Your average elementary school student runs at warp speed. Run to the gym, run to catch the bus and talk like a chipmunk on fast forward. Last week, actors from "Refugee Nation" and TeAda Productions challenged students at Fireweed Academy to slow down even freeze like a sculpture.
Photographer: Michael Armstrong, Homer News
Ova Saopeng, an actor from the play Refugee Nation, does a workshop exercise with Fireweed Academy students Nov. 15.
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"A lot of times you're in a hurry," said Elias Gibson a student in Chris Owens' fifth-grade class. "It was really kind of refreshing and fun to move as slow as I can instead of as fast as I can."
This month, actors Ova Saopeng, Leilani Chang and May Lee Yang visited Anchorage and Homer to present "Refugee Nation," their play about the Laotian refugee experience. With Anchorage's Out North Theatre, they worked with the Anchorage Asian community to collect stories. In Homer, they extended their residency to do theater workshops at Fireweed Academy.
Saopeng, born in Laos and raised in Hawaii, easily connected to the students evidence of his experience in youth theater, like We Tell Stories, a children's production theater he works with in Los Angeles. In Stephanie Zuniga's third-grade class last week, he ran them through exercises like the name-game, where each student had to act out her or his name.
Saopeng demonstrated, holding his arms out in a big oval, leaning forward and saying, "Ohhh-va." Even the shyest kids figured it out, and some created elaborate pantomimes.
"I could push them deeper and push them more and challenge them more," Saopeng said of the Fireweed Academy students. "For some kids, even to announce their name and do a movement and sound was really tough."
In another warm-up exercise, Saopeng had students do a slow motion race, where the last student to cross the finish line won but everybody had to move one foot in front of the other. With Chang, Saopeng shot out scenarios for Zuniga's students to act out: "be Homer," "be your mother," "be your mother in a hurry" or "be a cloud."
Not every exercise was light and funny, though. In Kiki Abrahamson's class, students did a unit on what it meant to be a refugee. She asked them questions like, "If you were a refugee, what would you take?" They watched the movie, "Legacy of War," about unexploded cluster bombs in Laos.
"That was a really touchy and hard topic for us to be exploring," Abrahamson said. "It was great to have someone like Ova, Leilani or May Lee lead us through that."
In the sculptor-clay exercise, Saopeng had one student be a "sculptor," another student or group of students be the "clay," and then had the sculptors mold the clay into three scenarios a beginning, middle and end. Before the exercise, the students got together in a circle and agreed not to laugh at each other.
"They taught us a lot about how to hold still," said Alex Knudston, another student in Owens' class. "You couldn't move. You couldn't laugh."
The resulting sculptures evoked stories. Some showed men fighting in war. Others showed women trying to escape with their babies and losing their babies. Others showed refugees struggling to find safety and freedom, and the joy that came when they got to a new land but a joy tempered by the loss of a homeland.
"It was really interesting to ask the students to be sculpture," Yang said. "There were some that had some really interesting and compelling images."
"I threw some heavy stuff at them in regards to assimilation, war," Saopeng said.
The actors explored those themes in two sold-out performances last Friday and Saturday at Bunnell Street Gallery. Taking on multiple roles of different ages and sexes, they looked at how generations adapted to being refugees, or the children of refugees.
"There's a long inter-generational misunderstanding," Chang said of "Refugee Nation." "Put these people who might not talk to each other on stage together. They have more to say to the audience than each other."
"I thought it was really powerful, but not in the way I thought it was going to be," Knudson said. "How they could pull off something like that and be so funny," he added.
"If was very interesting," said Taylor Iredale, one of Abrahamson's students. "Funny at times, depressing at times."
Saopeng said teaching youth theater offers him a way to give back to his own theater teachers. In Kalihi, Hawaii, at Farrington High School, Saopeng joined T-Shirt Theatre. That experience ultimately led to joining TeAda Productions with his wife Chang, developing "Refugee Nation" and even getting a part in "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" with fellow T-Shirt Theatre alumnus Thomas Morinaka. Saopeng is the pirate in a straw hat scowling in front of star Keira Knightley. His big line was "Aaargh!" he told the Fireweed students.
"The way I got into theater was through the same process, an artist coming in and doing a workshop," Saopeng said. "To me, this is giving back. The arts have come to me and I'm sharing with them."
TeAda Productions did one more show of "Refugee Nation" this week in Anchorage at McLaughlin Youth Center. For more information on "Refugee Nation" including a blog of their Alaska tour visit refugeenation.blogspot.com.
Michael Armstrong can be reached at michael.armstrong@homernews.com.
