An important event in the history of Armenia’s nightlife took place on March 9 when Yerevan hosted a Boiler Room party for the first time ever.

Boiler Room is a global online music broadcasting platform commissioning and streaming live music sessions around the world. Founded in London, England, UK in 2010, Boiler Room has now hosted shows in around 100 cities worldwide, from Stockholm to Shanghai.

The project was earlier held in Tbilisi and Baku, and when the party came to Yerevan, 4 DJs – Onetreeevn, Nancy Movs, Cast Coverts and Total – represented the country.

The inscription on the T-shirt worn by Onetreeevn -the DJ opening the event – grabbed the attention of the public: “Music has no enemies. Baku Yerevan are friends. The Earth is our home.”

The photo of the Armenian DJ spread across the Internet in Azerbaijan, causing an ambiguous reaction, with some approving the message, many condemning it and responding with aggression.

In a conversation with PanARMENIAN.Net Onetreeevn (Artur Loretsyan) said he was looking for an opportunity to convey this message.

“Everyone has their mission on this planet, of course, but there is a common mission, i.e. to educate generations correctly, promote love and stop aggression, especially one that geopolitics imposes on us,” Artur said.

“They have cashed in on us for centuries: we fight, and someone always takes advantage. Look at history, Armenia and Azerbaijan are not the first countries on this list. We have been divided for centuries for others to control us, and this, unfortunately, is part of our genetics.”

He revealed that he studied in Moscow in the 2000s, has a lot of Azerbaijani, Turkish friends, and has even lived with them for months.

Artur said he is going to educate his son properly so that he “learns to tell the difference between the truth and a lie.”

“I had the opportunity to send a message, and I took my chance. Everyone should follow suit. Boiler Room was the perfect platform for such a message. Peace for all of us,” concluded the musician.

One of Turkey’s most prominent museums stages an expansive show of the late cinematic great’s artwork.

Ayla Jean Yackley

The first-ever show in Turkey of artwork by the late Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov illustrates both the challenges and necessity of cultural exchange across closed borders.

More than 45,000 art lovers have visited the show since it opened in December at Istanbul’s Pera Museum, one of Turkey’s most important cultural institutions. It brought 76 works of art – including collages, storyboards, costumes, drawings and photographs – from the Sergei Parajanov Museum in Yerevan, making it the largest overseas exhibition of the museum’s collection. 

It pulled this off despite the lack of formal diplomatic ties between Turkey and Armenia, bitterly divided for a quarter century since Ankara closed its frontier in 1993 to protest Armenia’s occupation of Nagorno Karabakh and show support for its close ally Azerbaijan. An older wound also bedevils the relationship: The forced displacement of Armenians living in Ottoman Turkish lands during World War I wiped out a millennia-old culture, and Armenians, as well as most historians, say the massacres were genocide. Turkey denies they were systematically orchestrated.

Yet interactions between artists, businesspeople and civil society groups continue. Now, the Pera introduces Turkey to Parajanov, a master of 20th century cinema who was also a prolific plastic artist. The show runs through March 17 to coincide with what would have been Parajanov’s 95th birthday in January.

“Art is the shortest way to reach somebody’s heart,” said Zaven Sargsyan, director of the Sergei Parajanov Museum, who curated the show at the Pera. “This is a chance for Turkish people to get to know Armenians. It is unfortunate that they don’t hear the names of Armenians here. But we are making the connection with this show.”

Called “Parajanov With Sarkis,” the show is actually a duo exhibition with one of Turkish contemporary art’s most important and original voices. At age 80, Sarkis, who is of Armenian descent, continues to create art in his Paris studio that explores themes of remembrance, displacement and identity, and he credits Parajanov as a seminal influence.

Sarkis’ work occupies the top floor of the Pera and is pure homage to Parajanov. The director’s signature in the Armenian script is rendered in neon lights, his photograph is embellished with water color and stained glass, and a sculpture of wood, fabric and VHS film is called “Portrait of Parajanov.”

“My installations have always been in conversation with other artists, philosophers, musicians and filmmakers, but Parajanov holds a separate place for me,” Sarkis said in an interview, estimating he has watched Parajanov’s films more than 100 times. “In his work, and in mine, there is a confluence of cultures. For example, he uses Azeri, Georgian, Armenian and Turkish languages in his films. This blend of identities informs my work as well.”

Born in Tbilisi in 1924, Parajanov was fascinated by the swirl of cultures of Transcaucasia. The Georgian capital was still home to a large Armenian community while Parajanov studied music and dance at the Tbilisi Conservatory before enrolling at VGIK, the Moscow film school.

His early films were state-backed genre movies, but seeing Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Ivan’s Childhood” in 1962 triggered Parajanov to disavow his earlier work and pursue his own vision. Subsequent films contain highly stylized acting and painterly mise-en-scenes that maximize the color saturation of Soviet-era film stock, making everything appear lurid and fantastical.

While his distinctive poetic ideals earned him accolades from maestros like Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard, back home it raised suspicions about his political leanings as he defied the state-sanctioned art of socialist realism.

Parajanov’s elaborate costume designs stand alone as works of art, and some are on display at the Pera, including a kaftan made of patchwork squares from Oriental rugs that appeared in 1988’s “Ashik Kerib,” based on an Azeri fairy tale. It was the last film Parajanov completed.

Sarkis hangs his own robe, adorned with children’s garments and trimmed with fairy lights, directly one floor above Parajanov’s kaftan. It dangles over a room blanketed with Caucasian kilim rugs and punctuated with vintage television sets playing scenes from Parajanov’s surrealist masterpiece, “The Color of Pomegranates.”

The 1968 biopic of the great 18th century Armenian poet Sayet Nova is a lyrical, avant-garde meditation on color and composition. But the Soviet censors saw the religious and ethno-nationalist iconography of “The Color of Pomegranates” as evidence of Parajanov’s subversive streak and sent him to a gulag for four years following his arrest on trumped-up sex-crime charges in 1973.

Art that Parajanov made in his prison cell – with ball-point pens, nail polish, magazine clippings and metal scraps – is on display at the Pera. After leaving prison, he was banned from making movies and dedicated himself to other artistic pursuits, including the transformation of everyday objects like a leather suitcase into an elephant’s head and kitchen chairs into mosaic-clad baroque objects, also in the show. “When he wasn’t allowed to make films, he had to find new ways to express himself,” Sargsyan said in an interview.

Another stint in prison in 1982 ruined Parajanov’s health, and he died eight years later at the age of 66. He had only recently returned to filmmaking amid the thaw of glasnost, and a year before his death, Parajanov visited Turkey to receive a jury prize from the Istanbul Film Festival for “Ashik Kerib.”

After the Istanbul screening, he reportedly faced intimidation for comments he made about Karabakh. The exhibition includes four works Parajanov created while in Istanbul.

Both Parajanov’s artwork and his films skirt the line between truth and the unreal; for the filmmaker, that line was always blurred. In a 1988 interview ahead of “Ashik Kerib’s” premiere, Parajanov said: “I ask, ‘Did I make it up or is it the truth?’ Everyone says, ‘It’s made up.’ No, it’s simply the truth as I perceive it.”  

Ayla Jean Yackley is a journalist based in Istanbul.

Armenians have been happily discussing this year’s Brazilian carnival, within the framework of which Armenian flag has been waived for about 65 minutes and the Armenian culture has been presented. It all began when the director of the Brazilian Rosas de Ouro group and the students of the school attended the birthday party of an Armenian. They were so much inspired by the joyful and cheerful celebration that they decided to study the Armenian history more closely and to reflect it in the framework of the 2019 Carnival.

“In the past, I was thinking that life was full of surprises, there was nothing casual in life. My life, as well as my decision to become a singer, has gone through good and difficult ways. I recalled all this and once again thanked God. When I received an invitation from the carnival organizers and my participation was officially confirmed, I was more inspired by the fact that I had the opportunity to travel by the car dedicated to Charles Aznour and Aram Khachatryan, and in almost all of my interviews I mentioned that my dream was to get acquainted with Aznavour, I did not have the opportunity to accomplish …I remembered all this and thanked God once more. When I received an invitation from the carnival organizers and my participation was officially confirmed, I was more inspired by the fact that I had the opportunity to travel through a car dedicated to Charles Aznour and Aram Khachatryan, and in almost all of my interviews I mentioned that my dream was to get acquainted with Aznavour, I did not have the opportunity to accomplish … It was exciting to see Armenian flag in Brazil. I was happy to be the witness and the part of that day,” Sibil noted.

Uruguayan singer and actress Natalia Oreiro has sent a video message to the Armenian audience ahead of her concert in Yerevan that will take place on April 7 at Karen Demirchyan Sport Complex.

“Hello Yerevan. How are you? I am Natalia Oreiro. I wanted to invite you to celebrate together the Motherhood and beauty day on April 7. You will see an unforgettable show. I am looking forward to seeing you and sending a kiss to you. Let everything be good for you” Oreiro said in a Facebook video, published by the organizers of the concert.

As the organizers report, Oreiro will perform a two-hour long concert in Yerevan with her own team and the dance company.

To note, Oreiro is known to the Armenia public mostly from “Angry Doll” Argentine telenovela and for her song “Cаmbiо dolor” – a popular hit around the world.

On Sunday, March 17, 2019, the Educational Committee of the Armenian Apostolic Church of Crescenta Valley in cooperation with ARF “Zavarian” Gomideh will host a lecture on the “Armenians in the Late Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey” presented by Ara Sarafian. The lecture will begin at 1:00 p.m., after the conclusion of Divine Liturgy, at the Prelacy “Dikran and Zarouhie Der Ghazarian” Hall (6250 Honolulu Ave, La Crescenta, CA 91214).

This presentation will cover the recent publication by the Gomidas Institute of population statistics (and their relevance) for some 4000 Armenian-populated places in the immediate pre-Genocide period (Armenians in Ottoman Turkey, 1914: A Geographic and Demographic Gazetteer by Sarkis Y. Karayan) and what Armenian life is like there now, specifically in Dikrangerd at Christmas this year.

Ara Sarafian is the director of the Gomidas Institute of London, which has been at the forefront of Armenian Genocide studies for almost 30 years. At the core of its work are a number of seminal works, as well as other activities engaging the Armenian Genocide and its legacy in modern Turkey. He has an M.A. in history from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Among its book publications are English translations of Armenian texts related to the Armenian Genocide. Gomidas has published Talaat Pasha’s report on the Armenian Genocide and a critical edition of “The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916”, commonly known as the Blue Book (originally published in 1916 by British historians Lord James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee), as well as a Turkish edition of the book. The Gomidas Institute has also published the memoirs of former US Ambassador to Armenia John Evans and it has collaborated with the Hrant Dink Foundation.

We invite our parishioners and the greater community to attend Divine Liturgy and the presentation to follow. The event is free of charge to the public. There will be a reception at the end of the program.

The terrible and bloody Karabakh conflict has brought death and suffering to numerous innocent people, to both Armenians and Azerbaijanis; Russia has always considered this a great tragedy, and it continues to do so.

Maria Zakharova, official representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), on Thursday noted the aforementioned at a press briefing. She noted this when asked about how several Russian State Duma MPs had partaken in an anti-Armenian event in Azerbaijan’s capital city of Baku, and who the initiator was.

In Zakharova’s words, although the Russian position on the Karabakh issue is known, she stands ready to confirm it yet again.

“Our country is making considerable, very huge and decisive efforts in the [conflicting] parties’ seeking a pacific resolution to this conflict,” she noted, in particular. “You said that Russian MPs have participated there. It seems to me that, from the perspective of self-organization, it would be right to direct the question to those who have had a direct participation in that event. The [Russian] MFA hasn’t been the co-founder and co-organizer of the given event.”

90th Anniversary Banquet Honoring 

Maestro Ohaness – Hovhaness Tchekidjian

“Paganini of Choral Art”

Sunday, March 17, 2019 

1:00 PM

Lunch Tickets: $20 per person

Bestowed as National Hero
(Presidential Recognition)

Tchekidjian is the recipient of numerous prizes, including 1978 Paris Grand Prix award.
His portfolio includes 100s of recordings. He has conducted 868 Concerts outside of Armenia alone, performing in 184 world’s most prestigious
concert halls including New York, London, Paris, Moscow, and St. Petersburg!

Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Church Social Hall
2226 Ventura St.  Fresno, CA 93721

For tickets and reservations call 559.486.1141 or 559.224.1001

Dietfurt in Bavaria has been celebrating Carnival, the pre-Lent festival a bit differently than most German towns. In the small town residents have been dressing up like Chinese people and they even have an Emperor.

With cries of “Kille Wau” which is similar to Kölle Alaaf! Carnival in the Bavarian town of Dietfurt begins. The traditional costume in Bavaria is usually lederhosen or a dirndl, but here, during Carnival, Chinese costumes are mandatory. What was once a legend has taken on a bigger role in the life of this German town.

The Armenian State Symphony Orchestra (led by Artistic Director and Principal Conductor Sergey Smbatyan) is set to perform film music at Dubai Opera Theater from 28 February to March 2.

The project was brought to life following long-term negotiations, the orchestra told Panorama.am.

In this unique format called CineConcerts the Dubai Opera will screen two classic films while the State Symphony Orchestra will perform the scores live.

The orchestra is to play the scores of The Godfather and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. In total, the symphony orchestra will have five performances in three days to be conducted by Justin Freer.