Welcome!

photo courtesy www.ushmm.org

Hi and welcome! This blog is an ongoing journal of images, anecdotes, stories and geographic genealogy that highlights our personal histories. As the US is a melting pot of cultures that have immigrated or have been brought to this country, the world continues to “get smaller” and our global community grows. We now live in a technologically advanced present, but our connections to our pasts need not be lost. Many of our displaced communities have established themselves in cities and rural areas far from where they first began. Some languages have been forgotten over the ages in this change, some customs and traditions have been lost, yet some of both still remain. This cyber entity has been created for you to hold onto some of the memories and information about you and your family’s background and a place for you to share this wealth of riches with a wider range of people.

On June 26-27, 2009 I will be presenting an evening length dance, performance and video production at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, California that abstracts my interpretation of this phenomenon described above. Far From Home highlights four cultures within the performance hour–Eastern European (Jewish), Mexican, Afro-Caribbean and Japanese–using memories, traditions and customs as jumping off points for live theater. With a multi-cultural and intergenerational cast of twelve, the work includes movement, texts (in several languages), original and archival music and video to explore who we are now and where we came from.

I hope you will feel free to contribute to this blog, sending in digitized photos and stories from your past. It’d be great to see a linear travelogue of how you came to live where you now live, i.e. where your ancestors lived, where the next generation moved to (and why) moving on down to you now.

Thank you, in advance, for your contribution. I hope to see you in June at Highways!

warmly,

Keith

from the 2006 performance of Gold Men at Highways Performance Space:

photo by Keith Weng

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Tags: Santa Monica