Ensemble Decipher has been awarded a $30,000 grant from the MAP Fund to produce a new collaborative work with composer and decipherist Joseph Bohigian. The funded project is an evening-length multimedia work titled I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment about the life of the visionary Georgian-born Soviet-Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov (1924–1990), most well known for his 1969 film The Color of Pomegranates. The premiere of this new project will take place in 2026 at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, California.
Decipher will be joined for this project by Lebanese-Armenian vocalist Khatchadour Khatchadourian, a specialist in a variety of traditional Armenian musical genres, who will sing lyrics by the 18th century singer-poet Sayat Nova in three languages.