Azul, a new bilingual musical book by Melis Aker, Tatiana Pandiani, and Jacinta Clusellas is a psychological deep-dive into an immigrant family story.
This story, surrounded by a world of magic realism, is a musical transformation based on the poetry and short stories of the astounding writer Rubén Darío. Azul is a beautiful story about the tragedy of loss and the process of moving forward.
The story follows “Blue Bird,” an ambitious poet who has left her home behind to seek a new life. The tale also follows a composer named Rita in present-day Jackson Heights, who is struggling to write her debut album. Azul ties these two life endeavors by exploring how memory and imagination shape immigrant identity.
The creation of this musical book heavily blends multiple cultures and remarkable experiences within the music industry. The book writer, Melis Aker, is a multi-disciplinary writer and musician from Turkey who has won many awards for her playwriting and music. The concept creator and director, Tatiana Pandiani, is a director and choreographer from Argentina. The musicals music and lyrics were also made possible by the work of Jacinta Clusellas, a composer and singer-songwriter based in New York City, originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Tatiana’s love for musicals started with her passion for dance. “I grew up as a dancer, and in my dance studio, we sometimes did choreography from different musicals. The American book musical was a way to really question my belonging to American consciousness. It was a way of understanding what it meant to be a young American. The musical theater occupies such a central place in the collective unconscious of the United States. I fell in love,” Tatiana shares.
Melis, on the other side, has a different perspective on musicals. Melis states, “I am working very hard to fall in love with musicals. I have often never felt that I saw eye-to-eye with the American musical form, in that I could never surrender myself emotionally or culturally to the storytelling without always feeling in some ways stuck outside of the experience. But writing AZUL has forced me to widen my view and dive deep, and it has been an education, to say the least.”
Jacinta’s love for music has taken her across the globe. She has toured the United States as a songwriter, composer, and performer and has taken her music throughout South America and Europe. Along with exploring the world, she explores different genres of music, bridging harmony from South American folklore to jazz and chamber music. She aims to inspire others and brings this into her career. Not only is Jacinta an accomplished composer, but she is a teacher and mentor at several institutions, including The New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center, and Berklee College of Music. Jacinta expresses her experience working on Azul as, “A few things that I CAN put into words: one of the greatest gifts is feeling lifted and supported in this way, through a process that is all about the work, about creating something we love and finding so much joy in the process, about spending hours with one idea until it feels right, and giving all we have to the music we create.”
Infusing cultures and different languages together to make a captivating story is no effortless task. When asked about the challenges of creating this musical, Tatiana touches upon balancing two languages. She says, “There is a saying that one language equals one person. So dealing with two languages is like dealing with two separate people with different needs. It makes sense that writing a bilingual book required two separate individuals for the book (and three for the lyrics!), and probably one of the biggest challenges has been bridging the gaps in language, making sure there is a translatable, cohesive story between two worlds and a good balance between them.”
There is something special about developing a bilingual musical because of the development process and ensuring that the roles are represented perfectly. Tatiana shares, “ In AZUL, the actors are truly decoding their code-switching. All of us who grew up bilingual have different personalities and ways of moving in the world, whether we’re talking in English, Spanish, or Spanglish. And so, the cast tests and navigates that back-and-forth transformation over time. All of this, of course, makes the whole piece a challenge to cast. Not every bilingual person is a bilingual actor… Does that make sense? Many people are bilingual but have never been given a chance or the challenge to perform in a second language. We are so grateful to this cast that has brought so much clarity to the linguistic storytelling of the musical by being vulnerable and authentic and sharing with us their own language, journeys as immigrants or first-generation Americans with Latin American parents.”
Azul should be an experience you have never seen before. Tatiana explains that Azul is a story for the viewers who have experienced struggle from leaving their homes. She says, “Anyone who has left what they once considered home, who is homesick for a place they’ve never been or is struggling to piece together the story of who they are and where they come from.AZUL is an immigrant story, but not the one we are so used to seeing and hearing. The immigrant is not escaping poverty, not fleeing war or a dictator. This immigrant is an artist, adding nuance and specificity to a more silenced version of the Latin American experience.”
To learn more about Azul and the creation process, click here.
