Azad is a live storytelling performance of a woman’s magical, healing journey weaving traditional Hakawati storytelling and indigenous oud. A performance of Azad will be held in Los Angeles on January 4, 2024 from 7-9 p.m. at the TempleLA.
Embark on a mystical and transformative journey through the power of storytelling and music with Azad. Join an enchanting evening that will take you from the depths of the Armenian Genocide to the heart of the Syrian war, all while exploring the healing magic of traditional Hakawati storytelling and live indigenous Middle Eastern music. This unique performance will transport you through time and space, offering a glimpse into the art of storytelling as a means of trauma transformation and healing.
Azad (“free” in Armenian, Kurdish and Farsi) is a kaleidoscopic story within a story within a story, centered on a storyteller’s discovery of her great-great-grandfather’s Karagöz shadow puppets in Aleppo during the Syrian war.
A century after Abkar Knadjian salvaged his family and his art from the Armenian Genocide, his great-great-granddaughter Sona unearths a trunk in the attic of the family home, filled with his handmade puppets and ancient magic tricks. This journey leads Sona to discover 1001 Nights and ScherAzad (the bold, brilliant weaver of tales who counters destruction with creation) and catalyzes an epiphany for her: the frame story of 1001 Nights is a story of how trauma transpires and how it is healed.
The storytelling experience is followed by a talkback and an interactive healing circle, accompanied by light Middle Eastern snacks and teas.
The TempleLA is located on the second floor of a medical building at 215 South La Cienega Blvd. Beverly Hills, CA 90211. Two hours of free parking is available at 321 S La Cienega Blvd., a four-minute walk from the event. Paid parking is also available by the Urgent Med. The dress code is casual elegance. Tickets to the performance are available online.
As a first generation Syrian-Armenian-American theater and film artist, I straddle many realities and identities, often at odds with each other. In the Western imagination I find the associations to the Middle East to mostly be denigrating—a place of war, dictatorships, subjugated women and backwards thinking. Yet the cornerstone of Middle Eastern storytelling, the genesis of all modern storytelling, is a work of literature that has inspired countless creators around the world, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Guillermo del Toro to Angela Carter: A Thousand and One Nights. And Scherazad, the storyteller who bridges it all, is, like me, a Middle Eastern woman.
As a Middle Eastern woman and as an artist, I’ve been driven to explore how we sublimate trauma. I’ve come to understand that it is by facing it, feeling it. We become liberated when we open our hearts to pain. In the frame story of A Thousand and One Nights, night after night Scherazad does this: she faces death and uses storytelling to evade it, transforming the king’s pain and trauma in the process. She was neither subjugated, nor a victim, but a healer.
In 2019, when I read The Nights by candlelight in my ancestors’ home of Aleppo, in a city very much at war, I became enraptured by Scherazad, the very potent symbol of the power of storytelling. Surrounded by my great-great-grandfather’s puppets, his storytelling tools that illuminated his darkness, I realized how we frame anything is how we see it. And so I pondered reframing my own experiences as a Syrian-Armenian-American woman, artist and storyteller: What is legacy? What is magic? And when there is trauma, how do they co-exist? Something profound crystallized for me. Amidst this rubble, I realized my inheritance was trauma, yes, but also art—and specifically the play of shadow and light.
Like my great-great-grandfather, I was driven towards the tools of storytelling to help make sense of our complicated human experience. Light and shadow co-exist. What if we took the time to look at things from a different perspective, seemingly paradoxical yet holistic? What kind of healing would we have? What if all of us living in the places and spaces of war and tragedy, or the inheritors of those legacies, were able to reconcile our stories and invite our minds to imagine a future different from the past? More integrated and whole. Amidst war, we find hope, and we find home. In the rubble, we find treasure. And when we discover these things, we understand that trauma allows us to know healing.
I could never have known my great-great-grandfather Abkar, physically, but I met him through his art, spiritually. And so I understand now a new level of my inheritance, a reframe of my legacy. Azad is a quantum collaboration between my Abkar dede and me. A magical conversation across a painful space-time. An intergenerational rumination on what it truly means to be free.
Sona Tatoyan (storyteller): Tatoyan is a first-generation Syrian-Armenian-American actor/writer/producer with bases in Aleppo, Syria; Berlin, Germany; LA, California and Yerevan, Armenia. As an actress, stage credits include world premieres at Yale Repertory Theatre, The Goodman Theatre, The American Conservatory Theatre and others. She starred in The Journey, the first American independent film shot in Armenia (winner, Audience Award Milan Film Festival, 2002). As a writer, her first feature film script, The First Full Moon, was a 2011 Sundance/RAWI Screenwriters Lab participant and 2012 Dubai Film Connection/Festival Project. As a writer and performer, she is in development on the multimedia theatrical experience Azad (the rabbit and the wolf) with two-time Obie award winning director and multimedia designer Jared Mezzocchi. Azad (the rabbit and the wolf) was the recipient of a development workshop at the Vineyard Theater in NYC (2023), the inaugural University of Connecticut Global Affairs Digital Media Residency (2023) and Harvard University Artlab Residency (2023). Upcoming: Wake Forest University Character and Leadership Guest Artist Residency (2024). Tatoyan founded Hakawati, a non-profit storytelling vehicle focusing on elevating the voices of frontline and marginalized communities. Tatoyan served on the World Cinema Jury of the Duhok IFF in Iraqi Kurdistan (2016) and as Rudolf Arnheim Guest Artist Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, (2017). Speaking engagements include: “Storytelling as Spiritual Vehicle: A response to the Armenian Genocide and Syrian Refugee Crisis” at The Brandenburger Gate Foundation, Berlin; “Trauma, Magic, Love: Being in Aleppo with Karagöz Puppets, My Ancestors and the Spirit of Osman Kavala” at CMES Harvard University.
Dimitris Mahlis (oud performer): Greek oudist, guitarist and composer Dimitris “Jimmy” Mahlis has become known in musical circles as an eclectic interpreter of many musical traditions. Having a thorough knowledge of both eastern and western musical theory, he has developed a playing style on several instruments which is both earthy yet intricate. As a composer, his pieces have set a standard in cross cultural pollination. Some credits include: Perla Batalla, A.R. Rahman, Ramesh Misra, Airto Moreira, Freddie Hubbard, Hassan Hakmoun, Niyaz, Kevyn Lettau, Thanassis Papakonstantinou, Dionysios Savvopoulos and Mamak Khadem. Dimitris is featured in a number of recent films including Oscar winner “Argo,” “ The Angel” and “ The Power Of The Game.”
