Voices of Community

Khouragi/Foreigner

Living Memory/ Living Abcence

Don't Start Me To Talking or I'll Tell You Everything I Know

Weights

Voices Of Community

Theater as Social Activism

Anisa George  (Nazareth, PA)

March 14-15, 8PM

Khouraji/Foreigner 

Directed by Jennie Gilrain

A brave, beautifully told account of being Baha’i and of George’s search for god in Iran, where the Baha’i faith was founded and where Baha’is are persecuted. Her odyssey smoothly balances humor and sorrow, punchy and poetic words, sacred and secular questions of faith in a solo performance that the Morning Call called  “tack-sharp…as delicate and complex as a cat’s cradle.”
Anisa will also be at Sandglass from March 10-15  through a National Performance Network residency grant. She will be available for workshops and discussions with community groups and schools.

Anida Yoeu Ali  (Chicago, IL)              

March 28-29, 8PM

Living Memory/Living Absence

is an experimental movement theater piece conceived, written and performed by Anida Yoeu Ali. It is an exploration of memory and exile, and the pain of these experiences within the bodies of genocide survivors. In this interdisciplinary piece Anida performs poetry with movement inspired by Butoh set against a video backdrop of the sites and sounds of her memories of Cambodia. Anida’s performance traces her poetic fears of returning to her birth country The joy she feels immersed in ancient Khmer traditions clashes with the irreversible legacy of a genocide that lingers in the streets.

Anida’s work is haunting, both in its beauty and its rawness – a sensitive exploration of both aesthetics and of the interface where these two extremes meet, the area of conflict where so many original and creative possibilities are hatched. After watching her work, audience members have declared, “you
are left feeling like the parent who has conceived a child, held him or her for a few hours, only to have the child ripped away from you, to be left only holding memories of what was mixed with curiosity in what could have been.

John O'Neal   (New Orleans, LA)              

April 11-12, 8PM

Don't Start Me To Talking or I'll Tell You Everything I Know

Junebug’s artistic director John O’Neal founded the Free Southern Theater in 1963—the cultural arm of the civil rights movement. He continues to represent the culture of the Black Belt South with productions that feature the folk character Junebug Jabbo Jones, who hails from a long line of African storytellers. John O'Neal stars as the mythic Junebug who tells six tales recounting his bittersweet boyhood in the cotton fields of Pike County, Mississippi, humorous coming of age stories, and touching anecdotes about leaving home and growing old.
John will also be in residence at Sandglass from April 6-12 through a collaborative partnership between the Network of Cultural Centers of Color and the National Performance Network. He will be available to conduct story circle workshops on civil rights movements.

Lynn Manning   (Los Angeles, CA)              

May 16-17,8PM

Weights

In Weights Lynn Manning, a former blind judo champion, enacts the true story of how he became blinded in a shooting in a Hollywood bar, and of how his impoverished childhood in South Central L.A. prepared him to bear the weight of the instant destruction of his dream of becoming a visual artist. Laced with humor and hairpin turns, Weights is the story of a L.A. native son’s triumphant struggle to reclaim his independence. Manning plays all the characters in this extraordinary solo performance.

For reservations please email info@sandglasstheater.org

or call (802) 387-4051