The Nugget Newspaper - News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon

Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts & Agriculture will host a house concert at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, June 16 at Paulina Springs Books featuring No-No Boy, an innovative songwriting and multimedia project based on Asian American history. This community event is free to the public, but seating is limited, and advance registration is required.

Performers Julian Saporiti, Ph.D. and Emilia Halvorsen will share original folk songs, storytelling, and project archival images. Saporiti is a musician and historian who takes inspiration from his own family's history living through the Vietnam War and other stories of Asian American experience to create the No-No Boy project. Halvorsen is a musician and artist who finds inspiration from the workshops, community work, and performances she has led from Alaska to Tijuana, Mexico.

No-No Boy project began at the site of Heart Mountain War Relocation Center, a Japanese internment camp in Wyoming. There, Saporiti encountered a photo of an all-Japanese jazz band that had formed while its members were incarcerated by the U.S. government. Though he had studied jazz at Berklee School of Music, he had no framework for the possibility of Asian musicians playing jazz, much less under such dire circumstances.

The discovery led Saporiti to transform his years of doctoral study into an innovative project which bridges a divide between art and scholarship. By turning his archival research and fieldwork into a large repertoire of folk songs and films, No-No Boy has been able to engage diverse audiences with difficult conversations performing with a revolving cast of collaborators everywhere from rural high schools and churches to Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.

This event is hosted in collaboration with Paulina Springs Books and is a part of the artist residency program at Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture, a project of The Roundhouse Foundation.

"This concert will be an opportunity for community members to learn more about one piece of the messy parts of American history," Ana Varas, arts project coordinator for Pine Meadow Ranch, said "We hope this concert sparks curiosity in our community to revisit Oregon history and bring dialogue and opportunities to learn from all voices that make Oregon our home."

For more information or to register, call 541-904-0700 or visit: http://www.roundhouse

foundation.org/events. Paulina Springs Books is located at 252 W. Hood Ave.