Pathways ARTS presents its second annual offsite summer performance art event at the Tisbury Water Works, featuring Martha’s Vineyard poet laureate Justen Ahren’s evolving experimental theater piece, “After the War for the Valley: A Multimedia Project on Migration and Displacement.” The project focuses on three refugees’ stories about how they survived fleeing their homelands, and eventually arrived on European shores.
Justen Ahren’s evolving experimental theater piece combines live music, poetry, projected images, stories, and animation to relate experiences of refugees fleeing to Europe. Ahren debuts this year’s site-specific performance in collaboration with local artists and musicians Ken Vincent, Traeger di Pietro, and Dana Edelman.
While traveling in Italy in 2016, Ahren first encountered people traveling and sleeping along railroad tracks and riverbanks. He began documenting the personal stories and physical landscapes through which they were moving, as well as the belongings they left behind.
In 2017, Ahren returned to Italy to photograph sanctuary villages on the border with France, then in March 2018, he volunteered in Greece with A Drop in the Ocean, a nonprofit humanitarian organization patrolling the south coast of Lesbos and rescuing refugees arriving on inflatable rafts.
This year’s performance is centered around three such stories: Haya’s: a Syrian mother of four; Alma’s: a Syrian student; and Hussan’s: an Afghani teenager. All three live inside Moria Camp, awaiting asylum status.
For more information, contact Justen Ahren at 508-560-0467, or Scott Crawford at Scott4Pathways@gmail.com.
