How do we find our voice when the sounds that carry our stories are fragmented, out of reach, or scattered across the world?

Over the past six years, pianist, vocalist and artistic-researcher Lolita Emmanuel has embarked on a journey of remembering: reconnecting with the sounds and cultural knowledges of her Indigenous Assyrian heritage.

Since childhood, Assyrian music and cultural memories had been trapped within the confines of her Euro-Western classical training and the equally tempered keys of the acoustic piano. From her birthplace on Cabrogal land (Fairfield, South-West Sydney), she travelled to her ancestral Assyrian homeland (Iraq), Europe and the US, to learn and make music with her globally displaced community. Weaving this cultural knowledge together with storytelling, collaboration and microtonal piano, Lolita has found new ways to breathe life into her instrument and step into an Assyrian soundworld. This is her journey of Performing Assyrian-ness.

At Phoenix Central Park, Lolita reintroduces her artistic practice to Australian audiences as the first Australia-based artist to perform with the experimental Maqiano, a microtuner for the acoustic piano. Joined by Assyrian artists Wilson Eshay (voice), Benjamin Yelda (zurna) and Esho Bolis (dahola), she presents existing Assyrian piano music and new arrangements of Assyrian song, including Rawe, an ancient and endangered vocal practice. Here on Gadigal land, on a continent home to the world’s oldest living cultures, one of West Asia’s most ancient and continuing cultures will resound in new ways.