Reinventing the one-person genre, playwright May Lee-Yang enlists the talents of performance artist Katie Vang and director Robert Farid Karimi to give voice to her personal story of a Hmong woman who feels silenced living in the U.S
Center for Hmong Art and Talent and kaotic good productions present:
Sia(b)
a journey for the Hmong Heart
Written by May Lee-Yang
Performed by May Lee-Yang and Katie Ka Vang
Directed by Robert Karimi
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Sia = Hmong word for “life”
Siab = commonly believed to be the Hmong word for “heart”
Siab = in reality, the Hmong word for “liver”
Reinventing the one-person genre, playwright May Lee-Yang enlists the talents of performance artist Katie Vang and director Robert Farid Karimi to give voice to her personal story of a Hmong woman who feels silenced living in the U.S. For a community who has historically been searching for home, Lee-Yang’s story shows how we can all find our voices, our center, by remembering the community around us.
-Saint Paul Pioneer Press
WHEN/WHERE:
Saturday, May 30 at 8pm
Sunday, May 31 at 4pm
Wednesday, June 3 at 8pm (Pay-What-You-Can)
Thursday-Saturday, June 4-6 at 8pm
Sunday, June 7 at 4pm
All performances take place at Gremlin Theatre, 2400 University Avenue West, Saint Paul, MN
$15 Adults, $12 Students/ Seniors/with 2008 Fringe Festival button, $10 Groups of 10+
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
May Lee-Yang (Lead Artist) is a playwright, prose writer, poet, and performance artists living in Saint Paul. Despite no experience and bad acting, she got her first acting gig at eighteen. Since then, she has gone on to perform her writing as a solo artist as well as a member of the spoken word group, FIRE (Free Inspiring Rising Elements). Her plays include Stir-Fried Pop Culture, Sia(b), and The Child’s House. Her writing has been published in the following magazines and anthologies: Bamboo Among the Oaks: Contemporary Writing by Hmong Americans, To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets From Pre-Territorial Days to the Present, Fiction on a Stick, Water~Stone Literary Review, Unplug Magazine, eye.d magazine, Paj Ntaub Voice, Jade Magazine, and others. She is a two-time recipient of the MN State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant and of the Playwright Center Many Voices fellowship. She was one of the 2008 recipients of Intermedia Arts’ Naked Stages Performance Art Mentorship Program.
Robert Farid Karimi (Director) is an interdisciplinary playwright, multimedia humorist and poet, and is the artistic director of kaotic good productions. His solo works include self (the remix), Shaving Time, The Cooking Show con Karimi y Comrades, and The Approximate value of a Foot Bubbler. Karimi has collaborated with artists such as Guillermo Gomez Peña and Laurie Carlos; performances include the Edge of the World, Reverend of the DiscoChurch, and McMuertos. His awards include a National Poetry Slam Championship, an Alliance of Artists’ Communities Midwestern Voices & Visions Award, a Verve Spoken Word Grant, NPN Creation Grants, a Kohler Arts/Industry residency, and most recently a Creative Capital Grant. Published internationally in Callaloo, Latino Literature Today, and most recently featured in Total Chaos: The Art and the Aesthetics of Hip Hop, Karimi directs film and theater, and teaches workshops about comedy, mixed race issues, performance, and cross-cultural spirituality.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:
Center for Hmong Arts and Talent (CHAT) exists to nurture, explore and illuminate the Hmong American experience through artistic expressions. CHAT envisions a vibrant community where Hmong American artists are inspired to share their perspectives, valued for their creative contributions, and empowered to challenge life’s boundaries. Sia(b) is a part of the DabNeeg∞Dawning Theatre Program: Old Stories in a New Light, which strives to equip Hmong American artists in all aspects of theatre, including direction, design, acting and production, in order to tell stories in this unique and unlimited art form.
kaotic good productions creates, and develops ensemble based interdisciplinary community-oriented organic performances to explore the funny and not so funny revelations that occur when pop culture, personal history and politics collide. Through this work, kaotic good has received awards from the Mayor of Anchorage, Illinois Humanities Council, Minnesota State Arts Board and the National Performance Network.
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Sia(b) is a National Performance Network Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by Out North/VSA Arts in partnership with kaotic good productions and the National Performance Network. Major contributors of the National Performance Network are Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information: www.npnweb.org.
A portion of the funding for this production was provided from the Asian Pacific Endowment, a component fund of Spectrum Trust of the St. Paul Foundation
Funding provided in part by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and private funders.