Azad Storytelling

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.

This journey leads Sona to discover 1001 Nights and ScherAzad, catalyzing 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 Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College, and Clark University, among others.

Bring Azad Storytelling to your institution

Azad Storytelling is available for booking by universities, museums, cultural institutions, festivals, and conferences. The performance travels light, adapts to a range of spaces, and can be paired with a talkback, workshop, or curricular engagement.

For booking inquiries, contact info@hakawati.org.