RİTUAL
Theatre and Creativity Laboratory
Ritual Theater and Creativity Laboratory was founded on February 11, 2020 by director and educator Aynur Zarrintac. The goal of the theater is to work with community members in the regions of Azerbaijan and the capital to teach social issues through theater methodology and create resources in the Azerbaijani language. The theater operates both domestically and internationally and works with different age groups of local communities.
Documentary İnstallation
Open Space Art Center
Tbilisi, Georgia, 2026
Non-Existence Monuments is a site-specific installation created as part of Ritual Mobile Theater Laboratory’s documentary performance I Will Keep You Alive , presented at Open Space Art Center in Tbilisi, Georgia.
The installation is dedicated to the historical buildings of Baku that have been demolished or disappeared from the city’s urban landscape. It explores architecture as a carrier of memory and considers how buildings can continue to exist through personal stories, collective memory, and traces of the past even after their physical disappearance.
Developed in dialogue with the documentary interviews that form the basis of the performance, the installation became an integral part of the theatrical environment. It contributed to the play’s exploration of the fragile relationship between people, trees, and buildings within the changing urban landscape of Baku.
Presented as part of: IWill Keep You Alive — Site-specific documentary performance
Venue: Open Space Art Center, Tbilisi, Georgia
Scenic Designer: Leyla Guliyeva
Author: Zarif Bakirova
Director: Aynur Zerrintac
Curator: David Khorbaladze
Actors: Ilgar Aydin, Muhammed Mammadov, Zarif Bakirova, Eltac Alekberov
The Language of Carpets — A Research-Based Workshop
Documentary Spectacle
Leyla Quliyeva conducted a research-based workshop titled The Language of Carpets for women in Fuzuli, Karabakh. The workshop explored traditional Azerbaijani carpet weaving, with a particular focus on the visual language of Karabakh carpets and the ways in which this cultural heritage is transmitted across generations.
Quliyeva’s research focused on carpet weaving as a tradition historically passed down among women, from grandmothers to daughters and grandchildren. Although this practice is no longer as prevalent in everyday domestic life, its patterns and symbols may continue to exist within collective memory. The workshop sought to explore how this inherited visual knowledge could be reawakened through creative practice.
Through drawing and artistic experimentation, Quliyeva investigated how traditional patterns might persist in memory and re-emerge in new forms. The participation of young children was particularly striking: despite having no prior experience of carpet weaving, they spontaneously created patterns and symbols on paper. This observation raised questions about how cultural memory is transmitted across generations and how traditional visual knowledge can resurface even as the practices that once sustained it gradually fade.
The workshop was held as part of the project Stories of Hope: Women’s Leadership and Community Building through Art.
Quliyeva also worked as the production designer for Karabakh Stories, a documentary theatre and dance performance directed by Aynur Zarrintac. Based on the personal stories of women who were displaced during the First Karabakh War and returned to their ancestral lands following the Second Karabakh War, the performance explores their lived experiences and connections to their homeland.
2025
Irland, 2024
Fíorscéalta (meaning “True Stories” in Irish) is an international Erasmus+ funded training programme in Ireland managed by the Crooked House Theatre Company.
Supported by the European Union, it brings together roughly 50 to 60 youth leaders and creatives from multiple partner nations—including Ireland, Italy, Turkey, Belgium, Greece, Poland, Azerbaijan, and Kosovo.
A four-day intensive workshop led by Katsura Kan, exploring the physical and philosophical foundations of Butoh as a process of inner transformation rather than simply a movement technique.
The workshop focused on the relationship between body and consciousness, the performative potential of silence and emptiness, and the ways in which light, rhythm, and space shape bodily expression and performance. Through practical exercises, participants explored the body as a site of perception, transformation, and presence.
Emerging from Japan’s avant-garde scene of the 1970s–80s, Katsura Kan is a prominent figure in contemporary Butoh, bringing together dance, choreography, directing, and music within a unified performance language. His approach considers tradition not as a fixed form, but as a fundamental source for contemporary performance.
Organized by Ritual Theatre and Creative Laboratory.
