In 2018, shortly after returning from our first full group research trip in Turkey, the JIYAN team was invited to form a branch of Mosaic Interactive, an intercultural collaborative project taking place in Central Appalachia and involving musicians from the United States and a number of Muslim-majority countries, including Indonesia, Morocco, Palestine, and Turkey.
For Mosaic Interactive: Memories, we added Ali Tekbaș to the team. Ali is a singer and folklorist who was originally born in Iraq but migrated to Hakkari, in Eastern Turkey, with his family when he was a young child. He has devoted his life to collecting songs and stories from Kurdish communities, primarily in Eastern Turkey but also in Iraqi Kurdistan. Ali has a deep interest in women’s repertoire and traditions, inspired deeply by his mother, Fatma, who endured great hardship in her life but is a loving matriarch in her family. He works tirelessly to preserve oral heritage and culture within his community. Upon his joining the project, Ali traveled with Alexia to Hakkâri, where they collected a great deal of the photography and video footage that we incorporated into our performance with Mosaic: Memories.
During our monthlong tour in Appalachia in March 2019, we shared the stories of women’s lives and experiences with rural audiences in small communities in Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, culminating in Knoxville, Tennessee at the internationally-acclaimed interdisciplinary Big Ears Festival. Our performance of MEMORIES, created with theater director Ashley Tata, wove together Kurdish and Appalachian stories and songs, using a combination of live musical performance, multi-screen projections, and field recordings.
The Memories team (Alexia, Eva, Kyla and Ashley together with poet/dramaturg Mary Ellen Lough, new media artist, filmmaker and pianist Xuan, and visual artist/set designer Janet Pollock) presented a new iteration of the work at MATA festival in June 2023, building on the work from 2016-2018 with Jiyan and Mosaic, and incorporating our own lineages and legacies into the piece.
Below you can see a few still images from the Big Ears performance, listen to one of the audio tracks we created for the piece using an archival recording, and view the libretto we made for the initial presentation of the piece in 2019.
LINK: MEMORIES LIBRETTO
