Abdulsamad Murad (SY/DE)

“I search in the songs for my lost home. On your eyes the grass grows and from your wounds the flowers and the tree veins grow. You are still there. The earth is always writing you anew with each season. And I run here looking for a little house by the river, searching for a word to describe you. Family, neighbours and friends, you good people – only the earth gives you justice. I miss you.”

Abdulsamad Murad was born and raised in Syria. In 2012, war forced him to abandon the studies he had just begun and leave his homeland. After a long flight, he reached Germany with his family in 2017 and decided to study puppet theatre at the State University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart. “Mir geht’s gut” (I am well) is Abdulsamad Murad’s final project.

Using only a mask and a rope as his stage companions, he tells of his moving life; a story that can perhaps only be brought to the stage by the means of mask and object theatre. He is accompanied by cellist Hannah Dorothée Schmidt and oud player Maher Alauwaj in a combination of European and Arabic musical traditions. An intensely played, wordless solo about escape, loneliness, borders and the love of life.