Meral Polat & Chris Doyle

📅 1 March 2026
🕗 21:00
📍 Podium Grounds, Rotterdam

Meral Polat is a renowned actress, singer-songwriter, and theatre maker in the Netherlands. She graduated from the Amsterdam University of the Arts, specializing in drama and contemporary music theatre, and has built a multidisciplinary career spanning theatre, film, and music.

In this intimate duo setting, Meral Polat is joined by guitarist and pianist Chris Doyle. Together they present a stripped-down yet powerful musical dialogue in which voice, poetry, guitar, and piano meet.

Meral Polat’s music draws deeply from Anatolian and Kurdish musical traditions, reimagined through a contemporary lens. Inspired by the poetic legacy of her father, the Kurdish poet Ali İhsan Polat, her songs channel raw emotion, collective memory, and urgent social reflection. In the duo format, these stories come closer to the listener — more fragile, more direct, and deeply human.

Chris Doyle’s sensitive and versatile playing provides both harmonic space and rhythmic grounding, moving effortlessly between folk, blues, and jazz-inflected textures. His accompaniment allows Meral’s voice and texts to unfold with clarity and intensity, creating a performance that is both musically rich and theatrically charged.

This concert offers a rare opportunity to experience Meral Polat’s work in its most distilled form — an evening of song and storytelling that explores themes of identity, memory, belonging, and resilience, and invites the audience to encounter musical heritage not as something fixed, but as a living, evolving source of expression and strength.

More information: www.meralpolat.nl