Izmir Levantine Theatre - Ugo Braggiotti, February 2016

Here we are at the end of the 8th season of the ‘İzmir Amatör Levanten Tiyatrosu’. As you know we increased the playing nights from 3 to 4 for İzmir and we did our third tournée to Istanbul on the 20th of February 2016 with 2 plays on the same day. This means that we went from 3 to 6 plays in total.

It was again our best year. Almost 2000 seats in total found their theatre lovers in İzmir and İstanbul. İzmir was again completely sold out before the play started, and we saw in Facebook endless positive postings of critics, photos and videos, especially people wishing that we weren’t an amateur group, but professionals. There was last year a cinema director in the audience who wrote a positive critic for each one of us, and a movie actress who said she didn’t stop laughing during the whole play.

İstanbul is a difficult territory for us, and the 37 tickets selling friends are still encountering difficulties in selling tickets in such a big city where moving is always a journey. Despite this, at the end of each play we had to stay for almost half an hour to speak and accept congratulations from the audience. In the audience we have fans, and besides them we always have nuns, priests sitting in the front row. They all helped us in selling tickets. This year with the aid of a sponsor we were able to buy a very big refrigerator to the Türkiye Omurilik Felçlileri Derneği: they will use it in their nursery home at Beylikdüzü, (last year we bought them 2 washing machines and 2 dryers). We were able to give a donation to La Paix Hospital, to the Artigiana Old Peoples’ Home (Yaşlılar Evi), and to the Petites Soeurs des Pauvres, and all of them were so happy.

With this year’s income in Izmir we gave donations to: Ayse-Faruk Çelebi Vakfı (equivalent to a scholarship to 30 students for 1 month), Alsancak Güzelleştirme Derneği (Alsancak Beautification Society), and to our Church where we rehearsed every Monday. We also completed this year our big project to donate a fully equipped hospital room to the new 9 Eylül Üniversitesi Hematoloji Onkoloji Hastanesi: the IALT name will be on the door of this room.

We also continue our campaign: “If you can’t come, buy a ticket for one who can’t afford it” ... so we were able to bring free of charge to the theatre young boys and girls.

During the past years, we were able to donate to ECEV (the educational charity Ege Çağdaş Eğitim Vakfı), LOSEV, Caritas, Anadolu Otizm Vakfı, Buca Yaşlılar Evi (Manoli Levantine old people’s home), we played the entire 2010 season for the Van Earthquake victims where we contributed to the building of a new primary school, 9 Eylül Üniversitesi Çocuk Onkolojisi Hospital where we bought last year 2 new electronic devices used to calculate in 7 sec. the appropriate chemotherapy dosage… based on blood tests.

We are always open to sponsorship for the next season and happy to discuss this with local businesses and people who share in our passion. We would like to bring more smiles and more laughter and share in the joy of theatre across communities; please get in touch with us. Of course we don’t want to lose our amateur spirit, and we want to continue this way: we are happy, we love our rehearsals, we enjoy putting people together (it’s like a yearly meeting of all Levantines and friends) and we think that this is our goal: bringing the people together in this joy and provide donations to those who are not as fortunate as we are.

Report in Turkish version:

Left to right top row: Ugo Braggiotti, Ingrid Mary Micaleff Braggiotti, Marilen Braggiotti, Monica Tito Tunç, Vedat Güzel (director), Gina Carla Finale Ersan, Aysel Güzel (co-director), Benyil Poyraz Gloghini, Margery Braggiotti.
Front row, left to right: Özkan Özkan, Mustafa Özgür Tunç, Mehmet Çakmak, Fabio Fantasia, Jean Yves Özmirza.