New Village Arts Presents DESERT ROCK GARDEN

New Village Arts (NVA), North County's cultural hub, is presenting the world premiere of DESERT ROCK GARDEN February 11 to March 13, 2022. The production is a fictionalized historical story about a young orphan and a Japanese immigrant who forge a friendship in the Topaz War Relocation Center in 1943, revealing the inherent human ability to transform nothing - loneliness and barren desert - into something long-lasting and precious.

"I wrote DESERT ROCK GARDEN as part of the 2019 New Village Arts' Final Draft New Play Festival, and I am grateful to NVA for helping launch the world premiere of the full play this year," said playwright Roy Sekigahama. "The story is a memory play about belonging, family, and creating something beautiful out of nothing, and I hope it brings attention to the history of Japanese incarceration camps in the United States."

"We are so proud to share this second world premiere show in our 20th Anniversary Season," says Executive Artistic Director Kristianne Kurner. "I first read Roy Sekigahama's DESERT ROCK GARDEN in 2019 and was immediately drawn into this beautiful story of family and resilience in the most challenging of times. We are honored to bring the script to life with an incredibly talented group of theatre artists, most of whom are part of the AAPI community. This is a portion of American experience that has not been shared enough, and we are eager to encourage deeper understanding and conversation. We are also proud to have our first grant from the NEA in support of this thrilling new work."

DESERT ROCK GARDEN is directed by acclaimed Pilipinx director Yari Cervas and features Japanese American actor, filmmaker, playwright and arts activist Lane Nishikawa as Fuzzy and Chloris Li as Penny.

Cervas is a trauma-informed theatre director, teaching artist, and somatic worker exploring artistic expression through intuitive movement, music, sound production, spoken word poetry, illustration, and meditation. Inspired by a lack of Filipino voices in San Diego theatre they founded MaArte Theatre Collective in 2018, and as the Artistic Director produced and directed nearly two dozen plays to create space for fearless Filipino storytelling. MaArte's work established Cervas as a many awarded director for the original docudrama The Fire in Me by Thelma Virata de Castro and the original one-woman show Your Best American Girl. At present, Cervas serves as a teaching artist with six different organizations, including the Performing Arts Workshop in San Francisco, offering skills in artistic expression to youth teaching original curriculum informed by anti-racism frameworks. They have had the pleasure of collaborating with organizations such as Amigos Del Rep, Asian Story Theatre, Blindspot Collective, Cygnet Theatre, Diversionary Theatre, the La Jolla Playhouse, Liyang Network, People of Interest, the San Diego Repertory Theatre, South Coast Repertory Theatre, TuYo Theatre, The Old Globe, MOXIE Theatre, and Westmont Festival Theatre. As an arts administrator, they served more than two years as the Business Manager of MOXIE Theatre in San Diego.

Nishikawa has a long history in American theater, having served as Artistic Director for the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco for 10 seasons. His three one-man shows, Life in the Fast Lane, I'm on a Mission from Buddha, and Mifune and Me, toured over 50 cities across the US, Canada, and Europe and I'm on a Mission from Buddha was nationally broadcast on PBS. Nishikawa's first feature film, Only the Brave, tells the story of the 110th/442nd Regiment's rescue of the "Lost Battalion," Texans of the 141st Regiment who were trapped by the Nazis in the Vosges Forest in France. His most recent work is Our Lost Years, a documentary about the effects of war on the Japanese American community.

Li is a graduate of UC San Diego and attended the British American Drama Academy in Oxford. She recently appeared in the Berkeley Playhouse production of In the Heights, and at South Coast Repertory Theatre in When the Mountain Meets the Moon.

Film and theatre composer Marc Akiyama is creating an original score for the production incorporating traditional Japanese instruments with modern music and creating a soundscape for the barren Utah desert.

The opening night on February 19 will feature a commemoration to mark the 80th Anniversary of Executive Order 9066 resulting in the forced removal of 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry to incarceration camps across America.

New Village Arts received its first grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in support of this thrilling new work, which is also supported by the California Civil Liberties Program and the City of Carlsbad Cultural Arts Office.

Ticket information: www.newvillagearts.org or (760) 433-3245

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