The Thousand and One 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 Thousand and One 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 playing the role of the original “Open Sesame” to tell us in his own voice some of the stories from The Thousand and One Nights related with that idea. On the evening of September 22, the central theme will be “seduction.”

Héctor Urién (Madrid, 1977) makes his living from telling stories. As a professional storyteller, he performs his art and stage work at theaters in Spain and Latin America. Drawn by his curiosity and and a deeply ingrained scientific streak, Urién has developed his own regular storytelling workshop in Madrid, where students and teacher discover the inner workings of stories and the mystery of oral storytelling together. As a storyteller on stage, his most original and exciting project has to do with The Arabian Nights, which he continues to tell every Tuesday night at a small theater in downtown Madrid. A short, straightforward storyteller, he has taken part in several national and international festivals and co-directs the annual festival “Ávila de cuento.” He also had an essay published by the “Palabras del candil” publishing firm, 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. And Alienta Editorial has published his book El arte de contar bien una historia. 101 estrategias para el storytelling (The Art of Telling a Story Well: 101 strategies for storytelling).