Saygı means respect.

SAYGI1 — Babala TV and Sinerji Medya’s honours format, staged live and filmed for YouTube — pays respect while the artist is alive to receive it: peers take over the catalogue for a night, and the artist watches his own songbook come back at him from the room. The format opened with Ceza.

For three hours, one arena heard one man’s songs in other voices. The lineup ran four generations deep: Cartel, Killa Hakan, Ayben, Şehinşah, Gazapizm, Anıl Piyancı, Yener Çevik, Server Uraz, Ozbi, Contra, Sefo, Çakal, Baneva and Lil Zey — from the pioneers to the newest name on the bill — with Gripin and Candan Erçetin crossing in from beyond the genre. Ceza watched from the room, and walked up last.

Working as BİŞEYLER, OKYU’s founding team led creative direction and production design. The brief was a hard one: one stage, sixteen acts, four generations of Turkish rap, and six thousand people who had come for the man at the front of it. The stage architecture, multimedia, choreography — a twenty-person dance ensemble — and show flow were conceived as one composition, so the microphone could change hands all night without the room losing tension. Nothing was re-set between acts; the stage carried every voice as movements of the same piece. The result read as a single work, not a lineup.

The night sold out Ora Arena, and its YouTube release has passed fifteen million views. OKYU’s founding team went on to stage SAYGI1’s Sertab Erener and Mor ve Ötesi nights — both built on the shape set here.