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BURNING LIBRARIES

Stories from the New Ellis Island

Eloquent...seamlessly flowing...beautifully executed...joyful...  San Francisco Chronicle

...powerful, poetic, multimedia spectacle... Theatre Bay Area

…antidote to the waves of hysteria battering the media over the issue of immigration…It’s a story everyone will love, children to grandparents and all in between.  San Francisco Theater Blog

Burning Libraries is an original performance work that brings to life 35 immigrant stories—from Yemen to Guatemala and from Vietnam to East Texas.

Burning Libraries comes from the saying, ‘If a person dies without their story being told, that’s like a library burning down (unattributed).

The stories are told through music, dance, aerial arts, puppetry, and video effects.  Drawn from over 400 oral history interviews, they are verbatim accounts of ordinary people overcoming extraordinary challenges of war, poverty and prejudice in their quest for a better life for themselves and their families.  The stories are sometimes harrowing, sometimes sublime, always compelling.  They are, in a real sense, America’s new Ellis Island stories.

In a time of rampant xenophobia and thinly veiled racism, Burning Libraries celebrates the ability of the human spirit to take flight and is a visceral reminder that we have all come to America as travelers from some other place and time. 

We created Burning Libraries because we fell in love with these children and their stories, and we want audiences to do the same.  In this darkest of times we need to open a crack in the easy cynicism and division that infects every part of our society today—including the arts. 

Helen Stoltzfus and Albert Greenberg