October 2010
Jewels from the Mouths of Babes
By: Jean Schiffman
It started as an ancestors project for Alice (Arts and Literacy In Children's Education), a program for kids in the Oakland public schools. The participants--third-graders from minority and immigrant communities--were given a list of questions for interviewing their elders. The resulting oral histories were so simple and so powerful, says Helen Stoltzfus, who founded Alice seven years ago, that she was inspired to turn them into a performance piece.
Now, for its initial outing, Alice Presents (the program's professional producing arm) offers "Burning Libraries: Stories from the New Ellis Island," a pungent, multidisciplinary blend of text, dance, aerial arts, puppets, video effects and original music. Written and directed by Stoltzfus, with sound score by her partner, Albert Greenberg, it premieres on Theater Artaud's expansive Mission District stage, prior to further performances at Laney College Theatre in Oakland and, the producers hope, a future tour.
"The stories are from Laos, China, East Texas, Mexico--the world!" declares Stoltzfus. Short--some a mere 30 seconds--and succinct, they're read in voice-over by actors and native speaker Of the 4- to 500 stories originally collected, Stoltzfus culled about 35, selecting for variety, balance and eloquence. In one, a Vietnamese father washes refugees during the war. In another, a young mother escapes Russia with her baby. There are stories set in a kitchen in Yemen, around a campfire in Liberia, in cotton fields, in the segregated compartment of a train chugging its way from Louisiana to Oakland.
"They're not all pretty," says Stoltzfus. "There are wonderful, whimsical stories, stories of hardship, stories that are funny or everyday--the full human range." She edited them, but changed no words, discovering such poetic turns of phrase as, "I could smell the rain and the sadness of leaving my country." "These are truly invisible stories that never get told," she says. And because the children literally wrote the responses to the questions, some stories are spare and direct: "The Story. Very very poor. No food. No pets. Not much money. Was born in Texas. No jobs. Had to find sticks for a fire. Very hot." Or: "When my grandma was three she was scared of being cut by the knives …"
To theatricalize the tiny, jewel-like tales, Stoltzfus and Greenberg looked to their artistic roots. Composer, playwright and sometime performer Greenberg was a cofounder and longtime co-artistic director of San Francisco's A Traveling Jewish Theatre (now renamed the Jewish Theatre); performer/director/playwright Stoltzfus was also a co-artistic director. "This is coming out of our longtime theatrical language," explains Greenberg, "but this time we've abstracted it out with movement and aerial work… . We've always worked non-naturalistically and non-linearly. There's always been music and poetry in the work we do. We always define space by light."
"I was drawn to circus arts," adds Stoltzfus. "Combining that with storytelling, not in a literal way but in an imagistic way, was so exciting. I saw this piece somewhat happening in the air." Thus Burning Libraries' stories are embodied by an ensemble of two dancers--Saigon-born Danny Nguyen, who escaped as a boat person, and Jesus Cortez, who began his dance career in Mexico City--and two aerialists: Kerri Kresinski (cofounder/performer in San Francisco's Sweet Can Circus) and Susan M. Voyticky (who teaches aerial arts at San Francisco's Circus Center). All four will manipulate three puppets, called Rosita, Chin and Kadisha, who were created by local puppetmaster Antonio Echeverria; they are the size of the top half of seven-year-old bodies. There's additional choreographic input from Kim Epifano, plus a backdrop of video images, created by lighting designer Dustin Snyder, that suggest, in nuanced and impressionistic ways, the atmospheres of the stories. For example, a dripping faucet and red-yellow lighting enhances a story about a trek across a parched Mexican desert, evoking a sense of heat and thirst.
To create a score for the many cultures and ethnicities depicted, Greenberg used found music and also composed original music. For each story, multiple choices existed initially. But the project is collaborative, and as he listened to the readers, and as Stoltzfus worked with the performers, the score continued to evolve. For example, instead of a planned Fats Waller organ piece to accompany one story, Greenberg ended up with a jazz tap number. In the same way that the performers are interpreting the stories imagistically, so too does the music.
Transitions are fluid throughout the approximately hour-long performance, stories moving seamlessly from one to the other. "You don't realize you're in another piece until the lights and music shift and now we're in Russia, or Texas," explains Stoltzfus. She arranged them according to mood and feeling: "Certain pieces lend themselves to following others. I didn't want to stay in any one emotional field for too long." The piece has the arc of a true life experience, she and Greenberg agree; the little individual journeys form one whole emotional journey. "A certain kind of completion just happens," muses Greenberg. "It builds like a composer builds a piece, or the way an abstract dance piece has its aesthetic integrity."
Stoltzfus labels the Alice Presents creative process "slow theater." It's about honoring the marinating process, she says. It took six years for her to digest the text for "Burning Libraries"--a title that refers to a West African saying: "If you die with your story untold, that's like a library burning down."
The two producers have their own stories. Greenberg, whose family escaped Russia, grew up Jewish on the south side of Chicago, near the steel mills, mingling with African-Americans and Serbian and Mexican immigrants; Stoltzfus, raised Mennonite in Virginia, heard stories of her pacifist great-grandmother crossing a raging river, baby in her arms, the gunfire of the Civil War behind her. "Knowing who my ancestors were, good, bad or indifferent, that's part of me," she says, "and it's part of what's fed me wanting to do Burning Libraries. It does matter where you come from, especially in a place like this, where so many of us have left somewhere to be here."
"If you want to educate a kid, you grab their imaginative life," adds Greenberg. "With this, the Vietnamese hear the stories of the African-Americans who hear the stories of the Guatemalans who hear the story of the East Texan who hears the Yemenite story. The great part of this country is the Ellis Island part, and that's transformative for them. It's not just your story. Yeah, we're honoring your story, but others', too. We're all in this.
"All we can do is honor these people's lives as best we can," he concludes, "without trying to inflate, or deflate, them. Let their stories be told!"
Nov. 4-14, Z Space at Theater Artaud, 450 Florida St. (800) 838-3006/(510) 762-2220.
www.brownpapertickets.com
www.alicearts.org