Avi Amon’s grandmother’s apartment building in Istanbul was torn down—there one day and gone the next.
In 1979, his parents left Turkey for the United States, driving across the country while playing cassette tapes they had brought from home. Amon says that during that journey, his parents began forming a physical connection to their new country; he imagines the trip slowly scrubbing away their accents. After his father died, Amon began questioning where we come from and how we arrive where we are. Then, shortly before his wedding, his beloved grandmother died. Because Turkish custom discouraged mourning so close to a joyful event, Amon was left wondering how many stories remained untold and what had been lost from her simple life.
These experiences led Amon to ask: What is memory? In Mother/Road, he invites the audience to enter an emotional landscape of memory through a multimedia musical production built around the cassette tapes his parents brought from Istanbul. The tapes become entrances to other dimensions, suggesting that time itself can warp, overwrite, and rewind. Through memory, sound, and music, Amon creates new worlds where his family can exist together. The journey from Istanbul becomes the center of the story, even as the production begins in the middle and reaches outward toward the shape of remembered experience.
Avi Amon is a composer and sound artist whose work often explores collective memory and the experience of being “in-between.” His theater work includes music, song, and sound design, with projects presented in New York, at the Kennedy Center, and internationally in Scotland and London. His film scores have also been featured in a range of venues. Amon is the music director for the 52nd Street Project and teaches at NYU.
While creating this work, Amon came to understand that memory is made in more than one direction. He recalls taking his daughter to a natural history museum and noticing the timelines surrounding the exhibits. Children, he realized, do not yet understand time in the same way adults do. Hoping to create a memory for his daughter, he brought her to see the dinosaurs. As he grew excited by the exhibits, the artists’ renderings, and the videos, he turned to her and asked what she thought of the dinosaurs. She calmly replied, “Daddy, this is not dinosaurs. This is bones.” The same moment produced two very different memories.
Mother/Road is part concept album, part memoir, and part immersive concert. Amon asks the audience to consider the memories we carry, the pieces of identity we barely remember, and what gets left behind. The production lasts 65 minutes and includes ASL interpretation. This added another dimension to the performance: even audience members who could not understand the signs could see how hand shapes, movement, and facial expressions helped convey the story.
Immediately after the performance, a community conversation was led by Rabbi Kendell Pinkney and Avi Amon. Pinkney is a playwright, arts and culture advocate, and educator. Pinkney opened the dialogue by referring to an excerpt from The Past is a Foreign Country. This clearly established the theme of what was to follow. Together, Pinkney and Amon created a sense of community through the ritual of havruta, an ancient Jewish educational practice in which two or more partners study a text together. This practice creates a three-way dialogue between the partners and the text. The discussion centered on Joy Harjo’s “Remember,” from She Had Some Horses, and section IV of Tracy K. Smith’s “The Speed of Belief,” from Life on Mars. By carefully reading and discussing these poems, the group reflected on the themes of Mother/Road: memory, its transmission across generations, and the distance between an experience and what we remember of it. The conversation deepened the audience’s understanding of the production.
The Shed’s mission is to bring the future of art to audiences by welcoming innovative ideas across all forms of creativity. With Mother/Road, it achieved that goal.
