International sand art superstar Kseniya Simonova (as seen on America's Got Talent) and the Guy Mendilow Ensemble team up on an extraordinary show bringing to life Sephardi women’s voices and stories lost to war.

The Forgotten Kingdom––Sand Stories will appear one night only on Friday, November 8 at 7 pm at the Maltz Performing Arts Center on the campus of Case Western Reserve University.

Simonova creates, morphs and obliterates sand imagery in real-time, crafting a flowing narrative driven by the Ensemble’s evocative music and radio-drama-style storytelling. Weaving together early 20th-century women’s songs from Sephardic enclaves, the show evokes a panorama of the unraveling of an older Mediterranean world — not with the distant textbook hindsight we have today, but with the visceral experience of ordinary people caught in the extraordinary upheaval, unaware of how the dots will connect.

Audiences traverse breathtaking landscapes of sand, from ruined Ottoman villages to bustling Mediterranean ports like Salónica circa 1944. The Ensemble adds a sweeping, cinematographic score drawing on traditional tunes, techniques, and tales but in elegant arrangements and with radical reframing.

With song lyrics in Ladino, an endangered blend of archaic Spanish with Turkish and Greek, together with English narration, with heart and humor, the show renders scenes of daily life from WWI and the Ottoman Empire’s collapse to the glimmers of democratic hopes crushed by fascist regimes that cloaked entire communities in a ‘shroud of oblivion.’

Tickets start at $12 and can be purchased at case.edu/maltzcenter.