Mellan 2019 och 2026 presenterade kulturmagasinet Skyming en serie litterära och sceniska läsningar av verk av den hyllade dramatikern Deniz Dionysos Hellberg. Läsningarna genomfördes med stöd av Skyming, International PEN och det norska utrikesdepartementet.
Bland de verk som presenterades fanns Mongrel, Marja och The Alchemical City, framförda i İstanbul – den transkontinentala staden där Europa och Asien möts.
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Between 2016 and 2026, Skyming magazine presented a series of literary and interpretive readings of works by acclaimed playwright Deniz Dionysos Hellberg. The readings were supported by Skyming, International PEN, and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Among the works presented were Mongrel, Marja, and The Alchemical City, staged in İstanbul — the transcontinental city where Europe and Asia meet.
MONGREL
Mongrel is a tragicomedy of displacement, cultural exhaustion and a world losing its shape, moving between barroom satire, political grotesque and metaphysical fable. Istanbul becomes both a real metropolis and a borderland between competing realities, where Shakespeare, ancient gods, Christianity, bureaucracy, sex, art and private memory collide without hierarchy. At its centre is Steve—a Scandinavian artist, expatriate and self-declared mongrel—trying to understand what remains of a person when nation, ideology, profession, friendship and love no longer offer a stable ground.
Marja
A pale man with light-blue hair appears on a scorched highway outside a sweltering megacity of twenty million.
He has no coherent memory of his past. In his possession are a military pack, a sealed blue envelope, and the knowledge that he has forty-eight hours to find an architect before the world ends.
Around him, historical time begins to loosen. Ancient warriors enter modern streets. Ships from other ages appear among tankers. Gods, empires and private memories surface without distinction, as if the past has ceased to remain past.
Others are looking for Dag—and seem to know what he has forgotten.
Across forty-eight hours, the modern world and the ancient one begin to occupy the same ground.
The Alchemical City The Black Gate Trilogy
“At the harbor, it is winter through one eye, summer through the other.”
Set along the shifting waters of the Bosphorus, The Alchemical City is a three-cycle lyric work moving between Istanbul, Anatolia, Western Sweden, and a wider landscape of history and myth.
Concrete viaducts, ferries, gated villas, shopping districts and municipal offices coexist with Byzantine mosaics, ancient gods, biblical figures, animals, stars and fragments of forgotten law. Across this layered geography, Deniz Dionysos Hellberg moves between the personal and the impersonal, the historical and the contemporary, allowing mythic figures to walk beside street vendors while centuries repeatedly occupy the same ground.
With affinities to the metaphysical landscapes of Gunnar Ekelöf and the mythic modernism of T. S. Eliot, The Alchemical City constructs a poetic metropolis in which exile, memory, identity and history remain in continual motion—between continents, languages and worlds.
For inquiries regarding copyright, performance rights, licensing, or staging, please contact the Skymning or the Author.