Performance: No-No Boy
Venue: Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg
Date: Thursday, February 1, 2024
Time: 7:30 - 8:45 PM
Event Types: Music, Arts & Theatre
Cost:

Description:
The Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech presents the performance "No-No Boy" inside The Cube on Thursday, February 1, 2024.

Vietnamese and Italian American singer, songwriter, and scholar Julian Saporiti details the Asian American experience through his innovative songwriting and multi-media project, "No-No Boy". Saporiti (vocals and guitar), is joined by his wife and collaborator Emilia Saporiti (vocals and violin), and Michelle Bazille (bass), for an evening of heartfelt and poignant musical storytelling set to projected archival images.

Saporiti’s knack for melody and the directness with which he sings make the picture whole. Without pretension and preachiness, listeners are drawn into the world of real people and their struggles while also being uplifted by melodies that tug the heart and ears in several directions at once. With the sincerity of a folksinger and a master producer’s ear for minutia, Saporiti probes the edges of pain for joy, using history and its remembered landscapes as a way to understand the ground on which we now stand.

Storytelling has always been at the root of Julian Saporiti’s music as No-No Boy. The project developed as the central component of Saporiti’s Ph.D. at Brown University, drawing on years of fieldwork and research on Asian American history to write folk songs with uncommon empathy and remarkable protagonists: prisoners at Japanese American internment camps who started a jazz band, Vietnamese musicians turned on to rock ‘n’ roll by American troops, a Cambodian American painter who painted only the most beautiful landscapes of his war-torn home. Along the way he started to draw on his own family’s history, including his mother’s escape from Vietnam during the war.

Programmed by guest curator Shirlette Ammons.

General admission tickets are $15.00 and tickets for Virginia Tech student tickets with ID and youth ages 18 & under are $10.00 each.

To purchase tickets online, visit: https://tickets.artscenter.vt.edu/online/seatSelect.asp?createBO::WSmap=1&BOparam::WSmap::loadBestAvailable::performance_ids=1477EDF5-F89F-4F5C-9096-7E2102F26D5E.

Co-sponsored by APIDA+, Ati: Wa:oki Indigenous Community Center, and the U.S. Dept. of Education AANAPISI Program.

The Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech is located at 330 Turner Street NW in Blacksburg, VA.

For more information, visit: https://artscenter.vt.edu/performances/no-no-boy.html or https://www.facebook.com/artscenteratvt or https://www.instagram.com/artscenteratvt/ or call 540-231-5300.