BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS
Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America
Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America is a 400 page, four color book that portrays the lives of new immigrants and refugees who live in the most ethnically diverse locality in the United States—the borough of Queens, in the city of New York. For three years, writer and artist Warren Lehrer and actress and oral historian Judith Sloan traveled the world by trekking the streets and neighborhoods of their home borough in search of migration stories, culture and soul. This book documents some of the many people and stories they encountered along the way.
First person narratives, crafted from interviews and storytelling workshops, are illuminated by Lehrer’s photographic portraits of the subjects alongside reproductions of the objects they have carried with them from home to home. The Talmudic structure of the book juxtaposes multiple perspectives: neighbors who came from opposite ends of the earth, intergenerational points of view within families, teammates, classmates, friends, enemies, and co-workers. Narratives are annotated by Lehrer/Sloan’s observations, as well as historical perspectives on the countries of origin, changes in U.S. foreign/immigration policies, and other contextual matter. In five movements, the book features the voices of 79 individuals as they reflect on the good, the ugly, and the unexpected in their stories of crossing oceans, borders, wars, economic hardship, and cultural divides. Collectively, the stories, images and sounds of Crossing the BLVD serve as a magnifying glass for the future of America.
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Crossing the BLVD: paperback Retail price: $35
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From Memory to Transformation
Includes the script of Denial of the Fittest. From the editors:
“Judith Sloan is a superb performing artist who makes the personal into the political. She takes on the nuances of personal everyday life experiences and combines them with larger current world issues, plays with them and entices her audiences with biting insight and poignant realites. In her performance pieceDenial of the Fittest, her protagonist must deal with the deceptions and secrets of her family and her own inner past before she can find her authentic identity.”
Denial of the Fittest is a one woman show that interweaves family secrets and public lies. Featuring a dozen characters in the person of actress performance artist Judith Sloan, this funny and haunting work traverses a Jewish family’s taboos, nervous breakthroughs, nuclear meltdowns, beauty school and an ever-expanding hole in the ozone layer. It is a chronicle of memory and transformation, based on Judith’s own coming to terms with the deaths of her father and grandmother when she was a young girl. Written by Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer, Denial of the Fittest is a madcap look at the effects of whispers, silence and lies within a nuclear family and the nuclear secrets of a global family. Running time: one hour, twenty minutes. Workshop performances originally developed at La Mama ETC. It received critical acclaim at Edinburgh Fringe Festival and has been produced in theaters, universities and conferences throughout the USA and in Canada.
From Memory to Transformation
Editors Sarah Silberstein Swartz and Margie Wolfe`Paperback
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Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship & Pedagogy: Volume XX theme: Teaching Performance
A working script of Judith Sloan’s solo performance Yo Miss! Teaching Inside The Cultural Divide is reprinted in Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship & Pedagogy, Volume XX. The theme of the book-length journal is ‘Teaching Performance.’ From Judith Sloan: In the summer of 2007, I began developing new pieces for radio and performance that grew out of twenty years of teaching teenagers, writing poetry, writing and performing characters for the stage, and producing works for radio. In the winter of 2008, I sent three of these audio pieces to the editors at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. They put two of the pieces together; Sweeping Statements and What’s Your Status as a feature on their website. My conversations with them gave me the idea to use the different pieces I had already written about teaching, as the seeds of a new project called Yo Miss! Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide. This blossomed into a full theatrical performance work that incorporates character monologues, poetry, and music. As part of the process, the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center in Long Island City, Queens, gave me a space grant to test some of the work out in front of an audience in March 2009. Transformations published the work-in-progress which has since allowed me to hone and refine Yo Miss! into a work that explores the complexity of teaching— how over the years, our students stories stay with us and often leave their marks in ways we don’t realize until much later. Since the publication of this version of the script, some pieces have been edited out to make room for the ‘teacher’s’ journey. The final script was completed in March 2010: Yo Miss! Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide Vol. 1. Many of the pieces that were edited out of the script will be included in Vol. 2. The script published here, though not the final one, is a snapshot of a work in progress, and I think, makes for a ‘transformative’ read.
Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship & Pedagogy
Volume XX theme: Teaching Performance
including work-in-progress script by Judith Sloan
Yo Miss! Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide
BUY NOW $20 plus shipping