«The Turks came from the depths of the Asian continent. (...) They were more often farmers than fishermen, more warriors than navigators. They consecrated and sang the olive and the fig, cultivating, like others, the vine, the pomegranate, and the almond on the slopes that enjoyed the Mediterranean Sea breeze.»
Predrag Matvejevic, Breviario Mediterraneo
Ziya Azazi is an extraordinary dancer and performer: those who have had the fortune to see him work know the liberating power of his imagination and his deep and sincere pedagogical belief. Azazi is primarily a contemporary interpreter of Sufi traditional dances: his decoding relies on an innate analytical search that is not only artistic and conceptual but also personal and conscious. The question of motion in realizing through dance simultaneous states of physical awareness has always been at the center of his work.
The challenge of Ember, on the other hand, with the appropriate and evocative sound environment created by Mike Ottis, is to explore the moment that we can consider as the beginning or the end of something; this temporal moment also corresponds, evidently, to a spatial dimension of the beginning and end of life: in the metaphor of the cycle by which we usually recognize the extremes of existence, Azazi investigates a stage initially marked by three concentric circles, where and when and how the truest impulse of vital space is generated. The overcoming of the limitations of the three circumferences corresponds exactly to the victory over the limits of gravity and perception. The self-destructive dimension must also be traversed in the force of fire, so that the pain of finitude converts into the joy of a necessary, inescapable renewal of the cycle of life.
Azazi's Dervish dance solos transform the classical Sufi dance into a form of performance that centers not on enlightenment but on the pure joy of participating in a true secular ritual, alien to any mental or physical boundaries typically imposed by all systems of faith.
Born in 1969 in Antakya, Turkey, Ziya Azazi received the honorable mention as “Most Excellent Dancer of the Year in Austria” from the magazine Ballet International thanks to a scholarship from the Summer Dance Week Vienna (Dance Web) in 1999, where he had moved. Between 2000 and 2002, he was engaged by the Vienna Volksoper and, in Germany, by Theaterhaus Stuttgart and the Grand Théâtre de Genève in Switzerland. In 2004, he collaborated with Jan Fabre/Troublyn, and between 2005 and 2007, he participated in the performance D’Orient by the Compagnie Thor.
