Oral Histories of Three US Families Facing Poverty and Hunger
Pang! is a play that takes the form of live radio, asking the audience to fill in the gap between wh
World Arts and Cultures/Dance Professor Dan Froot is a producer, performance artist, writer, composer, dancer, and saxophonist. His new work, Pang! is an evening of three short plays based on the oral histories of families facing food insecurity in Los Angeles, Miami, and Cedar Rapids. The plays are performed as a live broadcast, amidst a forest of microphones, sound effects props and musical instruments. Pang! aims to raise awareness, decrease stigma, and promote cross-class dialogue around circumstances faced by families living below the poverty line.
"MIAMI — Radio dramas — and their present incarnation, the podcast — hit a storytelling sweet spot: they’re immersive enough to establish worlds of their own, but still require the listener’s imagination. In a program for his latest piece, Pang!, a triptych of live radio plays, Los Angeles director and artist Dan Froot writes: “I have always been fascinated by old-school live sound effects, which often involve actions … that don’t correspond visually with their aural effect … When there is a gap between what we see and hear, we are challenged to fill that gap with our imaginations.”
In Pang!, which was presented by the Miami Light Project last weekend, each character is voiced by one of three actors. At any moment, one of them — or Froot, or composer Robert Een — might spin a basketball to conjure the sound of a bicycle through mud, splash their hands in a tub of water to evoke a journey across a river, or switch, rapidly, between the voice of a cooing baby and that of an annoyed, pubescent teen. Everything moves fast. There’s a sense of slapstick here, until you become used to it. Then it’s seamless.
This is partly because Pang! is immersive, and good at engendering empathy. Initially, Froot — who was an artist-in-residence at the Miami Light Project — set out to describe the experience of families grappling with food insecurity. Over the course of four years, Froot and various members of his company interviewed families who dealt with these issues day-to-day — families who lived in Miami, Los Angeles, and Cedar Rapids, and had their own unique stories. According to an accompanying guide for the show, the participant families “were initially identified through a screening and consent process carried out by Pang!’s community partners in the social services sector.” In Miami, the partner was Touching Miami with Love and Curlee’s House of Style; in Cedar Rapids, Matthew 25, Jane Boyd Inc., and Horizons Family Services Alliance; and in Los Angeles, Hunger Action Los Angeles and LIFT-LA.
With the help of Pang!’s co-commissioner, Miami Light Project Executive and Artistic Director Elizabeth Boone, and three oral historians — Monica McGivern, Courtney Ball, and Luis Tentindo — Froot compiled the oral histories into six book-length pieces. Then, Froot and Company collaborated with one family from each city to create the 30-minute plays that make up Pang!, whose title refers to both pangs of hunger and emotional pangs in the heart."— Monica Uszerowicz, Jan. 31, 2018
This post is an excerpt, read the full article at the Hyperallergic website.
Read more about Pang here.
Read more about Dan Froot here.
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