REORIENT:

To understand Armen, they worked with her biographers and delved deeply into her first memoir,The Dancer of Shamahka [sic.] (1918). Her story – which takes places at various points in Aran andthe Caucasus, Iran, Turkey, and finally, Egypt – ends as she is on the threshold of an unknown life as an artist in Europe. The twists and turns of fate in her life end as she decides, plainly against her will, to leave her beloved East. Following the pogroms in Badkubeh (Baku), Armen fled to Iran, about which she relates in her memoir a phantasmagorical set of Scheherazade-esque rites of passage that can perhaps only be understood as a shifting of light from one reality towards a more shadowy, if not unreal depiction of her inner worlds. The Persian world she describes is at times so shockingly outlandish that it might be best understood as a metaphor. To understand Armen is to understand how an artist can flourish when faced with survival; and, key to understanding this fantastical world are Armen’s own words. ‘A dancer’, she wrote, ‘is a dream'; and to preserve the dream, she felt she had to ‘show the world only her unreal self’. Armen Ohanian – whoever she was – was someone obviously steeped in Eastern and Western fantasies. She wrote with winks and nods between the lines, knew her audiences, and shifted shapes before their eyes. One can only assume she knew her readers were many, and that she understood they passed beyond her own mortality.

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