The
11 students slouching in their chairs at the Center
for Cultural
Exchange dress and act like typical American teen-agers.
The boys wear droopy, oversized pants and baseball caps
a la rap stars. The girls have on chunky shoes and bell
bottoms. They titter easily, goof off and don't pay
attention.
Still,
they are different.
Nearly all of
these middle and high school students have lived in the
United States for less than five years. They come from
Cuba, Venezuela, Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, El Salvador
and Puerto Rico.
These
students were selected for the Youth Initiative Project
at the Center for Cultural Exchange because they are not
typical American teen-agers. This new programs designed
to give minority youths a means for expressing their experiences
and to help them learn performing-arts traditions.
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group of local students, three girls and eight boys, have
spent the past 10 days working with Hispanic performance
artist Jose Torres Tama every afternoon for three hours
at the center. They have written their own theater pieces,
which have been woven together into "Media and My
American Self: A Performance on the Verge of an Identity
Crisis." They will perform it at 8 tonight at the
center before Torres Tama's one-man show "We Are Patriots
in Dark Faces."On a recent afternoon, Josephine Carlo
and Zurmina Cisneros prowled the center's small stage and
blasted the rest of the group with their electric performance.
Carlo forcefully repeated, "I am a young African woman."
Cisnero queried the audience, "Are you black or white?"
The piece, created by the two young women, was as stridently
political as it was poetic at moments. It was one of the
few moments the cadre of baseball-capped boys quit joking
and snickering. |
Mary
Schmaling above, listens to feedback from other
group members after reading her poem.
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Arim
Taffere rehearses his role with performance artist Jose
Torres Tama, right.
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Most of all
I think it's fun," Cisnero said. "I really like
expressing myself."
"I
think (this program) is really great," Carlo said
during a break. "(Torres Tama) gives us an opportunity
to come up and say what's inside."
"Yeah,
like people ask me, 'Are you black or white?'" Cisnero
said.
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The
Youth Initiative Project programs are designed to teach
students traditional arts of their culture, such as traditional
Cambodian dance. In contrast, Torres Tama, an Ecuadorian
native who lives in New Orleans, has had to teach the
most contemporary and ambiguous of genres - performance
art. Although performance art has been around since the
beginning of the century, it still has an undefinable,
anything-goes element about it. Performance art can resemble
rituals, stand-up comedy, dance or straight theater. A
defining element of performance art, however, is that
the performer creates his own work. It's quite a daunting
takes, having them write pieces on issues of identity,
race and television, and introducing them to conceptualizing
their own pieces," Torres Tama said.
Torres
Tama showed the students a video of his own one-man show,
which mixes advertising jingles and corporate slogans
with rituals of fire and bilingual poetry, as well as
videos of performances he's helped create with other teenagers
in other cities. Although performance art can be a lot
to swallow in such a short amount of time, Torres Tama
said he's had no trouble mining the creative energies
of the students and their experiences as outsiders.
"It's
at the surface for these youths, these questions of identity,"
Torres Tama said. "At this age, you are trying to
find some kind of identity for yourself. The situation
is exacerbated more when you are an immigrant child."
Each
class starts with deep-breathing exercises. As the students
inhale and exhale, Torres Tama extols self-love. "I
want you to take a deep breath and think of how special
you are because you have multiple cultures," he called
out during a session this week.
Then
the students started rehearsing. The four baseball-capped
boys slouched in their chairs, cracked jokes and jammed
their hands in their pockets. When they took their turns
on stage, they couldn't say their lines without laughing.
Torres
Tama was undeterred. He brought Arim Taffere on stage,
had him kneel and gently rinse his face with water as
Carlo and Cisneros ranted their lines behind him. The
baseball-capped boys snickered. Finally, despite his best
efforts, Taffere cracked up.. Taferre protested that he
couldn't concentrate.
Torres
Tama was unfazed.
"Whether
they think it is silly or not, doesn't matter, because
we are creating art here," Torres Tama said.
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