A Village Yard for a Stage: an Open-Air Play at HandArt, Byurakan
Araz Tavitian5 min readByurakan
In this article (6)
On Saturday the twenty-fourth of October I went up to Byurakan, a village on the slope of Mount Aragats, to watch a play. I had been told that the theatre there has no stage, and it is true. At the HandArt garden, on a hilltop above the valley, the stage is a whole village yard: a shed of logs, a haystack with a ladder against it, a long table under an embroidered cloth and a line of washing, all under the open sky. The audience sits on wooden tiers at the side and watches the village live its day.
Before the play
I arrived just before noon, and the grounds were still quiet. A sheep wandered across the meadow, a big dog slept beside the stone steps, and from the top of the hill the valley opened out below us. Byurakan is in the province of Aragatsotn, under an hour’s drive from Yerevan through Ashtarak, and the village is best known for the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory, which was founded in 1946. HandArt has staged open-air plays here since at least 2023, and on a clear autumn afternoon it is easy to see why people make the journey.
The play
The play that day was «Ցանկապատ» (The Fence), after Stepan Zoryan’s story, with script and direction by Tigran Gyulumyan, from Bemel Production. It is a free adaptation, and the version I saw is set at a wedding in an old village. From the start the yard was busy: a man crossed it with a sheep on his shoulders, two men tended a fire under a cauldron, and at one point a black dog walked through the scene as calmly as if it belonged to the cast.
At the table the villagers raised a toast, and the toast became a speech about the homeland. One of them said, “Yes, we must keep and defend our homeland, so that no foreigner comes to rule over it. Each one of us must keep our own handful of land.” It is a line written for the stage, and I made one of my short films of the day around it.
Lala, from Van
The heart of the story is the bride. In her white dress she reproaches the villagers because they did not dance at her wedding and stood there with gloomy faces, and she asks them, “You don’t believe I’m getting married today, do you?” Then the play tells us who she is. Lala was the daughter of an aristocratic family in Van; she had a very good education, she taught history at the school, and she wrote very good articles for a newspaper. “So how did she end up in the village?” That is the question the rest of the play sets out to answer.
In my selfie with the actress who played Lala after the show, I said why the character had moved me so much: my own daughter’s name is Lala. That was not the only reason, though: the performance itself was very good.
Two songs
Twice the bride sings, in her own voice: once standing beside a hay bale, and once sitting high on the haystack with her hand raised. In the film the play keeps its own live sound, the actors’ voices, the show’s music and the applause, and when she sings I let her voice play on its own, with no music under it. I have not written the words of her songs here; you can hear them in the film.
Later an officer in a dark green uniform came into the yard, and the play moved towards its end, with the bride in white trailing a long red cloth across the ground.
After the curtain call
At the curtain call the cast stood in a line in front of the shed, and the applause went on for a long time. The actors did not hurry away afterwards. They stayed on the set with the audience, posing for photographs, the bride with a bouquet of red roses in her arms, and they told me that the show is coming to America soon. In three selfies by the stage we sent our greetings to our friends there; the first was with the actor Mkrtich Arzumanyan, and my film opens on it. In the last one, with the actress who played Lala, I said that the show would soon go to America, and she answered: “Yes, soon: already on 15 November, the first performance in America, in Los Angeles.” I have not found the details published yet, so I give them here only as she said them.
What stays with me
What stays with me from Byurakan is how little separates the play from the place. The yard is a real yard, the hill and the sky are part of the set, and a dog can walk into a scene without breaking it. If you are in Yerevan with a free afternoon, this is a journey of under an hour, and I recommend it.
| Where | The HandArt garden, an open-air theatre in the village of Byurakan, Aragatsotn province, on the slope of Mount Aragats. |
|---|---|
| How high, and where on the map | The village of Byurakan lies at about 1,460 m, north-west of Yerevan, beyond Ashtarak. |
| Getting there | Under an hour’s drive from Yerevan, through Ashtarak, or a shuttle from Yerevan, booked ahead with the organisers. |
| Whom to ask | HandArt’s Instagram, handart.garden, or the ticket sites that list its shows. |
| The play | «Ցանկապատ» (The Fence), after Stepan Zoryan’s story. Script and direction: Tigran Gyulumyan. Producer: Hayk Khanzadyan. Bemel Production. The company, as listed for the run: Mkrtich Arzumanyan, Artsrun Harutyunyan, Tigran Gyulumyan, Araksya Melikyan, Ani Petrosyan, Meri Movsesyan, Astghik Abajyan, Karin Tsaturyan, Arus Grigoryan. |
| Nearby | The Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory, founded in 1946. |
My film of the day is on our YouTube channel, @Aypoupen: watch it here. It joins our films of places to see in Armenia.
