Azad Storytelling
Azad Storytelling Performance is a live storytelling performance. A woman’s magical, multi-generational healing journey through rupture and survival—woven through Karagöz shadow puppetry, Hakawati storytelling, and indigenous Middle-Eastern music.
Azad ( “Free” in Armenian, Farsi, Kurdish) is a kaleidoscopic story within a story within a story, centered on a storyteller’s discovery of her great-great grandfather’s 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 Tatoyan 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: the frame story of 1001 Nights is a story of how trauma transpires and how it is healed.
Azad Storytelling has been performed at the University of Michigan, Clark Univeristy and the Pergamon Musuem in Berlin among others.
For Booking inquiries contact us.
