The following questions lead us to believe it is important for audiences to experience The Forgotten Kingdom and its thoughtful, multifaceted residencies.
Cultural/Historical Subtext
•Ottoman citizenship encompassed Muslim, Christian and Jewish ethnic groups, with little intergroup violence for hundreds of years — until the fragmentation into ethnic nation-states. Without glorifying the Ottoman Empire, the performance asks: what are the implications of a society premised on difference – not as threat but as norm and even strength? What identities must be erased, and invented, for such a society to fragment into nation-states rooted in one language, religion and ethnicity? What are the human costs? And what emerges by juxtaposing Ottoman multi-ethnicity with current experiments of multiethnic democracy, and threats to that democracy?
•Many struggles and dilemmas depicted persist, with personal poignance. For example, Ukrainian sand artist Kseniya Simonova and her family continue to live out the turmoil of the Russian war in Ukraine launched in February 2022.
Personal Connections
•Were we to curate a memory book for a child so that they may feel how it is to live in our place and time, and so they might understand the choices we make — or fail to make — what would we include?
•How might we recall our seemingly mundane day-to-day before a major disruption? What seemingly ordinary moments might stand out as vital? What aspects that once seemed so important suddenly are all but lost in the wash?
•What is it like to re-meet one's heroes as fallible human beings making critical mistakes? One might consider intimate familial scopes as well as larger socio-political dimensions
Field Innovation
•To our knowledge, this is the first and only performance of Ottoman Jewish music/history to feature evening-length theatrically projected sand animation.
•Ottoman Jewish communities and their multifaceted identities are under-represented on performing arts stages. Where included they have historically tended towards Orientalist/romanticized depictions that this project contradicts.
The Forgotten Kingdom stems from GME’s 4C framework:
1. Through efficacy in Craft, we move people.
2. By moving people we inspire personal Connection with what previously seemed unrelated or irrelevant.
3. Connection drives Curiosity, opening opportunities for learning.
Curiosity, especially directed by deft facilitation, expands willingness to explore, listen generously, and develop understanding of experiences, relationships and perspectives different from one’s own.
Why This Matters
•Sustained, deepened inquiry strengthens awareness of our own and of others’ often-tacit assumptions about how we relate to the world and to one another.
•Once we have heard someone’s story and understand more about how they have arrived at their beliefs and viewpoints, it becomes more difficult to dismiss/dehumanize them, even when we sharply disagree.
4. Over time, this increases informed agency in Choices we make.
The process is dynamic and multi-directional.
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Why We Tell These Stories
The distance of time and place can often dull our sense of history. It is easy for events that once shook lives to become abstract intellectualization. For example, we recognize the moral implications of terms like “fascism” from our own historical hindsight but forget that for those caught in the times, the end was far from certain, the day-to-day more complex and ambiguous.
How could it be that people who felt themselves to be moral and just embraced fascism in the pursuit of a better tomorrow — including Jews in Ottoman Salónica? What light does this cast on some of our own struggles today?
In hindsight, we tend to reduce complex ambiguity to simplistic “good” and “bad,” not knowing what such struggles can feel like, what they can do to families, to individuals.
Viewed from our lens, we take for granted aspects of history, ways of conceiving identity, seeing them as inevitable and pre-ordained.
We forget that there was a time in which the way our world is now organized was anything but obvious or likely, that individual choice played a role in trajectories’ unfolding, and that there were alternative visions that, at the time, felt possible, though they did not play out. This way of seeing in hindsight can remove us from a personal historical identification that could enrich our understanding of dilemmas we face today.
Stories combined with the direct emotional language of music and stirring imagery offer a window into the visceral experience of history that we may otherwise only understand abstractly. This intimate connection fosters greater identification across differences. It cultivates empathy as well as new perspective from which we can both question and interpret some of what we experience in our own moment.
