EXILES FIND A ‘HOME WITHIN’
Audio-visual performance mourns Syria
HOME WITHIN: THE SYRIAN EXPERIENCE What: Audio-visual performance by clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, artist Kevork Mourad When: Thursday, 10 p.m. Where: La Nouvelle Scène, 333 King Edward Ave. Tickets: chamberfest.com Clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh says he never wanted to become an expatriate.
After he moved to New York to further his musical studies and career in 2000, Azmeh thought he would shuttle back and forth between Syria, his homeland, and the U.S. “I still consider home to be both places,” says Azmeh, a 41-year-old native of Damascus, Syria’s capital.
But since the Syrian civil uprising of March 2011 and subsequent civil war, Azmeh has not been able to return to Damascus.
The sense of dislocation, plus profound sympathy for the plight of his people, prompted him to join forces with Syrian-Armenian visual artist Kevork Mourad, a fellow resident of Brooklyn, to create Home Within: The Syrian Experience. The duo brings this innovative, haunting and powerful performance to Chamberfest’s late-night Chamberfringe series Thursday.
However, before Azmeh began composing his contribution to Home Within, he experienced a bout of creative paralysis.
As long as Azmeh was playing his instrument, he had always been a composer and improviser, even as a child. “I say composing, but it was just six notes back to back, that kind of thing,” he recalls. “But I always liked to experiment with creating something new that was not there before. That kind of thought always occupied my brain.”
But the unrest in Syria caused him to question himself and his activities. “You see the terrible news coming from home, and you question, ‘What do I do? How relevant is what I do?’ ” he says. “I felt everything I’m doing is totally inadequate. “But then, eventually, it struck me that the whole uprising in Syria happened because people wanted to express an opinion, speak openly about things. I do have a tool that I can use and express myself with, so nobody should take away that tool from me. So I decided to write again.”
During the middle of the night, he got up and wrote a small tune — “it’s like a small prayer, if you want, three minutes long,” he says — that became the cornerstone for Home Within. He sent a recording of the piece to Mourad, and they were eventually determined that a larger, collaborative work would blossom from it.
Home Within, which premièred in 2013 in Montreal and has been performed in the U.S., Europe and Middle East, is a multi-layered evocation of the crisis in Syria that combines Azmeh and Mourad playing and painting respectively in real-time — Mourad’s work is projected on a screen behind Azmeh — along with pre-recorded audio and visual material that the artists have previously created. There are elements of compositions and improvisation at play, and the entire work is a jolt to the imaginations and consciences of listeners.
“We try to travel back and forth between these layers of interaction. … We try to make something seamless,” Azmeh says. “It’s very basic at the heart of it. There’s a musician playing and a painter playing. It’s really that.”
The project has evolved since its debut, Azmeh says. He points out that a dedication at the end of the performance notes the number of casualties due to the turmoil in Syria. “Every month or two months, we have to update that ... like adding zeros almost every time, that’s the thing that stuck in my head the most about what has changed,” Azmeh says.
That death toll is now nearing half a million people.
Azmeh says that for him and Mourad, the project has become “kind of a refuge ... in terms of speaking loudly about things, trying to make something poetic out of a very dark situation.
“You realize that you actually owe it to yourself, and to humanity in general, to remind yourself that this is going on, and all of us have some kind of duty to fulfil in terms of addressing the catastrophe of another human being. It’s very simple.”
Performances of Home Within are tied to raising funds and awareness regarding Syrian refugees.
“If Syria’s no longer in the news now, it doesn’t mean that bad things are not going on,” Azmeh says. “It continues to unfold in front of our own eyes and we hope this project will trigger questions in people, and trigger people into action.”
Earlier this year, Azmeh, while on tour in Europe, temporarily found himself stranded away from not just his home in Damascus, but from the United States as well. Between Azmeh’s duo concert with Yo-Yo Ma at Hamburg’s monumental concert hall and a concert in Beirut where he was to play Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, U.S. President Donald Trump signed his first executive order barring selected people from various countries, and Azmeh was affected.
“I’m a Syrian citizen with a Green Card. I guess I cannot go home,” Azmeh remembers.
Now, he minimizes what happened to him. “I put things into perspective, really, me not being able to go back home to New York, while I was in a hotel in Beirut, is nothing to compared to what people lost in the last six years. I cannot even complain about that.”
It’s very basic at the heart of it. There’s a musician playing and a painter playing. It’s really that.