Judith Sloan's Yo Miss! Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide

Show Description

What happens when a performing artist survives a near-fatal car accident and collides with the oncoming traffic of Hip Hop culture? Part documentary, part music, part poetic autobiography, Yo Miss! Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide looks back on Judith Sloan’s twenty years of teaching in prisons, immigration high schools, and universities. In this sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always truth-seeking performance, Sloan attempts to break down assumptions that divide teacher and student, student and student, one sub-culture from another, and residents of a polyglot city who live in close proximity but come from conflicting worlds. In addition to her work as an educator, Judith Sloan is an award-winning character actress, oral historian, and radio producer. Fusing the art of theatre and radio, Yo Miss is an eye- and ear-witness account of one artist navigating a maze of miscommunications, memory, and cross-generational dialogues as she finds resilience in the face of tragedy.

A play with music
Conceived and written by Judith Sloan
Directed by Michael Dinwiddie
Music direction Frank London
Performed by Judith Sloan
with Adam Hill and MiWi LaLupa
Live Sound Engineer Luke Santy
Sound direction and design Judith Sloan
Editor at large Warren Lehrer

“As Sloan helps the students compose their performance, 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!"
-Anne Barnard, The New York Times