TURANDOT

Students: Anahita Khodadad & Görkem Topalhan

Once upon a time,
in a Chinatown built from other people’s imaginations,
a princess lived inside a riddle:
What is the East ?
And what remains of it after being dreamed again and again?

This question opens the gates to a world shaped not by geography, but by imagination—by a long tradition of cultures being framed, layered, and distorted through distant eyes. The stage design for Turandot emerges from this tension, asking how the East has been constructed, repeated, and mythologized across centuries.

To trace this vision, imagery from Chinatowns across the world forms the project’s asset library. These images are not treated as documentary references, but as already mediated and distorted reproductions; copies shaped by expectation, tourism, and repetition. Despite their geographic distance, Chinatowns share a remarkably uniform visual grammar: lantern strings crossing streets, red ornamental gates, frozen dragon motifs, neon promises of mystique, and architectural fragments reduced to recognizable symbols of the “Orient.”

This space is neither fully Chinese nor fully Western. It exists in-between, where identity is performed, adapted, and translated. Integration does not erase difference; it reshapes it, often turning culture into something that must be visible, legible, and marketable. Chinatown thus becomes a mirror of how Western societies consume the East: through food, festivals, spectacle, and atmosphere, while remaining distant from the complexities of lived experience. On stage, these already distorted images are further exaggerated, layered, and compressed; mirroring how cultural imagination continuously reshapes and misreads what it claims to see.

Turandot itself stands firmly within a long Western Orientalist lineage, portraying an East crafted by fantasy: alluring, dangerous, and timeless. Chinatown functions in a similar way. Its aesthetics are curated for recognition, repeated until representation hardens into ritual. Using Chinatown as a visual foundation therefore exposes how imagination can flatten culture into motif.

These ideas materialize in the stage’s defining feature: a vertical structure composed of multiple worlds stacked upon one another. Each level represents a different fiction of the East. The vertical movement is not merely spatial; it carries philosophical weight. As the stage ascends and descends, the audience is invited to move mentally through successive constructions of the East, each one resting upon the imagination below it. The stage breathes, expanding and contracting, mirroring how cultural imagination stretches, compresses, or elevates the East depending on the worldview projecting it.

And there, inside the layered tower of worlds imagined and reimagined,
the princess continues to live within her riddle; What world do you think you see?
And what world are you actually looking at?