Azira’i

Azira’i
Um Musical de Memórias

Performed by Zahy Tentehar | Conception & Dramaturgy by Zahy Tentehar & Duda Rios | Directed by Denise Stutz & Duda Rios

OCT 24 – 27 | North American Premiere

A cultural high point of our city’s Latino Heritage Month, the Chicago International Latino Theater Festival Destinos showcases Latino theater artists and companies from around the world. Azira’i is presented in partnership by the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance and Chicago Shakespeare Theater, a partner since the festival’s inception.

This biographical play looks at Zahy Tentehar’s relationship with her mother, Azira’i, the first female Shaman from the Cana Brava reserve (MA), who held the rank of Supreme Shaman of the Tentehar peoples, which is only for people with extremely developed medicinal and spiritual knowledge.

The relationship between mother and daughter takes place in a necessarily conflicting context, in an extremely patriarchal northeastern interior and in a culture torn between preserving its ancestral values and absorbing the dynamics and ills of a globalized civilization system. At the same time as Zahy is the daughter chosen by her mother to inherit the gifts of shamanism and communication with the Mairas, it is also in her that Azira’i unloads the frustrations of existing in a colonial and oppressive environment.