 I'm going to tell you a little bit about this show before I punch into the very short excerpt that I'm going to show you. The show, the play is called Industrious Angels. And it was born at the Co-Festival of Performance. Yes. In Amherst, Massachusetts. In Amherst, Massachusetts. And it was nurtured, and that's my home away from home, right? It was nurtured at my home theater, the Bloomsburg Theater Ensemble in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. And the way it came about was I was driving to Amherst because I had maybe foolishly signed up for a course in making solo theater. And this was a real sort of bold choice on my part because when I make theater, I make it in collaboration with my theater company. I never created a solo show before. And I was also driving with a really guilty conscience because I was supposed to come up with an idea. And I had been, I had just pulled myself through and was now clear of a four-year collaboration with an Egyptian Shadow Public Theater Company, right? Which was a wonderful project and very difficult and very wonderful and very occupying. And so I was driving to Amherst with a relatively unoccupied mind, no idea. So I started thinking, okay, when my theater company makes work, we make work about the place where we live, what do I know about Amherst, Massachusetts? Well, Emily Dickinson lived there. Well, I'm not going to make a piece about Emily Dickinson. That's a good idea, right? That's a good idea, right? That's a good idea, right? That's a good idea, right? That's a good idea, right? So I get there and I took a tour of the Emily Dickinson house. We've done it before. It is marvelous. If you get to Amherst, of course, go to the co-festival, but also take a tour of the house. They've done a great job preserving it. The dozens are all brilliant. And they all quote poetry. Have you read poetry? It's just beautifully done. This time, as I stepped out of her bedroom, that bedroom where she wrote the close to 1800 poems that she wrote during her lifetime, mostly in secret, most of them never published, most of them found after her death hidden away in chests and drawers. As I stepped out of that bedroom into the hallway, I was hit by a flood of memory. One of the memories was that my mother read me Emily Dickinson poetry when I was little. And another memory was that I was actually reading an Emily Dickinson poem to my mother at the moment of her death. You know, this had to be explored. Another memory was that my mother, like Emily Dickinson, was a writer, unlike Emily Dickinson, who was very proud of her work. She knew she was good. My mother had a lot of self-doubts. Considered herself a failed writer because she didn't publish much in her lifetime. And after her death, I found her writing hidden away in chests and drawers. So I started working on the piece, and I found very quickly that probably a lot of you know this, probably most solo shows are never made alone. They're made in collaboration. And my collaborators were my incredibly imaginative scenic designer, Elaine Williams, who I've worked with for many years. And Elaine does a lot of designing for the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta. And we also use the crass people at the Center for Puppetry Arts to help create the really weird kind of special effects that I have in this show. The scenic element, it's as if it's a sort of shadowy attic room, workroom, playroom. It's filled with curio cabinets, desks, work tables. I do a lot of actual work in the course of the piece, paper folding, cutting, making shadow puppets while I'm talking to my listeners. And there are lots of drawers. Chests and drawers. Chests and drawers. Hiding places for mementos and unmentionables. Every time I open a drawer in this piece, a surprise pops out. I call Industries Angels, which is actually a quote from Emily Dickinson, a handcrafted shadow puppet memory plague with music that evokes the hidden creative lives of women, women's handiwork, mother-daughter bloodlines, and the ghost of Emily Dickinson. She appears as a little shadow puppet in my play. Now, I can't do most of the shadow work in here because, well, let's see why. But there is a lot of shadow work with little shadows and little creatures appearing on walls and disappearing and so on. We do not see that. I'll do the part that doesn't require that. Mama read poetry to me when I was little. Mama's not-so-secret plan for me was that I was going to grow up to be a world-famous poet and receive an honorary doctorate from the prestigious Smith College in Faraway, Massachusetts. Back in the 1940s, Mama had received a scholarship from the prestigious Smith College in Faraway, Massachusetts, but her parents couldn't afford the train fare from Kansas City, so she couldn't go. Mama read poetry to me at lunchtime while I ate my mac and cheese. The mac and cheese was meant to fortify my bones. The poetry was meant to grow me into a better person. The poetry was meant to fortify my soul or grow me into a world-famous poet. This is a world-famous poem. By a world-famous poet says Mama. My favorite poet says Mama. Emily Dickinson. She reads the poem to me. This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me. The simple news that nature told with tender majesty. Her message is committed to hands I cannot see for love of her sweet country name. Judge tenderly of me. What does the poem mean? Says Mama. How does the poet express her meaning? Says Mama. Would you write a poem on the same subject? Says Mama. Says Emily Dickinson. Book of poems. We have the same favorite poem. I read one of her poems to Mama. A solitude of space. A solitude of sea. A solitude of death. These society shall be compared with that founder's site. That polar privacy. I'm glad it's fast to fit. But I will just say that as I get older I can't see a damn thing. So I go to write it and I get multiples of these. Good. Okay, and I'm just going to talk and check something while I'm talking. But it didn't take that long. So it was interesting for me to do something. Really, I have to cheat. A year ago at the Co-Festival before I had, and it really helped shape it in terms of the lighting, and it taught me something about how lighting can change how you decide to move and where the focus is. But we don't have Sabrina's wonderful lighting here. But I also continue to work on it since then with Morgan Genest refining and tightening everything. So what I'm going to do is I feel like I need to explain something. And I'm cutting inside things so if it feels like a character didn't finish their whole story that's because I'm not finishing. But I wanted to just show some elements of how I'm using all these voices and how that's led to other things. The only thing I would like you to know is that normally I have a little keyboard on stage which I play as well as trigger. I have a foot pedal which is sometimes seen and sometimes not. So working with people who are helping me choreograph and like when am I really stepping on it and when am I just walking up and the sound happens. And then there's this thing which is much easier to travel within a rural area. So I'm going to do a few excerpts. Here's a story about a girl, a grandmother, a teacher, a student. There's a woman in college. There's a girl in high school who's working in a restaurant. There's a 12-year-old 15-year-old 22-year-old woman from Russia, Croatia, Tokyo, Mexico. There's a story about a woman, a man, a girl, a boy, a child, a lover, a father, an uncle, a daughter, a real child waiting for her. A 9-year-old daughter, a 16-year-old brother, a 48-year-old grandmother from Queens, Bula, New Haven, Buffalo, looking, waiting for papers, waiting for an answer, waiting for immigration, waiting for the petition, waiting for the answer from the papers that were filed with INS, B-C-I-S, U-S-C-I-S, Homeland Security, the government, the agency, the agency in Nevada, New York, New Hampshire, it's a post office and a dress somewhere else. What's the answer? The green card from the SATs, E-L-A-S-G-R-E What's your status? In the country at the country your mother, father, sister, brother, she wants to go back, can't go, can't go to the chef. I was wondering if maybe she should leave, maybe go, maybe stay, maybe leave, looking and longing, waiting to find somewhere that's home, waiting to find somewhere that's home. And then the lights shift, and then the lights shift, and then the lights shift, and then the lights shift, a new character for you. So that'll happen to a nice reason. Yes! Do you remember? We're just doing the stories, like she ain't like me. Daughter is my, child is another in you, Daughter is me. So she goes on to talk a little bit more and make the interconnection with whoever this woman is. She just keeps salt in her but not to direct and rush to direct a high school class with new and new teenagers. The only reason I wanted to do the Queen's thing is because the themes of home, Queens, which is a borough that was neglected for a long time, and other things keep coming back over and over. And names, what's the meaning of your name? So those keep coming back, but I'll cut to a part where I end up, end up on the project I run with immigrant teenagers. I get there, and not one of them has their lines memorized. Half of them are running around the room playing games. You don't understand, there's gonna be a performance in two weeks. You see, they're all new. I tell them you're drunk. I don't get it. There's hope at the bottom. The kids take care, the rest of the kids are lying down on the floor, glimpsed, drowsy eyes. I'm exhausted. So I lie down on the floor with them, I'll use this tool. Very mature. All right, seven, three days ago. Oh, you don't miss, yeah, okay. Really, I'm feeling like a broken-down train. One of the many things going through my mind besides the fact that I almost died in a car accident was who's gonna take over my youth program if I die? I was saying this to the kids, and I said, you were all supposed to have your lines memorized by today, focus. It's what I tell the kids all the time, no matter what's going on, focus. I was making them work too hard. They tell me they're exhausted from having to speak English all day. Miss, when I talk in English, I have to use so much energy of me. In your language, you don't have to think, but when you use the English words, you have to think and talk. So it's like two kinds of energy you use. And also when I go home, I speak in my language, my teeth, my tongue, my mouth, everything is so relaxing. Okay, so I put these groups aside, and I asked them to sing in their own languages, say songs, whatever they want, but you wouldn't understand us. You said, well, you'd be surprised. If you sit up and you do it, why do you need it? Someone from Nigeria sings a song. The girls start showing and clapping games in your own language. They are brilliant. They are relaxed. They are relaxed. I get it, but before it's the point of time. Became an original kind of shamanist now. Money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money. I'm going to go home, and I'm going to mix these into a track, and we'll make a movement piece, and your own languages are going to be the soundscape, and you won't have to speak English. I don't know why I need to do this. I'm so proud of myself, so I go home to my little studio, which is here, it would be a little cute. And I mix these into a track. Money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money. He says, that's cool. It's like hip hop. I'm just saying all that. You don't even know the kids. I made that track for the kids, and I already made that track, and that's like stealing. He says, it's not stealing. It's re-creating. What you're doing is like hip hop. Uh-uh. What I'm doing is only to do with hip hop. I'm just recording original things that I've done myself, and then I'm making beats out of that. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know if I got paid. Or on the Beatles, right? Or James Brown. What? Money you can have, like a lot of guys with the ego, and a lot of misogyny, you know? Like, you know, using a half naked woman to sell up. The history, it's a whole culture. Hip hop is an art form that grew out of the fires in the Bronx, and came into the light when there was a blackout in New York City in 1977. 1977. This was just the way young people made something out of nothing. Born out of desperation. Born out of desperation. I can relate to that. Then he says, we need to go to rock house concerts. Hell yeah, here's the line. Ghost base, met the man Q-Tip, and hip hop. I wonder why he named himself Q-Tip. Oh, my boy, immortal technique. I never heard of him, so I go to rock the bells concert, and I hear immortal technique. I'll say it's an eight. Interesting. Then talking heads, day to burn, once in a lifetime. That's all. Everything stopped making sense. It was as if you were hitting all the trees, and the branch is now asking myself, well, yeah. The school's so really good. Thank you. That was a college. It's had an A&M in high school, obsessed with these kids. My name is Louise Licklack. Duke, I saw your show at the Teenage Runaway to Deputy Shabra for pulling the whistle on police brutally. Your characters are wonderful. I run all of the programs in New York City for the alternative schools, and these kids are a hands-breath away from going to jail. and you would fit right in. I mean, your characters would be wonderful. And I'd run all the programs for your English speakers. Okay, cool, right? Steady gay, go off the road, running, come on, you're all artists. You're gonna do a nice little lie. So, Louise walks me through the fingerprinting process at the New York City Board of Education. The woman behind the desk tells me it's going to take three months to get my fingerprints back. Why so long? First we have to log in friends. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. There is a box for my day to birth. And then there's a box that says D-O-D-1. Sitting for an education, I get to choose my day. Walk into the auditorium. Institution, jail but school. You've been in one of these places. I'm here to teach writing juggling theater. Start juggling schemas. Why are they wearing them? It's over 75 degrees in here. They're wild running around, hopping over the chairs, jumping on the stage. The guard in charge can't control them. What's made you do it? Nervous. They're too close. I can't see their faces. Well, for now I say these other guys want to learn how to juggle. That's bullshit. If you want to do it here, they take off the mask. I'll teach you how to juggle and if you can't do it within the hour, then we write. Otherwise, we just do it right now. Three, two, one. Excellent. I'm older than most of their mothers. If you're 30, you're older than most of their mothers. Tina doesn't know his mother. He ends up writing. I'm a person. I'm a person who is dark. I'm a person with an incarcerated mother. I'm a person who got into a lot of trouble in junior high. I'm a person who likes to draw. I'm a person who likes the Yankees. Judith says she likes the Yankees. I like that Judith likes the Yankees. I am a person who is kind. But no one inside here knows this. Marquis writes I only fight when someone fights me and all the ladies love me. What good is this gonna do us when we get out? Sticking with something until you finish? It's about not giving up. But what good is this gonna do us? Us when we get out? Who knows? Maybe some of you might end up becoming writers. Oh, man. What good is this gonna do us when we get out? Have you got anything better to do right now? You're in jail. Then I say you'll discover something that can keep you sane. S says I want to go back to crackers. I don't believe it. I want to go back to jail, jail, watch TV. I don't believe it. What about you? You gonna write something? I was old and in the 7th grade. About a big black girl named Mary who was 16 and in the 7th grade. I remember eating a boy. And I wrote about my father dying of a Christmas vacation. He and I had the flu. I got better. That sick girl went to the hospital and died three days later drowning in his own life. 38 years old. 48. And I wrote how the day I came back to school, Mary kicked the boy out in the seat across from me and said, hey, Sloane, are you your father died? I couldn't speak all I could do was not. Mine too, she said. And I wrote about how out of the 67 white kids at that mostly black junior high school I was one of the few white kids who didn't get beat up. You lucky, Miss. Lucky because of Mary? No. Because you had a father that loves you. Day, he's right. I'm lucky. I'm going home to a big strong man. What it takes to get out. I'm going to leave that excerpt there. And what happens in the play is that as it goes along the relationship between me and a Muslim girl that explained about English kind of starts intersecting. And as I keep working with kids over the years they ask me about my life. I reveal a little more when I feel like it's important because something is missing in the story and end up revealing the truth about my grandmother's suicide which was probably connected to why my father kind of just sank and dropped dad but it ends up opening up this other girl's story to me at the end of the play. And a lot of very crazy and I don't mean crazy like you know, wild but just things that aren't typical stories happen like a Muslim kid inside a school cuts off the pony tail a Muslim kid from Pakistan cuts off the pony tail of a sea kid from India. So what I'm doing is I'm talking about the border countries like China and Tibet the Jewish kids from the Bukharian Jewish kids from Tajikistan and the Muslim kids from Afghanistan. So it ended up being a lot of what I was dealing with and Morgan and Warren and a couple other people really pushed me and Tori, the guy that says that's cool he comes back at the end of the play also kept pushing me to just write the truth, you know, and that was my kind of draw to hip-hop was basically the audience what gets revealed is that I grew up and I lived through two deaths in a fire by the time I was 15 in New Haven and there were, hip-hop was growing up out of fires in the Bronx at the same time so those kinds of things but I wanted to do like a somewhat coherent section for today and I have no idea if there's like four more minutes of time but I was going to see if it was possible to do something with multiple voices with you with anybody who's game and what this project has led me to so you see I'm using like Ableton Live and say a whole lot of things and I'm a radio producer so I'm doing this but I'm doing it in a symphony where I recorded people in Arabic and Chinese and Russian and peppered that as the echo of what was happening in the symphonic song stuff and so I do have five scripts of something if there are three, even three or four five people that are gay if anybody, does anyone speak another language anything, it doesn't matter what language Mandarin, can you do like where are you from on the fly yeah and Spanish and anyone else speak another language Persian and French French, if you four wouldn't mind just coming up here and you're going to see and then I'm going to teach something to the audience and we're just going to do a little tiny section of it so it was written for and while I'm handing it out and it can look everything is blue is what you're going to have I hope Morgan's going to do some cities toward the end it's multiple parts the black is sung so I'm going to speak the sung part for now but I'm going to also just teach everybody one of the sung parts are we just doing this part I'm just going to say that we're only reading in the blue say you can pick one of them you can say it in English if you can do it in Chinese, great but you don't have to wait a minute why don't you just do the Chinese here at the top this can all be in English and while that blue and orange is in English and that way it'll be easier is that okay, do you want one are we going to move down because we'll go down the road with the speaking and I'll do the very first just to get us going with someone can you do it in Chinese and then Spanish and then Persian so this is what it ended up being like but we had Arabic Chinese so your part is you go and it's quiet so it's four times this is my story and this is my home and four times this is my story and this is my song you can hold the note and I know there are some singers here so you can feel free to harmonize but the basic goes like this this is my story and this is my home this is my story and this is my home this is my story and this is my home this is my story and this is my home this is my story and this is my song this is my story and this is my song this is my story and this is my song this is my story and this is my song this is my story and this is my song this is my story and this is my song And for any of you that want to harmonize inside that, that's great. So when I point to you, that happens. There's one other song part that we'll all do at the end, which is just this. I'm from It comes at the end. So I'm gonna cut through this. So it starts this, this, this, this, this is not. There's lots of music. Not, not, not. There's also projections. This is not. Not. This is. This is not. Not. Not. This is not. This is not a movie. This is my story and this is my song. This is my story and this is my song. This is my story and this is my home. This is my story and this is my home. And it's gone. This is my story and this is my song. This is my story and this is my song. This is my story and this is my song. This is my story and this is my song. I'm from Venezuela. My shirt is from old Navy. Maybe in Pakistan, I bought it in Queens. I'm from where the Algonquin language once lived. I'm from the swamp land filled in by dirt. I'm from the place where the glacier stopped. This is awesome. From where the housing market dropped. From where we eat tomatoes from Mexico, chocolate from Switzerland, drink coffee from Brazil. Where am I from? You really want to know? Where? Where? Where? Chocolate coffee. Great. You got it. Can you do the slew? I'm from... I'm from Sorrow's Kitchen. Let's just do English. I'm from Hotness. I'm from the place of rice and dumplings. Where it is? The place I'm from? The place where I just came from? Before. Before. After. Samba. Samba. I'm from Samba. Samba is where I'm from? The Mediterranean Sea. From violence, that's the space. I'm from a warm place. My mother's car. Where I come from, you wouldn't know. Right here in this country, from the drone of cicadas and dry grass. From the purple mountain's majesty. No, really. That's where I come from. The place in the song. The song. But shut up. The Nile River. My old house. Wow. Struggled in black music and Pittsburgh. The light from the sun as it reflects off my window. I'm from the place where other girls are wearing scarves. The rice in the mud. A box of old photos under my parents' bed. A blue doge caravan. It's true. The 11th floor. Straight cast under the window. Where frogs eat frogs. Through the page and go to the blue. I can't everybody do that. This is my story really crowded again. This is my story. This is my song. This is my story. This is my song. I'm from where mangoes fall to the ground. This is my story. Where you climb the shells and make a nest of gold. This is my song. Playing baseball with carpets for basins. Playing cricket with garbage cans and sticks. This is my story. Montgomery Damanchi beat you by my father. Nemo. Michael Jackson's thriller on the thine. The current carefee of mountains. The current carefee of mountains. Sheherazade's castle. Yak butter in front of a powerhouse. A beautiful land. A beautiful land. The smell of sand after raining. 1001 voices to keep me alive. Everyone, I'm from Babylon. Black guys, thank you very much. Black guys, thank you very much. Thank you.