose. comfort resolves things, and i am not interested in resolution. the not-understanding is what keeps two bodies working on each other. if you could assimilate it, it would stop doing anything.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: The two performers appeared intimately connected despite not always touching or explicitly acknowledging one another. What binds these bodies together, and what passes between them?

caner teker: you build a language shaped by each other from studying, watching, moving, rehearsing together, constantly. the piece was conceived as a solo, and i still call it a serial solo, solos back to back. what binds the bodies is the shared material, the shared archive, not touch, not acknowledgment. i am refusing the cliché that a duet has to prove itself with a gesture you can point to. and i am refusing the other demand too, the one that says marginalized bodies owe a visible signal before anyone believes they’re related. the connection does not need your gaze to confirm it is real.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: How does sound play a role in your research and in this work specifically?

caner teker: sound is always where i begin. it is not decoration, it is essential. for this piece the collaboration with Space Afrika has been wonderful. we recorded my bagpipe playing and released it as a piece of its own. sound is not added later. it is the ground the whole research grows from.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: The bagpipe is sustained by breath but often sounds as though it exceeds the body producing it: a continuous voice, drone, or spectral presence. What does this instrument allow you to articulate within the work?

caner teker: the bagpipe gives me calm and transcendence, and it is also a dead sheep, filled with air, played by pressure. i do not separate those two facts. violence and intimacy sit in the same space everywhere else in this piece, so why would the instrument be exempt. i play the tulum, a black sea bagpipe, carried by the body and still sounding like it exceeds the body playing it, because it is not the body playing it, it is a corpse animated by pressure into something continuous. that is closer to a spectre than a folk instrument, and i am not dressing it up as heritage for anyone. it holds the space and lifts it because something already dead is being forced to sound like it is still deciding to be there.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: At what point does sound enter your choreographic process? Does it generate movement, accompany it, disturb it, or emerge from what the performers are already doing?

caner teker: usually i move with affect and emotion first, sound gets me there, and after that neither one leads. i do not let sound direct the body and i do not make the body illustrate the sound, that hierarchy is exactly the kind of command i am refusing everywhere else in this piece. sound and movement spar. one advances, the other falls back, sometimes the body moves with nothing behind it, sometimes the sound holds the space alone with no body answering. i do not fix that relationship in advance, because a fixed hierarchy between sound and movement is reinvention-on-command wearing a different costume, and i already said no to that.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: How do you understand silence here: as an absence of sound, a heightened mode of listening, or a space already populated by memory, expectation, and internal rhythm?

caner teker: silence is not an absence of sound for me. you make your own rhythms and the silence sits heavy around them. it does not empty the space. it is where you actually notice the material.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: Repetition is central to the work. Does repetition function rhythmically for you? What accumulates in a gesture when it returns: memory, exhaustion, difference, or resistance?

caner teker: repetition is the whole method, not a device. what accumulates is not memory, not exhaustion, those are side effects. what accumulates is ground. every return is the body refusing to move for you. rhythmically, yes, but the rhythm is a form of holding, not entertainment.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: Between Bridges describes the research as emerging from your long-term martial arts training and from movements of defence and self-protection. What sonic knowledge does martial arts carry for you: the rhythm of breath, impact, anticipation, contact, or the sound of another body approaching?

caner teker: mostly rhythm, contact and breath. martial arts is full of sonic knowledge. the rhythm of an exchange, the breath before and after it, the sound of contact. that is the sound i carry into the work even when nothing is playing.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: Defence is often imagined as a response to an identifiable threat. What happens when the threat remains unseen or cannot be located? Can listening itself become a defensive practice?

caner teker: there is nothing clean to respond to when the threat cannot be located. so the body stays ready, that is the whole answer. you listen for it: the rhythm, the breath, a body approaching, before anything is there. listening is already a defence. you are tracking something that has not arrived and might never, and you do not get the relief of finding out.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: Defence and self-protection are never entirely abstract: safety and the need for vigilance are distributed unequally. What social or political conditions have made defence an urgent choreographic question for you now?

caner teker: it is urgent because it is happening right now. constant militarization. budget cuts, funding cuts. the independent scene kept like puppies by a conservative government, everyone scared of losing their job, the economy neoliberalized to the bone. meanwhile money gets blasted into Wagner festivals as if we had forgotten his antisemitism. for me the aesthetic is never separate from the political, and never from the social. pretending it is, is its own kind of violence. we are marginalized, we are read before we move, and we are allowed to defend ourselves. that is what makes defense a choreographic question now. it is necessary, it is now, and we do not fuck with the state. when identity becomes a currency, what happens when you go bankrupt? elsa dorlin writes about those made “indefensible, exposed to violence, and always already guilty.” that is where the defense comes from. you defend yourself by refusing the terms you were handed in the first place.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: Sound can gather bodies into a collective, but it can also overwhelm, discipline, exclude, or expose them. How do you understand the politics of sound when it organises bodies in a shared space?

caner teker: sound organises space, and organising space is already political. no neutral placement of bodies exists. sound pulls people into something shared, and at volume, up close, it overwhelms and exposes them just as easily. i work that edge on purpose. i am not going to smooth it out for anyone’s comfort.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: Across your practice, violence and intimacy frequently occupy the same space. Does sound help you hold these forces together without resolving the tension between them?

caner teker: yes. sound exaggerates the urgency. it does not resolve the tension between violence and intimacy, it heightens it. it keeps both present at once instead of letting one settle the other.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: When you were hosting showings, the proximity between performers and public created a stark intimacy, with little space to retreat. How do sound and architecture organise this encounter? Can sound produce distance inside physical closeness or closeness across physical distance?

caner teker: sound and architecture set the terms of the encounter. the score adapts to each site, so the space decides a lot. where you can stand. where you cannot retreat to. sound does what architecture cannot. it opens distance inside closeness, and pulls closeness across distance. you can be right next to someone while the sound holds you apart, or far away while the drone binds you together. i use that to shape how close the audience really is, past where their bodies are standing.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: Your performances have taken place in theatres, museums, clubs, and exhibition spaces. How does each context condition the audience’s listening and its sense of bodily proximity?

caner teker: each context disciplines the body differently. a theatre tells you to sit still and face one way. a museum tells you to stay quiet and keep your distance. a club lets you sweat and lose yourself. an exhibition space keeps you moving and browsing. each one trains a different kind of listening, and a different sense of how close you are allowed to get. i always know which regime i am inside, and i play with it or against it.

Antoine Simeão Schalk: Your works have developed a recognisable physical and sonic intensity. Does the provisional title b2b / nothing new reflect on that recognisability, or is it an attempt to unsettle what audiences expect from a caner teker work?

caner teker: the title takes something away from what is actually happening. It deflates it, deliberately. “nothing new” points at a condition of the field rather than at my own work. Novelty is what the funding structure rewards, and the cycle keeps getting shorter: a new subject, a new language, a new self every season. That demand falls hardest on artists whose biography is already treated as the content, who are expected to keep producing themselves as material. What actually happens in a practice is repetition. Skills get built slowly, a body holds them for years, and at some point they get passed on. “b2b” names that, one after the other, a handover rather than a premiere. Refusing novelty is not a refusal to work. it’s a means of institutional critique.

All Images: caner teker, b2b nothing new, Between Bridges, photo credit: Vincent Wechselberger