İlker Erçman is a theater person who came to Bodrum from Istanbul six years ago. For twenty years, he has been giving drama lessons to children, teens and adults, and staging plays. My son Ege has been his student since he was four years old. For six years, he has attended drama lessons without interruption and taken part in plays. This is how theater and İlker have started to have their share in our lives in recent years.

According to İlker, drama education makes children more creative, enables them to have ideas, expand their vision, and prepare them for life as creative individuals. In this way, İlker says that children will be individuals who speak up and question.

Pedagogical foundations of creative drama education were provided by Prof. Dr. İnci San and the theater artist Tamer Levent in 1982. In 2000, Turkish Ministry of National Education offered drama courses as an elective course from 4th grade to 8th grade’s curricula. Drama entered also elementary school curricula as an elective course in 2007. Currently, there is no such elective in the curricula of public schools.

I tried to explain this process that I witnessed in İlker's story. I wanted to make İlker’s passion and excitement, who kept his relationship with drama, children, and theater alive for years, visible through photographs.