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EMERGING
VOICES The lights went dim, and the audience watched 12-year-old Rana McLeary walk to center stage. She is a calm, quiet girl her father sometimes calls "mousy." Then she started screaming. "My mouth is open! I am silently screaming! I hate screaming although sometimes it is all I can do to be heard, the world deaf to these sounds of fear, agony and sadness!" McLeary's voice pushed the wide-eyed parents to the backs of their seats as if by sound waves alone. "Mousy" was out the window. While she strutted about onstage, hands on her hips and wearing a white bandanna, McLeary's parents in the audience heard a voice from their daughter they never knew existed. In fact, it was there at "Images of Youth," a teen performance project Saturday at Out North Contemporary Art House, that McLeary found it. "At school, I am nonexistent," she said. "I suggest things, and people don't listen. They ignore me. I'm hoping things will change when I go to eighth grade. People will know me as a girl who yells, a wild screaming girl. I'm just saying that I have something to say. I'm screaming and not heard -- silently screaming." After the show -- a 10-scene ensemble written and performed by 12- to 16-year-olds -- McLeary and her parents met in the seats and hugged. "I always knew she had a voice," her mother, Brenda, said. "I just never heard it so well-thought-out, so grown-up." Rana's father, Fred, laughed and added, "Yeah. So teenage." But being a teenager is exactly what Images of Youth is about. Director Jose Torres Tama and video artist Kelly Wilbur channeled the everyday angst that is adolescence into one part theater, one part musical, one part movie -- what Tama dubs a "live, collective ensemble piece." But the show touched on not-so-adolescent topics like the myth of the American Dream, crass materialism and even the death of a friend from a drug overdose. Each student wrote poetry, stories and rants. Then they juxtaposed each student's works and created an ensemble, a collage of ranting accompanied by a background video the students shot and edited. A screen behind the stage showed girls blindfolded by the American flag, students trapped inside a television and magazine cutouts of fashion models. "Some of this stuff is just brilliant," Wilbur said. "It gives me a charge to see them develop. At school they aren't able to express themselves like this. They are told to sit down, shut up and write what they did last summer." Indeed, "Images of Youth" was a walk in raw artistic expression, guided by Wilbur and Tama during the three-week workshop. For four hours every weekday, Tama gathered the students in a circle to shake their bodies and howl like wolves. They discussed how the media, pop culture and television have invaded their lives. A white dry-erase board showcases their collective brainstorm with words like "prototype," "paradigm" and "perfection." Then they put their thoughts to paper, creating vignettes on greed, commercialism and true beauty. The result was scenes like "Fat Santa Man," a poem by Rebecca Barker on materialism in which she is a "clothes glutton and The Gap is her restaurant." There was "Marilyn Monroe or Marilyn Manson," a rant by Shell Purdy questioning the American dream. After all, how can everyone in such a diverse country want the same thing? "They can't," Purdy said. "An addict dreams of his next high, not a big house -- it's all relative." "Images of Youth" is the latest on Tama's long list of youth performance projects in the country over the past seven years. The son of an immigrant mother from Ecuador, Tama has long been fascinated with the American dream. As a Latino immigrant, he is in a unique position to examine that dream's mythology and fallacies. He effectively pulls American children from the trees to look at the forest. "I'm teaching these kids to think critically, to be critical of the lies of the media, to be critical of the government, critical of authority," Tama said. "Parents see a side of their teens they have never seen before. It's a kind of an epiphany. They see their teens in an intellectual light. They see their teens express emotions and think critically. This performance art is a kind of subversive humor, and teens get this." At least these teens got it. In one of the highlights of the show, the audience clapped in rhythm while Rachelle Smith and Robyn Pucay sang their own lyrics to the Des'ree song "You Gotta Be." Gotta be smart, gotta be rich, better be suave now Need a big house, need a big car, need a big sal-ar-y Cannot be poor, cannot need help, have to be perfect All I know, all I know: Wealth will save the day. The girls titled their song simply "Be" because they have learned they don't gotta be anything. "I've always had a picture of the American dream: big family, big house, car, dog," said Pucay, 14. "But that is TV. They portray a perfect world that doesn't exist. America is trying to tell you to be a certain kind of person, and that's stressful." Television was a hot target for the students Saturday, just as television and advertising companies have targeted teenagers as consumers, they said. In "Television Girls Rebel," the nine girls of the group struck back at an idiot box of supermodels that makes them feel inferior and the advertising that makes them feel incomplete. "TV always pictures blacks and Latinos living in ghettos, and that's not right," Rachelle said. "Life is not the Brady Bunch. And all girls don't have to be blond-hair, blue-eyed with big boobs." "Guys put a lot of pressure on us to be Britney Spears," Laken Amberg added. "WE ARE NOT Britney Spears. If we didn't have MTV, the world would be a better place. Seriously." Other than Laken's recommendation, the students offered no answers or solutions on Saturday. Their time at Out North was one part angst-ridden artist, one part carefree kids on summer break. In a scene that called for the actors to synchronize use of their flashlights in the darkened theater, they became like Jedi knights turned to the dark side, flashing their lights at all the wrong times and loving it. But after settling down, the cast created a legitimate performance through the medium of contemporary art. "Kids learn all the classics in school: Shakespeare, Mozart, etc.," said Jay Brause, Out North director. "They miss out on contemporary art and literature, which is what we can expose them to, often for the first time." Instead of the traditional route (auditioning for a part in a play or musical), these teenagers scripted their words, memorized their lines and mounted a production -- something professional actors may never do, let alone in the span of three weeks. "This is the difference between a cover band and a real band: writing your own stuff," Brause said. "What really takes guts is to tell a story that maybe their parents have never heard. The most important part of these shows is always after, when parents get to greet their kids onstage and see them in this new light." Midway through the show, 13-year-old Summer Hamrick took the stage for her solo scene, "Emptiness." She cried for her sister, who left home after fights with her mother. She screamed that a birthday card from her sister every three years doesn't cut it, that she needed more than an annual phone call, that her mom and sister could have worked it out if they wanted to. In the audience a woman sucked in her breath and covered her face. Her daughter's words were too powerful, and she began to cry. After the show, mother Michelle Hamrick was the first to greet Summer with a bouquet of roses. Her eyes wet, she beamed down at her daughter. "We talked about her sister a little, but I never knew it affected her so much," Michelle said, her voice a bit shaky. "I am so proud of her for doing this. I'm so glad she let it out." Jon E. Miller is a free-lance journalist living in Anchorage. |
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Narrative
|| Biography || 2003
Spring/Summer Residencies & Tour || Recent
Touring History |