How do you survive a genocide? The docufictional music theater KOMITAS is dedicated to the Armenian priest, composer, ethnomusicologist and singer Komitas Vardapet (1869-1935). He was considered the “voice of the Armenians”. In April 1915, like hundreds of other Armenian intellectuals, he was arrested by the Young Turks and was one of eight men to survive this first of many deportations to follow. But what was the price? Komitas spent the rest of his life traumatized in a psychiatric ward. His fate is representative of that of all the victims of the Armenian genocide. In 15 chapters, Marc Sinan and his ensemble walk in the footsteps of Komitas Vardapet’s ethnomusicological travels in Anatolia. The performing monologue by award-winning actress Sesede Terziyan interacts with live music and video projections, as well as live soundscapes that reflect on Komitas’ psyche – the disruption of his clear mind by deportation. The score combines sound documents of the singing Komitas and other prisoners of war with contemporary composition. The piece addresses the absence of voice, the absence of music, the cultural and human loss triggered by the murder of the Armenian population. Marc Sinan himself is the grandson of a survivor of the genocide: his maternal grandmother grew up as an orphan on the Black Sea in a Turkish, strictly Islamic family who could not reconcile the expulsion of their Armenian neighbors with their faith.