Performance artist Alex Luu began the last “My Own Story” workshop by asking participants to say, “The big black bear bit the big black bug. The big black bug bled blood.”
At first, members of the student groups involved stumbled over the words, but after several rounds, the tongue-twister rolled smoothly off of their tongues.
The 11 participants from the Asian-Pacific American Student Union, the Black Student Union, the Vietnamese Student Association and MEChA have been attending Luu’s workshop for two hours, twice a week since the beginning of January. The workshops consist of more than just games — each student has been perfecting a personal monologue, called “My Own Story,” which will be performed tonight at 6 p.m. in the EMU Ben Linder Room.
APASU first invited Luu to the University last year to lead a three-week set of workshops after watching his one-man show, “Three Lives,” that he performed in Eugene in April 2000. Luu, who arrived at the University from Los Angeles six weeks ago, will travel to Boston after he leaves Eugene to begin another “My Own Story” workshop with at-risk Asian high school students.
If all goes as planned, Luu will be back at the University next year, and his workshop will be offered as a class for credit.
After warm-ups, the workshop involves writing on different prompts. He might ask participants to “write about five things you love and five things you hate about your race,” he said. But students sometimes come into the workshop worried that they don’t have any stories to write about.
Luu said one of the most rewarding parts of the workshop is when students “understand and realize, ‘Wow, I have a story.’”
He said the stories created help people break though the stereotypes about their backgrounds.
“We see very little that’s true about our experiences,” he said.
At one workshop, after the warm-ups, APASU member Sophanna Kuch was ready to rehearse his piece in front of the group.
Kuch didn’t just read his lines standing still — he filled up the whole space he had, using his entire body to convey his experiences with racism, family and the role wrestling has played in his life. After he’d performed, Luu pointed out the layers in Kuch’s piece.
Kuch said that Luu helped each student learn something new about themselves.
“I’ve started to trust a lot more,” Kuch said. “And a lot of my attitudes have changed. I’m more positive and I realize bad experiences can be good.”
Luu helped APASU and VSA member Hai Do find the common thread that “unifies” his piece — his aspiration to become a model.
His piece ties that aspiration with the stereotype of the “un-sexual Asian male,” Do said. In movies, the black male and the white male always get the girl, he said.
Kuch and Do added that the workshops brought participants closer together.
“We’ve all gotten to know each other on a deeper level in a short amount of time,” Do said. “It would have taken years to know everything I’ve learned about them in the past five weeks.”