The greatest show on Earth — for kids who need it most | Sahba Aminikia
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Today's talk is from our brand new batch of 2024 TED Fellows films adapted for podcasts just for our TED Talks daily listeners. TED's fellowship supports a network of global innovators, and we are so excited to share their work with you. Today, we'd like you to meet composer and artistic director Saba Aminqia. Saba Aminqia.

He explores the refuge that art can provide in times of difficulty and struggle. I mean, Kia and his team put on a mobile arts festival for kids in dance, performance, music, and more in some of the most divided and dangerous parts of the world. He shares how he is using art as a path to connection. And after we hear from him, stick around for his conversation with TED Fellows program director Lily James Olds.

Back in 2018, I was visiting the city of Nasaibin, which is close to the border of Syria, almost on the border. And this city has been the center of a lot of conflicts between the Turkish government and the Kurdish militia in North Syria. So we were visiting that area.

And suddenly, like 50 children, they gathered and they saw me and they wanted to talk English. So I asked them one by one to sing a song and I started recording. And at first they were very shy and just hesitating. And then there was a fight over who's going to sing. And this got to a moment that there were like literally tanks roaming around in the city. So I had to get in the car and because I'm an American citizen and that could create...

create a lot of issues. And while we were driving away, I remember like 100 children were running after the car and they were just saying, the one next to the window was shouting, one more song, one more song. So I realized that I'm blessed in the West with all these beautiful friends and connections and the work that I'm doing, but seems like this place needs me more, you know.

My name is Sahbo Aminikia, and I am an Iranian-American composer. I was born in the 80s in Iran, and this was the time that the Islamic Revolution just happened, and Iran was also engaged in an eight-year war with Iraq.

It was a dark period of Iranian history because my family are followers of the Bahá'í faith. Relatives and family and friends were constantly being harassed, arrested and imprisoned by the Iranian government and were subjected to show trials and even executions. I remember these weekly gatherings at a friend's house in North Tehran that we would all gather from people from all ages and Bahá'ís coming from all backgrounds. And this was a time that these people were going through real difficult times.

but they were very artistically active, playing music, singing, dancing, creating theatrical experiences. It was all about creating a vital refuge for the Baha'i community in Iran, because otherwise we wouldn't survive with all the dark experiences that were happening. I know the significant effect of exposing children and communities who are suffering to extreme beauty, to something that is truly, truly beautiful and magical.

Our Flying Carpet Festival is the first mobile festival for children living in difficult places and conflict zones. We mostly operate around the city of Mardin. We organize workshops, sometimes up to 20 a day. Dance, circus arts, live music, visual projection. We had face painting, for example, a two-hour storytelling experience, and also a

puppet performance. We go through the city with children and with the puppet and people start to follow us and we go back to the performing place and now we have 2,000 people as audience.

And we have established a system over six years that we can basically travel anywhere. We can go to small villages, we can go to gigantic cities. I love us to show up at places that there is less possibility, actually. So this includes a small community in the middle of some village in the middle of desert in Mesopotamia that has only 70 residents, you know. And so sometimes our own staff are more than the people living in that place.

but also we have performances in cities that 2,000, 2,500 people is normal for attendance. I want to go to the most risky places, in fact, because those are the children who are stuck with the decisions that adults made in that community.

Today we are living in this world that obviously politically is so divided. We were hoping that we can create something that people of different backgrounds without being looked at as a certain representative of a certain ethnicity or a certain race or a certain culture can come together, be looked at as one regardless of the color of their skin, their religion, their background and would serve as one full soul. The ultimate power is in unity.

And unity is what connects us all, and that's separate from what we think, what we think politics should be. I see human connection beyond that and above that. I strongly believe that arts and artists today can be the closest thing we have to spirituality, in fact, because every other way failed, has failed significantly. So I think arts can still be relevant and can be extremely...

useful for social progress, for political progress, because they envision and they show you a better version of ourselves. And either we accept it or not, it's up to us. So I like the kind of art that doesn't tell you what to do, actually. I love the kind of art that just presents the issue in front of you and lets you decide as a human which side you want to be on. There is no good or bad side. In fact, people just have different opinions. And I don't think there is any evil in this world.

There is no evil in this world. It's just people being misinformed or not informed about certain things. And I think there is a huge responsibility for people who know things and they can improve things to be educational. And education can only come through love and no other way. So by shouting and cursing at people, people wouldn't learn anything. You just have to be lovely to them.

And now a special conversation between TED Fellow Saba Amin-Kia and TED Fellow's Program Director, Lily James Olds. Hi, Saba. Welcome.

Hello. I'm so excited to talk to you about this today. I mean, first of all, I know that you just wrapped the most recent festival. So I want to hear how did it go? And can you share some of the highlights from this year? Absolutely. This year we worked on the story of the language of the birds by Fariduddin Attar, who is a 12th century Persian poet and mystic. And we turned this mystic poetry and story into a clown show.

We had around 40 artists and many volunteers and a full documentary team.

and visitors from the European Festival Academy who were case studying our festival. So it was a lot of work, maybe the largest production we ever created. Wow, that's incredible. I know that you said that your festival is the first for children living in conflict zones. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you and your collaborators developed this idea to begin with?

So I always collaborate and work with organizations that already exist in the region. And in this case, in the case of Flying Carpet Festival, we are working with an organization called Sirkhan Social Circus School, which is a circus school located near the Turkish-Syrian border in Mardin. In 2018, when I visited this organization, I was very much interested in them. I heard about them when I was in San Francisco.

I was just so interested and I was so excited that it was more of a calling than less of a job. I had an academic job in San Francisco and I quit that job and moved to Mardin for five or six months to just initiate this project.

festival in a region like this due to the cultural sensitivities and political sensitivities, you have to partner with local organizations who have a broader perspective of the culture and the region and the needs in the community, in fact.

So this development started with witnessing, first of all, the impact of conflict on children. When I was there and I was talking to children, you realize how these conflicts and trauma and violence has affected them. So by observing these needs and recognizing the gaps that exist in the humanitarian sector in this part of the world,

I realized that this is a perfect platform, both for creating something for the children that have no access or little access to cultural activities and also connecting the world that I was coming from and the artistic world

to this part of the world. So I was the person who basically initiated this global aspect of the festival, bringing people from two worlds and bridging basically these two worlds to each other. And we named it Flying Carpet because we wanted to emphasize the magic and the imagination and the freedom that children in these regions normally don't have. They cannot travel, they are not

really identified as a person. They don't have identity cards and they are considered guests in Turkey until they can go back to Syria. So from the very beginning, the project was inspired by the children and it is for the children.

That's amazing. I mean, and it makes so much sense that those partnerships would be really vital. You know, it's such a Herculean feat what you and your team pull off. I'd love to hear just a little bit more about how you make those logistics happen because it seems like that's part of

First of all, it starts with fundraising.

Because normally these type of projects are funded by gigantic humanitarian organizations. So you have to persuade the donors and you have to create it. It was really like creating a new culture. I have to meet with different people and explain to them what we are trying to accomplish here.

And then every year I come to Turkey and I spend three months basically with the people from the organization. We start the diplomatic process with the government and with different municipalities. Since we are performing in different cities, we have to meet with different organizations.

parts of the sectors of the government in every city. That takes about three, four months just negotiating, taking gifts to officials and trying to establish a friendly relationship with them. And then we start mapping the locations, going to every city that we want to perform that because we usually perform on the street in open air. So we have to find the locations that are convertible to what we try to create in every location.

And then after creating these local partnerships and engaging the politicians and municipalities to help us and support us throughout the process, then we assemble a team. By now we have...

about 12 to 15 people that are coming to the festival every year consistently. And these people are from very different nationalities, but they are kind of committed entirely to the festival. And so we need to choose a story. We need to translate it to Turkish and make it more vernacular. And we have to adapt this story to cultural sensitivities that exist in the region because it's a region that multiple ethnicities exist and it has...

many stories behind it. And the mobile staging design that is usually done by a couple of artists that are working with us from Iran, from the Middle East, and

and then implementation of that with local forces and companies, production companies that exist here. So this is like the logistic part of it, and it's incredibly actually difficult. And every year it's different. We have to come up with a strong team that they have the morals and they have the resilience that they can be in this part of the world. I really try to implement spirituality into our work

team, this kind of spirituality that does not discriminate against any ethnicity or group or racial group who are coming to the festival. And we are trying to create something very idealistic and keep ourselves energetic and idealistic and go through the entire festival. That's

amazing, Saba. And I feel like it's like bringing the Super Bowl there, you know, the level of detail that you just went, I'm exhausted. Like, you'd have to have that spiritual energy because that's just, I mean, the amount of different languages, I just mean that in like a social emotional way that you need to be fluent in is incredible. So thank you for talking through that in such detail. I'm curious, Saba,

When you leave these places, what is that like? What happens when everybody leaves? How do you try and build relationships with the community since you're coming back year after year with the children? What is that like when you're leaving after the Super Bowl is there?

Absolutely. So that's when this organization that I'm constantly mentioning, Sirkane, comes in because they have all your activities here. And they already provide a safe space for children that they consider home. They can be free, liberated, and they can do anything they want. They can practice music, circus, dance.

We have workshops all around the year. And the marriage of this organization that has all-year activities for children and our festival is the perfect marriage, in fact. This creates this moment of joy, as they call it, the best time of the year in the festival. And all year, many children are working towards

the festival and towards performing at the festival. So the children are so excited and they feel that there is a group of people coming from all around the world paying direct attention to them. You don't know how many times they mentioned this to me, that they would be in the center of attention. And that's what every child in this region needs. So when the festival finishes, the number of children in our centers increases.

Organically grows. So I was asking, for example, the Syrian youth that we worked with on a consistent basis, that what do you imagine for the next festival? How do you see it? Would you like it to continue or do you want it to change or transform? And they were all saying, we want you to fundraise more and make it even larger and more beautiful and bring more people, you know.

So that part of it is what keeps me going, honestly. Yeah, that's so beautiful. And I mean, what you're doing is so nuanced, so complex, multifaceted, bespoke. But I am curious to hear if there's something of your model that you think could be repeated by others elsewhere. How can we learn from all the work that you and your team do? Yeah.

From the very beginning, we decided to design every aspect of the festival. So everything that people experience from artists arriving at the festival first day and they are just in the center and they are just hanging out with each other, having community dinner together. And the next day, we usually have an orientation session that I try to spiritually uplift this group and tell them what they are here for. And

So everything is in many ways open source, in fact. I never wanted to take possession of this festival. I want to see more festivals like this and I don't want us to be the only festival doing this. So I always wanted this to be an open concept that anyone can work with and we are also open to

any collaboration with any organization. We can even basically initiate it for them, tell them how to do it, work with them through it, and then we would learn something, they would learn something, and we would go our way. And they can name their festival, anything they want, and they can continue doing that.

The whole message is to bring arts and beauty and magic to underprivileged communities. As someone who grew up in Iran in very difficult times in the 80s, through a war and through a revolution, I know that the effect of beauty is immense in these communities. And arts and beauty are as necessary as food and hygiene in this part of the world.

And this might sound radical to people hearing this, but in fact, as a child growing up in Iran, I still remember the first performance I saw with Tehran Symphony and how when I still think about it, I get goosebumps. Beautifully said. I'm just wondering if there's other resources that have been inspiring to you in your work that you'd recommend to people, whether that's a book or a podcast or something else?

When I started doing this, Lily, I had no experience running a festival. I'm a classical composer and there is no manual for doing something like this, but feeling the power of love inside of yourself and being really motivated and emotional about it.

And many impossible projects are accomplished through this kind of energy. But I can recommend a couple of books that I truly admire and it changed my life in many ways.

The Mysticism of Sound and Music by Hazrat Inayat Khan, which is an incredible book about music by this Sufi master from early 20th century. Man's Search for Meaning by Dr. Viktor Frankl. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. And anything by Rumi and his interaction with Sham Sabrizi. I highly recommend these books. But also I have to mention a movie called

which is called Baba Aziz, made by Tunisian-French director Nasser Khamir, which I watched first time that I was traveling to Turkey. And I felt that we are exactly replicating this model in our own festival. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for this conversation, Sapa. It's really been a pleasure. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me.

That was Saba Amin Kia, a 2024 TED Fellow. To learn more about the TED Fellows program and watch all of the TED Fellows films, go to fellows.ted.com.

And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Fazi-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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