Nuyorican Poets Café 236 East 3rd Street Between Ave B & C, NYC
Tix: $20 general $15 students/seniors/groups 212-780-9386
http://www.nuyorican.org/

What happens when a performing artist survives a near-fatal car accident and collides with the oncoming traffic of Hip Hop culture? In Yo Miss! actress/writer Judith  Sloan remixes stories from twenty years of reporting on and teaching immigrant/refugee teenagers and incarcerated youth as they grapple with the cataclysmic global events that shaped them. Through poetry, vivid character portrayals and music, she brings their tales to life along with her own stories revealing the ripple effects of the Holocaust on her family. Sifting through a maze of miscommunications and misunderstandings, Sloan and the musicians battle through a cross-generational dialogue as she finds resilience in the face of tragedy.

A play with music
Written and conceived by Judith Sloan
Directed by and developed with Michael Dinwiddie
Performed by Judith Sloan
with Adam Hill and MiWi LaLupa
Live Sound Engineer: Luke Santy
Music direction: (Grammy Award winner) Frank London
Sound direction and design: Judith Sloan with the company
Lighting design: Melody Beal

Includes music by: Dave Guy, Adam Hill, David Krakauer, MiWi La Lupa (band member from Red Baraat), Taylor Rivelli, Judith  Sloan.
Additional Music and Sounds by: Touré “Southpaw”  Harris, Guy Klucevsek, Frank London (of Klezmatics), Immortal Technique, Ken White

Yo Miss is a project of EarSay, produced by Judith Sloan with the purpose of supporting EarSay’s social justice work focusing on stories of healing from trauma. A portion of the proceeds from the Yo Miss! theatre project go to benefit EarSay’s Youth Education project, Transforming Trauma Into Art, for immigrant and refugee teenagers.
Yo Miss! is being developed with support from Viper Records, and Morgan Jenness from Abrams Agency.

For more information: http://www.earsay.org/

Development of Yo Miss! with support from the Queens Council on the Arts, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Murray Street Productions, Danny Simmons Corridor Gallery, and Viper Records.

Talkback following the SUNDAY Matinee performance: with Julissa Ferreras, City Council Member Queens / Jackie Vimo, Immigration Coalition / Mallika Dutt, Breakthrough

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About Judith Sloan
Teaching, acting, producing – when it comes to exploring the world through the streets of New York, it seems that Judith Sloan has done it all. Known for her collaborative multi-media project [with Warren Lehrer,] Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new america Judith spent 20 years teaching and reporting at schools and jails where she encountered immigration, cultural clashes, and generation gaps. Now, she presents her accounts in a new play Yo Miss! Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide. Sloan is an award-winning playwright, radio producer, and performer.  Yo Miss is a project of EarSay, a non-profit devoted to portraying uncelebrated stories. Judith’s work in Yo Miss! is described as “sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always truth-seeking performance” that “attempts to break down assumptions that divide…. residents of a polygot city who live in close proximity but come from conflicting worlds.

Advance praise for Yo Miss stories produced for public radio:

“This is an art you can trust to tell the truth in vivid detail, and Sloan  renews the original mission of radio and writing in the process. These are wonderful sound pieces. They are as full of life and presence as all of Sloan’s earlier works.” — Andrei Codrescu, poet, novelist, commentator NPR’s All Things Considered

About Sweeping Statements by Judith Sloan: winner First Place Missouri Review National Audio Competition, 2008: The essay, “Sweeping Statements,” is a first-person author-read accounting of teaching theatre, writing, and juggling in jails and alternative sentencing institutions with incarcerated teenagers. Category judge Jay Allison, of transom.org, says the essay “truly left the page and warranted its existence in sound.

“Judith Sloan’s work is exactly what public radio sounds like at its  best: unique, amazing, real people’s stories that confront tough issues,  told with the highest production values, including original music, and a  sense of humor.” Brian Lehrer, the Brian Lehrer Show, WNYC