Musician, composer and sound artist AVI AMON is one of four lead artists selected to lead the SINDBAD LABS, running at Target Margin from May 31 – June 24. Avi’s lab, INSHALLAH/MASHALLAH, runs from June 7 – 10.

INSHALLAH/MASHALLAH is part musical installation, part performance. How did The One Thousand and One Nights inspire this approach?

I love that with The One Thousand and One Nights, you can zoom in and out of the story at will, paying attention to what you like and discarding the rest. All the embedded – and sometimes contradictory – layers lend themselves to further abstraction. And for me, that abstraction is through sound and music. Think of it as a painting that you ‘look at’ with your ears.
 
What was your relationship to the source text, or even just the story of Sindbad the Sailor? How has it changed since beginning work on the Lab?

I was exposed to the stories through wishy-washy American pop-culture references, Rimsky-Korsakov, and a really bad (like, really really bad) Turkish soap opera VERY loosely based on the source text that I would watch from time to time with my grandmother in Istanbul. But having time to sit with the text has been great, and even revelatory – lots of “wait, what?” moments while reading.
 
What comes first for you when incubating ideas as a sound artist? The sound itself, the visuals, the overarching idea, or something else?

Definitely the sound first – I feel paralyzed without a strong sense of sonic pallet. Which is why it takes me so long to get moving on a big project like this! Things finally crystalized with a melody that formed around Scheherazade’s invocation at the beginning of each night of storytelling: “I have heard, oh fortunate king…” After that moment I could start filling in the rest of the piece. 

You’re a super collaborative artist, often working in film, dance and theater. Has this process for the Lab differed from the usual order of business? How so?

It’s significantly scarier! When working with folks in other mediums, you can lean on your collaborators when ideas “aren’t flowing.” Strength in numbers. Or as this often the case, stubbornness in numbers, because it can be hard to pivot when ideas stem from multiple heads. For this piece, I am collaborating with an incredible team of creators and designers, but Target Margin has been challenging me to be the central guiding voice which means more flexibility, but also, more more vulnerability to actually make the thing. It’s a great exercise and and I’m truly thankful for that opportunity.
 
You’ve called INSHALLAH/MASHALLAH an “anti-harem piece,” an exploration of how to tell the Sindbad story with resorting to exoticism. What are you hoping to excavate, correct, reinvigorate, or change in your iteration?

Without diving too much into a conversation about cultural appropriation, I think the simplest way to talk about the idea is this: Yes, sometimes there are carpets and tea and smoke and fortunes and delicate fabrics, but it isn’t ALWAYS carpets and tea and smoke and fortunes and delicate fabrics. That incomplete representation has too much visibility and I’m bored with it, both as the child of Turkish immigrants and also as like, a person living in 2018 more generally. We’re talking about thousands of years of continuous life in these parts of the world. History, ideas, conquest, music, family, violence, politics, religions…It’s so much more than a lazy sexualized moment in a hazy room or a “terrorist” with beard.  There’s depth to explore and it’s up to us to do the work in understanding the complexities and specificities. 
 
What’s next for you?

I’ve got a residency at Berkeley REP to develop a new music-theater piece about the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews of Salonika, Greece. Really excited about that! And also a hiking adventure out west because there aren’t enough trees in NYC.

AVI AMON is a composer, pianist, and sound artist. His work has been developed or presented by: Actors Theatre of Louisville (2017 Humana Opera Commission), Spoleto Festival USA, The O’Neill Theater Center, Yale REP, Prospect Theater, BAM, Ars Nova, BRIC, La Mama, and in a 100-year-old grain Silo in Buffalo, NY. Residencies and Awards: Exploring the Metropolis at JCAL, Judson, Anna Sosenko Assist Trust, Target Margin Theater, New Dramatists, Weston Playhouse. Avi is the resident composer at the 52nd Street Project. He received his MFA from NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, where he currently teaches.