Storytelling Alchemy with Sona Tatoyan

Sona Tatoyan: I founded the organization. And then I got obsessed about these puppets. And I found my way to Aleppo in 2019, still very much at war, in the Syrian War. And I discovered this trunk in the attic of our home in Aleppo filled with 180 shadow puppets, a whole cosmos of puppets. Animals, homes, people. Then I fell down the stairs a week later. In the building there was no electricity—it was an active war zone. And I broke my foot.

Yura Sapi: You are listening to Building Our Own Tables, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. I'm your host, Yura Sapi, founder of multiple organizations, including LiberArte, a nonprofit nurturing artists for liberated futures; Protectores de la Tierra, a farm and food sovereignty initiative based out of Colombia; Balistikal, an LGBTQ+ healing and art space for communities in Latin America. And through all my programs, workshops, coaching, and this podcast, I've helped countless founders and leaders unleash their brilliance and build thriving movements. In this podcast, we share visionary solutions, stories, and snapshots to support you as a leader on your own journey of creation and transformation.

This fifth season is especially meaningful. I'm recording while eight months pregnant, and this experience of bringing new life into the world has brought a deeper opportunity for lessons in leadership, in legacy, and in creation—all of which I'm sharing in this season alongside the powerful voices you'll hear from. You'll hear from extraordinary founders building their own tables for their communities, their lineages, and for the planet in this evolutionary time. You are here for a reason, and I'm honored to be on this journey with you. So stay tuned and enjoy.

Welcome to the Building Our Own Tables podcast. Pulling up a seat to liberation. Today we have Sona Tatoyan. Welcome, Sona. Thank you for being here.

Sona: Thank you so much for having me here.

Yura: Yeah, so you are a first-generation Syrian Armenian American actor, writer, producer. You spent your childhood summers in Aleppo, where you learned about the Armenian genocide, and throughout the years eventually became to be the founder of Hakawati. As a storyteller, you're so passionate about art as alchemy. And that translates to this organization, this social justice vehicle as you call it, where we're really exploring the intersections of storytelling and the way that we can work with communities on the front lines to transform this history of trauma and, really, through creativity and storytelling, making the world a better place.

You also have a new play, a new production, AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf). It's a shadow puppets production that has also a lot of connection to your own family lineage because the shadow puppets were made by your great-great-grandfather, that you found and discovered in an attic trunk in Aleppo. And then also there's this kind of social, political side of the whole performance and production where you're sharing the story of your family, surviving the Armenian genocide, all of this complexity, a lot of courage and honesty.

I also would love to share with listeners that we know each other because we're both part of this year's cohort for the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University. So it's just such an honor, so exciting to be with you today, to share more about your story, to share the wisdom that you have for us today. So, thank you.

Sona: Thank you.

Yura: And I'd love to start off. Llet's get into it. What inspired you to start building your own table, to build Hakawati?

Sona: I love this title of this podcast, Building Your Own Table. So fantastic. I grew up, like you said, I'm a first-generation Syrian, I'm Armenian American, so I'm the first member of my family born in the US because my parents are both immigrants from Syria. So I spent my summers in Aleppo with my maternal grandparents and extended family while growing up in rural Indiana where there were no Armenians, no Syrians, nothing. So this wildly schizophrenic kind of dichotomy that I was straddling. And I, as a kid growing up in the late eighties, early nineties, we'd go to Aleppo, and that's where I heard stories about the Armenian genocide, because I'd ask questions of why do Armenians say that they're from these kind of mythical sounding places like Urfa and Antep and Kharpert? Which are the names of ancestral villages. That's what Armenians would say when you asked them where they're from. But we’re in Aleppo and we’re among Arabs, what is going on here?

And so that's where I remember some of my first memories around the age of seven of hearing about the Armenian Genocide. And then coming back to the States at the end of those three months that we would spend there, getting my history book on the first day of school, I went to public school in rural Indiana, and I'm just immediately turning to the World War I section, where the Armenian Genocide happened in 1915 during the First World War. And there would be no mention of the Armenian Genocide, no Armenian word in the section. So I thought, “oh, something must be wrong.” I'd go to the index, maybe I'm just not seeing it. And again, no mention of the word Armenian or Armenia or any of this. I'll just never forget that moment where I thought, “Oh, the book is not true, the official story is not true,” because I knew experientially from those summers and from those visceral downloads there in Aleppo with my family, what was true. And so who holds the power holds the story, and then who holds the story continues to hold the power. And it's this cycle.

And that was the beginning, I would say. The seed. And then I continued to grow up in the US finding theatre as a salvation, being this strange little Syrian Armenian girl in rural Indiana eating hummus and tabbouleh at a time when people did not know what that was—it was not sold at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods—and being made fun of it. I was straddling this world, and then the theatre became a place where I belong. Theatre is a place where all kinds of misfits come together. And that was where I found my salvation.

And that continued on until I went to college. And I had the great fortune of, I went to Wake Forest University, and I found mentorship through Dr. Maya Angelou, who was a lifetime professor there. I ended up taking two courses with her. One was a performance in poetry class, and then the other was a class called The Philosophy of Liberation and Literature. So talking about liberation here. And I happened to that semester also be performing in a play called Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill, a renowned British playwright. And the play was about the overthrowing of Ceaușescu's dictatorship in the late 1980s in Romania.

And she came to the play. And she issued a whole class, and she brought one of her friends. And in the middle of the play was this section where we were talking directly to the audience about the day we overthrew that dictatorship as an ensemble of eleven actors. And then all of a sudden the theatre turned into a Black church. The audience was like, “mhmm.” They were there with us, they were witnessing us, they were responding to us.

That was a major seeding of, “Oh, this is what I'm going to do with my life.” It was all of these experiences converging together where I thought, with the conception of Hakawati, it was about how do we create spaces where our stories can be told? Because if story is what's at the foundation of power in the world, how can we take back that? How can we democratize narrative, take back our own story? To both have that experience of telling, which is empowering, but also being witnessed, which is empowering. And so those were the seeds of what came together, the threads that wove, I would say, the tapestry of what became Hakawati.

Yura: Amazing. Yes. Thank you for sharing that. That absolutely makes sense. And I think it's a common experience for founders, for me as well. It's like there are moments throughout our life that feel connected beyond time. So really tapping into this “time is not linear” aspect when it comes to living our purpose, which is this calling that we've been brought to. It shows up in those moments throughout our life. So that makes a lot of sense that there's these strings of moments that are connected to this particular path.

Will you share more about the story of the word “Hakawati”? Where does that come from?

Sona: Yes, yes. My very first meditation retreat about nine years ago. And ten-day silent Vipassana retreat, and the word bubbled up in my consciousness, in all these ten days of silence, “Hakawati,” “Hakawati.” And I had this memory of hearing it as a kid in Aleppo that my great-great-grandfather, whose name was Abkar Knadjian, my maternal great-great-grandfather, was a Hakawati. I would hear this Abkar (dedeh*) Knadjian was a Hakawati. And so it just came up. It's an Arabic word. It means “storyteller.” So Aleppo is a very multicultural, multilingual place. It has always been for millennia, and it was a major outpost of the old Silk Road, a trading route. So, it's a place where cultures have always converged and intersected. And so we're ethnically Armenian, but we've grew up with Kurds and Arabs and the Turkish language floating around in our house.

So “Hakawati,” and I thought the word came and so did the download and the vision. This was 2016 when I was on this retreat, the height of the Syrian Civil War. And Aleppo had become, unfortunately, its epicenter. And my family had left again. My family had fled to Aleppo for refuge a hundred years prior during the genocide. That's how that major Armenian community built up in Aleppo. And here almost exactly a hundred years later, they had to flee. And so I was sitting with all this, and I was also hearing all these narratives about the Western media narrative, very binary narratives about what was happening in Syria at the time. And those conflicted with stories of my family. So some members of my family did stay in Aleppo. And so just all of the stuff again converged, and I was like, “Wow, a hundred years ago, we didn't get to tell our story.” And we pay the price of it.

There's Türkiye, the modern nation of Türkiye, which is not who committed the genocide, the Ottoman Turks committed the Armenian Genocide. But the progeny of those perpetrators formed the modern nation of Turkey, and that state continues to deny genocide. But here we are today, this thing happening in Aleppo, and we didn't have a chance a hundred years ago to tell our story, and I just couldn't sit back and be a witness to that happening again. So the question for me was like, how do we create spaces to amplify those voices of frontline and marginalized communities to give them the tools to tell their own stories, or to help nurture that so that this doesn't happen again? Kind of thing. And that's where it all came from.

How do we create spaces where our stories can be told? Because if story is what's at the foundation of power in the world, how can we take back that? How can we democratize narrative, take back our own story?

So Hakawati, and honoring my great-great-grandfather who was a storyteller, he was a shadow puppeteer in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the genocide. And he did this form of puppetry called Karagöz, which is a political form of theatre. It's satire and body humor to say what could be said at the time during the Ottoman Empire. And sometimes these puppeteers got away with it, sometimes they didn't. And they'd be arrested, actually. And so he was one of these puppeteers. And often they also made their own puppets, so he also made his puppets, made of leather, handmade, painted. And so he was a puppeteer in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the genocide, and then fled with his family, with his wife, his seven children, and he took his truck of puppets with him. And got to Aleppo, as refugees, and slowly rebuilt a life there, and started a theatre again in Aleppo, in the old city, continued to perform.

So that's what I had heard. The organization was founded on that. My great-great-grandfather did this thing and this form of puppetry that is also a form of cinema before cinema, actually. So it's a screen with shadow and light. It was like both theatre and pre-cinema. And it was really astonishing to have this epiphany around, that's what I do. I do the modern version of that as a film and theatre artist, wildly driven by human rights issues and social justice issues, and using these art forms to speak to those things. I founded the organization and then I got obsessed about these puppets.

And I found my way to Aleppo in 2019, still very much at war, the Syrian War. And I discovered this trunk in the attic of our home in Aleppo, filled with 180 shadow puppets, a whole cosmos of puppets. Animals, homes, people. Then I fell down the stairs a week later. In the building there was no electricity—it was an active war zone. And I broke my foot. And I got stuck there. And it was wild because in Armenia we have this saying, “vodk't g'dres, vor deg't n'sdis,” which I had heard a lot because I've been so nomadic in my life, and the saying is, "May you break your foot so you sit in your place."

So that's what happened. And I thought, “oh my God,” this is a destined thing. The storyteller in me, as you can imagine, was like, “This is too crazy. The saying is happening.” Then I realized that I had broken my foot in the house where I actually had taken my first steps, so I broke my foot in the house where I learned to walk. So I was like, had to learn how to walk while sitting with all this. And this became the genesis of my theatre piece that I just world premiered in San Francisco called AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf), which incorporates these puppets. So his puppets are in the show, and I've just been marveling at just inheritance, what we inherit, thinking that as a kid, I had chosen to do this. I was going against what my parents wanted from me, which as an immigrant was like, become a doctor, become a lawyer, very strong in the Armenian, Middle Eastern immigrant communities.

And so I was being disruptive by pushing against that and going into the arts and then to have this realization that actually my great-great-grandfather did this. And so these deeper questions of how much of this is volitional, and how much of this is something much larger.

Yura: And that's so powerful. And you've gotten reviews in the San Francisco Chronicle, and people are seeing the work that you're doing. The show is out, and it's gotten a lot of support. I'm curious to hear about your reflections over these past ten years. There's the physical challenge of breaking your leg, but do you have any thoughts on how you've been able to move through the challenges and then, now, getting to this place?

Sona: Yeah, good question. I think so much of this is deeply passion-driven, where it's like something beyond you is moving through you and directing. And it's like I've had to strengthen, and this may sound a little wild, my belief in magic. We are co-creating what's happening. I don't think it's a coincidence that the idea for Hakawati came to me on my very first silent retreat, my meditation retreat. There's a very clear connection between my spiritual practice and the work that I'm called to do in the world. And it's about listening. I think there's something about, it makes me emotional actually, opening up ourselves to listen. What's needed? What's beyond us that wants to use us? To move through us? To serve something larger than us?

And it's when I have done that, doors open. Doors open, and there's alignment, and then the right people show up in that alignment and the right things start. And it's not easy. It's not like, “Woo hoo, believe in the magic.” It's almost like a path of developing my own soul, really. It's like, how much can you surrender? Understand that this is really not about you. And then I found these puppets, and a reframe happened in my mind around my own inheritance. And this shift of, it's not just trauma and tragedy. That's part of my inheritance, but so is art and storytelling.

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Sona: That was a massive scramble in my head. It took that ego thing of, “No, I'm the one that decided to be an artist. I'm the one that decided to be a storyteller. I pushed upstream.” And it was like, “Wait, actually, hold on.” And if you're going to claim the trauma in your life and the tragedy of your inheritance, then actually you also have to claim the storytelling and the art of your… They come from the same place, your family, your culture. And that scramble, that paradox has done so much to open up a path for me. And then I was like, “All right, puppets, show me what you got.” I found these puppets, and right afterwards I was invited to give a talk at Harvard. That talk opened up things, and then that talk turned into a storytelling piece in the style of Hakawati oral storytelling. Then I began to do Hakawati self-produced. It was the first thing Hakawati officially raised money put out, was able to raise a little money and put out into the world.

And then that storytelling version got people excited to want to see it as a full play. And some introductions were made into the New York theatre world. And then that quickly went through a two-year development process where again, doors were just opening. It's the most I had personally gotten out of the way of the thing. And just really walking that line, I think. How much do you organize and plan and vision? How much do you listen and follow?

What's beyond us that wants to use us? To move through us? To serve something larger than us?

Yura: I know we have that connection, too. Being connected to energy and spirituality and this deeper way of living. It sounds like too, after you made that choice of saying, “There's actually good things that are coming out of this accident, breaking leg,” but also in terms of the inheritance example that you gave of, well, there's actually something else beyond just the violence that comes through. There's also the other aspects of what being from this culture, this community is about. And I find that really interesting too, because in our Global Lab program, for listeners, we had an assignment, Sona and I, to share what similarities could there be about our backgrounds. So for me, Ecuador and Colombia. Syria, Armenia.

And one thing that's coming right now with this inheritance conversation has also been a shift for me of really welcoming the inheritance of Earth wisdom. This Indigenous wisdom of being connected to the Earth and the farming practices, and just the abundance of rainfall and food that can be grown, and all of this aspect of the Andean region overall, being able to really accept that, and understand that, and welcome that into our spaces. Especially for those communities of us who've been marginalized, who've been told that we are less, that we are in poverty, that we are attacked. That shift just almost emotionally, mentally, and then energetically to say, “We actually aren't lacking. There is so much there.”

What are you dreaming into being right now? Tell us more about this future that you're building.

Sona: Yes. Hakawati is established in the US. It's a 501(c)(3). It's been a year, a little over a year that we are also established in Armenia as a nonprofit organization. And I have a producing partner there named Raffi. And right now, there's a lot of work to do with these puppets. In addition to taking AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf) out into the world. We premiered in San Francisco, and now having conversations with various theatres on the East Coast of the US for its next productions, as well as taking it across the pond to Europe and eventually to our part of the world. But the puppets themselves, like I said, there's 180 of these puppets that were refugees, twice over. They escaped the Armenian Genocide, and then they lived in this attic for about a century in Aleppo and survived the Syrian War.

So we're looking at doing an exhibition around these puppets, and currently it's called The Refugee, Illuminated. These puppets are objects of, they're shadow puppets, they're objects that light moves through when they're fully expressed. But this way of reframing the refugee and immigrant experience, and seeing them as refugees, as resilient, and innovative, and offering great value to the societies that they end up coming a part of and so forth. So a reframe around that. We are working on various story labs in Armenia for communities there, again, to uplift those voices, as well as in the Middle East in theatre and film, and helping develop those tools in the region.

I'm in the midst of visioning a book, crazy to say it out loud, that I'm beginning to think of writing around all this. And I'm sitting a six-week meditation retreat, my first one in September. Definitely being called more in that direction, deepening that. I just sat a week-long retreat with this extraordinary Buddhist monk who quoted, I don't know if you know this Nigerian artist, activist, Bayo Akomolafe, who talks a lot about how times are urgent, we need to slow down. So I've been thinking a lot about that in this age of AI and hyperstimulation, and all these things positively resonate with all this. And the slowing down that we listen, that we hear. I feel a deep calling towards that, which is really a rewiring of my whole system.

Yura: That's beautiful. Yeah, definitely with my pregnancy this year, I've definitely learned, especially in the first trimester, about the opportunity to slow down. And it was definitely also what you were talking about in terms of listening to the moment and to the acceptance, because it was also the exact time that I could slow down, because we didn't have anything planned to do for the organization. So it was like just letting those moments and those time be what they are instead of forcing and saying, “No, we have to be productive. We need to take advantage of these months that we don't have something. No, it is going to be a slower process.”

And also seeing how, because in those Vipassana retreats, it's not that there's not movement happening, it's just a different kind. It reminds me of the abundance scarcity perspective. We think that we're in scarcity of one thing, but actually it's just because there's an abundance of another thing.

Sona: That's right. I love that.

Yura: What advice would you offer someone just beginning to build their own table?

Sona: Really listening. I think this is true of all endeavors. Profit, not profit, whatever we're doing in the world. I think it's about discovering what our passions and skills are, and the ways that we can give into the world and what the world needs.

Yura: Beautiful. Yes. Tell us how we can find you, get more information?

Sona: Hakawati's website is hakawati.org, so that's H-A-K-A-W-A-T-I.org, O-R-G. And you'll see our current work projects, upcoming projects. And then my personal artist site is my name and last name, sonatatoyan.com. S-O-N-A-T-A-T-O-Y-A-N.com. Yes, Sona Tatoyan, first name, last name on Instagram. Hakawati as well has an Instagram. And @azadshadowplay is the social media for the show AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf). But yeah, contact forms on websites like old school, or at least old school for this moment. I'm not asking you to send me a snail mail written letter. But yeah, contact form on the website is a great way to get in touch.

Yura: Beautiful. And we'll put all this in the show notes. Thank you so much, Sona.

Sona: Thank you, Yura.

Yura: Hakawati. It was so great to chat and we'll be in touch.

Sona: Thank you so much.

Yura: This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and any HowlRound show wherever you find podcasts, including non-commercial, open-source apps, like Anytime Podcast Player for iPhone and AntennaPod for Android. If you loved this podcast, please share it with your friends. You can find a transcript for this episode along with lots of other progressive and disruptive content on howlround.com. Have an idea for a meaningful podcast, essay, or TV event the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and submit your ideas to this knowledge commons. Thanks for pulling up a seat to liberation with us at Building Our Own Tables. Catch you next time.