Evento

Crossing the BLVD: Crossing The Cultural Divide

A multi-media performance
(proceeds to benefit EarSay's non-profit work with immigrant teenagers)

Performed by JUDITH SLOAN with guest actors RITI SATCHDEVA, VICHET CHUM, ASHLEIGH AWUSIE, JULIAN ROZZELL.

As immigration policy is hotly debated around the country in terms of national and cultural security Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America presents the human stories of why immigrants and refugees have migrated to the US and what their experiences have been since they came here. Based on Lehrer and Sloan's critically acclaimed book, actors channel many of the people that the couple interviewed on their three-year journey around the world through the borough of Queens, New York. The performance is illuminated by projections of Lehrer's stunning photographs along with an original soundtrack of music and sounds, including Sloan's audio mixes, music by Scott Johnson and Gogol Bordello.

Home to the New York airports, Queens,is no longer made up of neatly partitioned ethnic enclaves. oday the choreography of Queens, a place where residents speak 138 different languages, is one of chaotic co-existence. This group portrait of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial community is a magnifying glass for the future of America. Above all, Crossing the BLVD is a celebration of resilient, prismatic character in search of home.

Sloan will present a short excerpt from Yo Miss! opening for the Crossing the BLVD performance accompanied by Andrew Griffin. Judith Sloan is a masterful actor/dialectician and a sublime sound artist. In Yo Miss! Sloan blends her gifts as a world of immigrant teens dances before our eyes in a fusion of theatre, radio, poetry and music. Her empathy and perceptiveness have the potential to inspire muchneeded
understanding amid the inflammatory rhetoric that outweighs in our current political climate.

Crossing the BLVD: Winner of the Brendan Gill Prize Municipal Art Society of NY
and the BAXten Artist Award

WHAT THE PRESS HAS SAID:

"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'." The Washington Post, Lynn Duke

"Crossing the BLVD is a whirlwind tour and love poem of what has often been called the most racially and ethnically diverse county in America. In the tradition of the playwright Anna Deavere Smith, Ms. Sloan performs "Crossing the BLVD" adopting the personae (and respectfully mimicking the accents) of the varied immigrants whose stories are in the book). The New York Times, City Room Blog, Sewell Chan

"Crossing boldly carries the tradition of oral history into the 21st Century. Electrifying!" Eve Ensler author The Vagina Monologues

Featured as a "Global Hit"
"An incredible and moving story Sloan and Lehrer spent three years talking to immigrants and refugees in Queens, traveling the world, in a sense, while never leaving their backyard a place where new immigrants from every corner of the globe come to start their lives in America. The result is a unique multi-media project. Oral History with a twist!
The World, PRI/BBC Marco Werman

"Behind the drab storefronts and nondescript homes that define the borough, Sloan and Lehrer discover a soulful place teaming with immigrants from Mexico to Australia whose stories unfold in a kaleidoscope of color"
CNN