Premiere party planned for Gila River Indian Community

Place: Vision & Voice, in conjunction with the Ira H. Hayes Memorial Applied Learning Center and the Huhugam Heritage Center, announces the premiere of The River People, a video collage created by the students of the Ira H. Hayes Memorial Applied Learning Center on the Gila River Indian Community.

The premiere party will be held March 13, 2003, from 5-7 p.m. at the Ira H. Hayes Memorial Applied Learning Center.

Professor of Theatre Stephani Etheridge Woodson partnered with the Huhugam Heritage Center and the Ira H. Hayes Memorial Applied Learning High School, working with 14-to 18-year-old Akimel O’otham Indians to explore their relationship to their heritage, the adults in their immediate community and to non-Indians through the use of multi-media and performance.

Many Gila youth have little or no knowledge of their peoples’ traditional ways, and thus one of the objects of the project is to have young people explore their heritage and their personal relationships to that heritage.

Through workshops, theatre games, improvisations, creative writing, and interviews, the group explored thematic language, metaphor and symbol, identity, family relationships, and leisure activities. They also worked on video filming techniques, interviewing strategies, storyboards, basic editing principles and sound capture.

The final result is this exciting video collage.

This project supported in part by grants from the Herberger College of Fine Arts at Arizona State University and ArtsWork: The Kax Herberger Center for Children and the Arts.

Media Contact:
Megan Krause
480-965-8795
megan.krause@asu.edu