Roots

2022

Role

Performer

Venue

Live Action 17 — International Performance Art Festival, Gothenburg

Roots is a performance narrating the story of the Hazara people, a Shia minority who have lived for generations in the mountainous center of Afghanistan and faced discrimination and genocide under nearly every government to hold power — a persecution the Taliban have continued, removing Hazaras from schools and government jobs and driving them from their towns and villages, while the world largely looks away. Kaveh Ayreek uses his own story as the platform: fleeing Kabul as it fell to the Taliban, and revisiting the last twenty years of his life — years as an undocumented immigrant and refugee in Iran, a hopeful return to Kabul, and the night in the fall of 2021 when he was forced to leave his home, his hopes, and his people behind to survive. The performance revisits this trauma not only as personal history but as the history of a generation and an entire minority — reckoning with the past, an uncertain present in the country that has taken them in, and an uncertain future ahead. Roots asks whether the next generation will repeat the same cycle of discrimination and exile, or get the chance to turn it around. Is there hope — or have the roots gone rotten?