Gabriel's Odyssey

Performed by the renowned Afro-Asian Kukutana Ensemble (founded by Janie Cole), Gabriel’s Odyssey is a vibrant musical and visual narrative of slavery, conversion, persecution, and resilience from an early modern Indian Ocean world. Gabriel's Odyssey tells the true 16th-century story of Gabriel, a Beta Israel Ethiopian Jew, who was abducted as a young child and sold into slavery in the Arab world, and his woeful wanderings between faiths, love and persecution in Asia to his final encounter with the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa, as based on historical reconstructions by Matteo Salvadore. Drawing on imaginary and sumptuous soundscapes, visuals and voices of an early modern Indian Ocean world, Gabriel’s life represents a universal story of oppression, faith, migration and self-fashioning like the experiences of countless other early modern Africans.

The event will also be livestreamed.

Host or Publisher Yale Institute of Sacred Music