The Arabian Nights are like a long-lasting kiss that stretches on to keep from dying. And by emulating Scheherazade in Madrid, Héctor Urién, a professional storyteller, will choose a different story each month at Casa Árabe, from the fictional universe created in The Arabian Nights. With a contemporary sensitivity supported only by his voice, presence and discourse, he uses his art as a storyteller to take us on a journey from a Baghdad souk to the cave where a genie lives, from the islands of the Indian Ocean to the domains of the Serpent Queen.

At each session, Héctor Urién uses a single word as a narrative thread which plays the role of the original “Open Sesame” to tell us in his own voice some of the stores from The Arabian Nights related with that word. On Thursday, December 14, (Night 3), the word will be “hopes.”

Héctor Urién (Madrid, 1977) is a professional oral storyteller who has brought this innovative, original show to the stage, based on the structure of Scheherazade’s tale. As a professional storyteller, he performs his art and stagecraft at theaters in Spain and Latin America. Drawn by his curiosity and a deeply ingrained scientific streak, Urién has developed his own ongoing storytelling workshop in Madrid, where students and teacher discover the inner workings of stories and the mystery of the oral narrative together. A narrator of short, direct tales, he has taken part in several domestic and foreign festivals, as well as co-directing the annual festival “Ávila de cuento” (“Storybook Avila”). In 2015, he had an essay published by the Palabras del candel publishing firm, with the title: La narración fractal: arte y ciencia de la oralidad (Fractal storytelling: the art and science of oral tradition), in which he presents an innovative, surprising perspective on storytelling, backed by chaos theory and fractal geometry.