One Thousand and One Nights
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One Thousand and One Nights* appears through a myriad of guises and forms that frames a dialogue between the established and the experimental, the past and the present. With the active engagement of its audiences it examines the questions that shape and inspire us as individuals, cultures, and communities.
One Thousand and One Nights facilitates experiences between people and art that encourages debate, exchange and collaboration reflecting the vitality, complexity and unfolding patterns of contemporary art.
*The Arabian Nights, also known as The Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: alf laila wa-laila), originally a collection of oriental tales in the Arabic language that developed into a powerful vehicle for Western imaginative prose since the early 18th century. The labyrinthine intertwined stories in The Thousand and One Nights are framed by a tale of a jaded ruler named Shahryar, whose disappointment in womankind causes him to marry a new woman every night only to kill her in the morning. The grand-vizier's clever daughter, Scheherazade, determined to end this murderous cycle, plans an artful ruse. She tells the sultan a suspenseful tale each night promising to finish it in the morning. This narrative device of delaying unpleasant events by means of arousing the curiosity of a powerful figure is a constant feature in the stories themselves. It is now believed that the collection is a composite work originally transmitted orally and developed over a period of several centuries.
The collection has a long and convoluted history which mirrors its complex narrative structure; one amazing story evokes another, so that the reader is drawn into a narrative whirlpool. The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques and various forms of erotica. Numerous stories depict djinn, magicians, and legendary places, which are often intermingled with real people and geography, not always rationally. The tellers and authors of the tales were anonymous, and their styles and language differed greatly; the only common distinguishing feature was the fact that they were written in a colloquial language called Middle Arabic that had its own peculiar grammar and syntax.
