Meral Polat & Chris Doyle

📅 2 April 2026

🕗 20:00

📍 Lab Grounds, Rotterdam
’s-Gravendijkwal 58-B, 3014 EE Rotterdam, Netherlands

Meral Polat is a renowned actress, singer-songwriter, and theatre maker in the Netherlands. A graduate of the Amsterdam University of the Arts, she specializes in drama and contemporary music theatre and has developed 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 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 is an Amsterdam-based pianist, guitarist, composer, producer, and songwriter. His work moves fluidly between jazz, experimental music, theatre, and cross-cultural musical collaborations.

Doyle is the Artistic Director of the interdisciplinary arts collective Touki Delphine and performs as guitarist and keyboardist in the Meral Polat Band, where Anatolian rock and Kurdish blues traditions meet contemporary musical approaches. He is also involved in a wide range of Netherlands-based projects, including collaborations with Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly’s Mestizx, the indie-rock band Awkward i, the synth-pop project Sheila and the Kit, and composer Rik Elstgeest. In addition, Doyle composes music for theatre productions and works regularly in film scoring, often collaborating with film director Gonzalo Fernandez Carmona.

Originally from Mount Desert Island, Maine (USA), Doyle studied Piano Performance at Berklee College of Music in Boston and later completed a Master’s degree in Jazz Performance and Composition at McGill University in Montreal. Although he currently lives in the Netherlands, he continues to maintain close connections with the United States music scene, particularly in New York City.

In New York he performs with the experimental trio Tczeebo alongside David Palazola and Aaron Rourk, and collaborates with artists including the Grammy-nominated Afrobeat band Antibalas, Katherine Perkins, Danny Fisher-Lochhead Large Ensemble, Annika Zee, and Viktor Longo.

As a recording artist, Doyle released the solo piano album “Piano Songs 2” in 2019 in collaboration with composer Danny Fisher-Lochhead on Fishkill Records in Brooklyn. His second solo piano album, “For Afie,” was released in 2023 on Excelsior Recordings in Amsterdam.

Beyond music, Doyle is also part of the creative duo behind the psychedelic performance and video project SPACEBAR, created together with Michael Wideburg. In this project they write scripts, design sets, perform, film, compose, and produce the episodes themselves.

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

https://www.chrisdoylemusic.com

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. It 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