The House of Ash

This is a great article...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/nyregion/13websloan.html?_r=1

Voicing Pain Through Performance
By ANNE BARNARD
Published: April 12, 2009

Standing in a circle, in a windowless classroom near an on-ramp to the Queensboro Bridge, two dozen high school students chanted in unison. Their accents revealed their origins: Honduras, Ghana, Albania, Vietnam.
What are we, why are we, where are we going?
Why are we leaving, what are we doing?
Then, rapid-fire, they spoke the lines they had first uttered in a classroom discussion about displacement and emigration but now were molding into art.
“We had to leave; the rebels took over!” declared Stephanie Saint-Val, from Haiti.
“We left the city for the desert,” Hadeel al-Hindawi, from Iraq, said more shyly.
“You don’t know my struggle, you haven’t a clue,” proclaimed Sandup Sherpa, from Nepal, who had just dazzled the class with his break dancing.
Stephanie’s family fled machete-wielding attackers during a 2004 coup. Hadeel’s father was shot in the face in Baghdad because he worked as a translator for the United States military. Sandup’s father, a legislator, was targeted for assassination by Maoist rebels and now lives in Elmhurst, Queens, selling cellphones.
Leading the recent rehearsal at the International High School at LaGuardia Community College was Judith Sloan, a performance artist and oral historian with a fountain of red hair. She has spent a decade documenting immigrants’ stories and teaching teenagers to transform their experiences into theater — mainly in Queens, which, with 167 nationalities and 116 languages, was deemed the nation’s most diverse county in the 2000 census.
Ms. Sloan’s art and teaching cross-pollinate: She uses immigrant stories that she and her husband have compiled — dozens of them are included in a 2003 book, “Crossing the Blvd” — to demonstrate how to shape narrative and to get students talking about their lives. And the students flood her with new material.
As she helps the students compose the performance they will present in May, she is also coming full circle with a new work of her own. “Yo Miss! Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide,” which she performs with musical collaborators, re-enacts and riffs on her experiences teaching teenagers from myriad worlds: refugee camps, struggling neighborhoods, prisons. It is a performance about performances, a story containing many stories.
And suddenly, “Yo Miss!” has another mission: To raise money to keep the story going. Facing a shortfall of about a quarter of the high school program’s $45,000 budget for this year, Ms. Sloan has earmarked a chunk of the proceeds from her show to finance the workshop.
In one “Yo Miss!” vignette, a patchwork of sentence fragments conveys Ms. Sloan’s jitters as she travels upstate to teach teenagers in a detention center for the first time: “Snow. Rolling hills. Country homes. Farms. Prison. Boys from New York City. Fresh air. Barbed wire. Sky.”
“Yo miss! What good is this going to do us when we get out?” she sneers in the half-whiny, half-aggressive voice of a teenage boy. After trying some answers that do not fly — “Maybe some of you will become writers!” — she finally tells them, “I don’t know; do you have anything better to do right now?”
The workshop at the International High School, run by EarSay, Ms. Sloan’s nonprofit group, is just one of countless cultural programs across the country that are facing cuts.
To cope, Ms. Sloan gave up her teaching pay, found volunteers to help, and even plans to seek financing from the hip-hop artist Nas, who grew up partly in the Queensbridge housing project near the school.
The New York State Council on the Arts was given $48.5 million in this year’s state budget to support cultural groups and projects, but midyear budget cuts brought the allocation down to $39.5 million. Next year’s budget raises financing to $42.4 million —still below pre-recession levels.
Small community groups are most vulnerable to budget cuts, said Lynn Lobell, managing director of the Queens Council on the Arts, who funnels city financing to arts projects like flamenco theater and Chinese opera. But they are vitally important to developing neighborhoods, she said.
And they help in less tangible ways.
The International High School is a public school for students with limited English proficiency who have been in the United States less than four years. Many are refugees whose education has been interrupted by war and displacement.
For them, Ms. Sloan’s workshop does more than fulfill their arts requirement: students say it helps them work through experiences that are hard to discuss in any language.
Stephanie, 18, brought Haitian zouk — joyous dance music that she said “releases pain” — to be woven into the performance, along with patriotic Albanian hip-hop and Arabic pop. That meant sharing something positive about Haiti, even as she talked about hiding from rebels, unable to leave the house, and missing school.
For Hadeel, 15, the performance helped explore feelings of loss. “I have a new life, and it’s fun, but I lost a lot,” she said: friends, her neighborhood, the habit of wearing a headscarf.
Ms. Sloan and her husband, Warren Lehrer, founded EarSay in 1999, and learned to listen to stories of trauma through “Crossing the Blvd,” for which they interviewed dozens of immigrants along Queens Boulevard, the borough’s main thoroughfare. The stories became not only the book but continuing performances and museum exhibits that have toured the country and become part of curriculums for high schools, medical residents and college oral history classes.
On Sunday, as part of the city’s Immigrant Heritage Week, Ms. Sloan will be performing pieces from “Crossing the Blvd” and “Yo Miss!” at UnionDocs, a documentary arts center in Brooklyn.
At the high school workshop, Chenits Pettigrew, a hip-hop artist who goes by the name Chen Lo, had compiled the students’ thoughts into a spoken-word performance, part poetry, part rap. He asked each student to perform the line that meant the most.
Sandup, 14, said speaking his lines made him proud. “It feels like I’m telling the public how I’ve been struggling,” he said.
He pointed to a favorite line: “My homeland screams, ‘Don’t forget me!’ My new life says, ‘Come and get me!’ ”
He said he and other Nepali teenagers spend a lot of time speaking English and having fun, not thinking much about what their parents went through to bring them here.
“I don’t want to forget,” he said.