Judith Sloan presents EarSay Voices

Show Description

If you can't attend please consider making a donation so we can buy more tickets for immigrant youth to come to the performance:

http://www.crowdrise.com/earsayvoices/fundraiser/earsayinc

Performances by Judith Sloan, MiWi LaLupa (from Red Baraat), Bridget Kelso, EarSay Youth Voices from the International High School, & Queens College Choir with excerpt from 1001 Voices, a symphony by Frank London, Judith Sloan & Warren Lehrer. Honoring Viper Records for their support of EarSay's immigrant youth voices programs. 

Judith Sloan, actor, writer, radio producer, hosts a performance including stories of recently arrived teenagers, immigrants and refugees who migrated to the borough of Queens NY, the new Ellis Island. Performance excerpts from Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan's Crossing the BLVD, a celebration of resilient, prismatic character – in search of home. Sloan performs excerpts from her developing work YO MISS! Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide. Featured artists performing excerpts from various EarSay projects include: actor/teaching artist Bridget Kelso performing excerpts from her solo show, musician MiWi LaLupa a.k.a. Michael Williams (from Red Baraat), members of the Queens College Choir performing excerpts from Frank London, Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan's 1001 Voices: A symphony for Queens, and immigrant youth from EarSay Voices arts program, Transforming Trauma Into Art.

EarSay's Youth program Transforming Trauma Into Art is an initiative born out of EarSay's partnership with the International High School at LaGuardia Community College where many students come from war- and conflict-zones. This program is specifically designed for teenagers who recently migrated to the United States. As an antidote to war and polarization, the program encourages a depth of scholarship and storytelling that shapes the experience of the participants. It gives them the tools to make connections between cultures, shed light on the complexity and humanity of each individual, and deepen what it means to be part of a global community.
Video Excerpts: from the Brian Lehrer show WNYC, 
Short Doc on EarSay You Tube 


“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… As she helps the students compose the performance, she is also coming full circle with a new work of her own. “Yo Miss!,” 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. The New York Times, Anne Barnard 

“Crossing boldly carries the tradition of oral history into the 21st Century. Electrifying!” -Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues 

“Immigrant life in Queens, as told in the intimate, rich, comic, ironic and sad stories so often seen but not heard in America’s big cities… Archie Bunker doesn’t live here anymore — not in the Queens of Crossing the Blvd. The first-person narratives are engaging… The stories are so different, and yet many of the immigrants’ lives are so similar… What links them all is the desperation and desire that brought them here. As one immigrant says in Crossing the BLVD, ‘America can do without you, but you can’t do without America’.” -Lynne Duke, The Washington Post 

Winner Brendan Gill Prize 2004 a prize awarded annually to the creator of a book, essay, poem, lyric, song, composition, play, painting, sculpture, landscape or any other work of art which best captures the energy and spirit of New York.

EarSay’s YO MISS and Immigrant Youth Programs supported in part by  theInternational High School at LaGuardia Community College, Morgan Jenness of Abrams Artist Agency, Viper Records, Liberty Partnership Program, NYC Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with City Council, New York State Council on the Arts.