Judith Sloan's YO MISS! Makes World Premiere at La MaMa Tonight

"YO MISS!" by Judith Sloan will make its world premiere at La MaMa from tonight, March 4, through March 13, 2016.

The production is a fusion of theatre, poetry, and music that reveals the stories of immigrant teenagers and incarcerated youth as they grapple with the cataclysmic events that shaped them. It has the potential to create much-needed understanding amid the offensive and inflammatory rhetoric that outweighs reason during our electoral season.

Judith Sloan is an actress and radio/audio producer known for her one woman performances. She has spent 15 years performing and teaching in schools and jails, where she has encountered and reported on immigration stories, cultural clashes, and generation gaps. While teaching theater to multinational young people in Queens high schools, Sloan found that her immigrant students were exhausted to the point of helplessness by the simple effort of functioning in English. They were unable to remember English lines for a play, so Sloan took another tactic to reach them: having them recite tongue-twisters in their native languages.

Their complex, poetic, energetic vocalizations led to the creation of her latest performance work, "YO MISS!" It's a fusion of the arts of theater, radio, poetry, and music in which Sloan learns from her students as they learn from her about acculturation, ethnic conflict and being enlightened by their differences. The play is written, performed and sound engineered by Ms. Sloan and accompanied by Josh Henderson on viola.

In the performance, Sloan records the students' complex, poetic, energetic tongue twisters, mixes them into soundscape and plays the mix for a hip hop music producer, which brings her into the world of rapper Immortal Technique and his producer Touré Harris, from whom she learns about the "culture of desperation" that gave birth to an entire new art form. She realizes it was the same impulse that launched her on a peculiar personal quest that landed her, a solo artist, into school programs with new immigrant teenagers. She juxtaposes her own traumatic experiences with those of her students, including those in an alternative sentencing institution ("jail but school"), revealing how people can find resilience and humanity in each other's stories. Sloan then reveals the ripple effects of the Holocaust on her family and how that interconnects with refugees today. Throughout, she uses a combination of recordings of her interviews and dialogues, blending her voice with those of her subjects.

Excerpts from "YO MISS!" first appeared as public radio pieces, two of which won the Missouri Review National Audio Competition: "Sweeping Statements" (First Place) and "What's Your Status" (First Runner Up).

"YO MISS!" was developed under the guidance of dramaturg Morgan Jenness. Composers on the sound track include Frank London, David Krakauer, Taylor Rivelli, MiWi La Lupa, Taylor Rivelli, Adam MJ Hill , Red Ukachukwu, Guy Klucevsek, Dave Guy. Contributing sound engineers also include Taylor Rivelli, Josh Valleau and Deep Singh. Development of "YO MISS!" has been supported by the Queens Council on the Arts, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. The show has been developed over the past several years in workshop presentations at Joe's Pub, the Danny Simmons Gallery and Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

Reflections by Columbia University graduate students to workshops of Judith Sloan's work in the university's Oral History program offer unusual and articulate reflections on Sloan's techniques in giving a theatrical place to refugees' everyday voices.

Pablo Baeza from Argentina wrote, "It perhaps seems naïve to believe that large questions of assimilation, interethnic conflict, and learning from difference could be resolved simply through high school theater. However, Sloan's work and practice as a teacher invokes the need for communities, especially those transformed by immigration in the way of Queens, one of the most ethnically diverse communities on the planet, to face the global as inherently local. For the high school kids that Sloan works with, theater is a way to learn English, to explore becoming American, without leaving the homeland behind."

Steven Palmer added, "The only problem with Judith Sloan's work is that it isn't replicated as a curriculum requirement through this country. Given the laser-like focus on differences in this culture -- race, gender, sexual preference, documentation status, religion -- Sloan's work could be instrumental in alleviating these tensions. The presidential campaign is stirring up hate-speech at an alarming rate. And Donald Trump is the head cheerleader of this not-so-funny clown car as he slams Muslim-Americans and immigrants. Sloan's work could be the antidote to this trajectory by illustrating the struggles of Muslim Americans and immigrants while normalizing their place in our society."

ABOUT JUDITH SLOAN

Judith Sloan has been described as "One part Lilly Tomlin, one part Studs Terkel, two parts originality." As an actress, she is known for a collage of absurd-to-touching characters, combined with standup juggling and shrewd commentary on international and social issues. She is also an audio artist, writer, radio producer, human rights activist, educator and poet. She has created interdisciplinary works in audio and theater with her husband, visual artist and writer Warren Lehrer, since 1990. Critics have consistently lauded her fine humor, apt political commentary, and on-target sense of character. Her earlier performance works included "Denial of the Fittest," based on her own coming to terms with the deaths of her father and grandmother when she was a young girl (it was nominated for best comedy performance at the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival) and "A Tattle Tale: Eyewitness in Mississippi," a one-woman show based on the true story of Andrea Gibbs, a deputy sheriff who blew the whistle on abuses of inmates in a Mississippi prison.

Her recent works include the libretto for "1001 Voices: A Symphony for a New America," with music by Frank London and animations by Warren Lehrer, which premiered in April 2012 by the Queens Symphony Orchestra. Much of her work has been developed at La Mama and her plays have been produced there and by other theaters including The Public Theatre, The Theatre Workshop (Scotland), The Smithsonian Institution and the Market Theatre (Johannesburg). Her commentaries, plays, poetry and documentaries have aired on National Public Radio, New York Public Radio, WBEZ Chicago, PRI, & the BBC. Sloan received a 2013-2014 New York Foundation on the Arts (NYFA) fellowship in Sound/Music, individual artist grants from the Queens Council on the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Her audio, radio and performance works have won First Place and First Runner up finalist Missouri Review National Audio Competition 2011, 2009, 2008; 2005 BAXten Artist In Progress Award; 2005 Short Doc Competition from the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

Sloan is a member of the adjunct faculty at Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU and a member of the Dramatist Guild and the Network of Ensemble Theatres and the Alliance of Resident Theatres, NY (ARTNY). A frequent guest lecturer on college campuses on issues of diversity, human rights, and the arts, her work has been published by Second Story Press, W.W. Norton, Alternet, and The New York Times. She has worked with immigrant and refugee teenagers, many who come from war-zones, since 1998. Her work with EarSay Youth Voices at the International High School at LaGuardia Community College in Queens garnered her a Partnership in Education Award in June 2009.

Sloan has directed a theater workshop for 15 years at the International High School, at LaGuardia Community College for students with limited English proficiency who have been in the USA for less than four years. Run by EarSay, the nonprofit group founded by Sloan and her husband, Warren Lehrer, the theater workshops are partially sustained by state grants, the school, and proceeds from performances and book sales. "YO MISS!" follows the multimedia project (book, cd and performance) "Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America," written by Sloan and Lehrer which was culled from complex weaving of impersonations and recordings. It contained oral histories drawn from years of interviews in Queens with immigrants and refugees who had migrated to the US before and after 9/11 and won the 2004 Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Art Society of NY.

Judith Sloan's website is www.earsay.org.

Photo Credit: Kate Hess

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