Poet Alisina Saee-Nazari and vocalist Laura Sui are creating an original song together for this year’s performance at Live Art Magazine on October 21st. It’s their first time collaborating in this way and combines their distinct skills.
Laura started singing when she was in kindergarten. She’s now the music director of Vocal Suspects, the longest running co-ed a cappella group at UMass. Alisina studies journalism and just published his first book of poems, Butterfly Crossing. The two met as UMass freshman living in the same dorm, and bonded over a love of spoken word. Their friendship has been a creative one – Laura helped launch Alisina’s book with an art event on campus – but Live Art has given them a chance to focus on their shared experiences and channel those into an artistic piece combining poetry and song.
Alisina is an Iranian American and Laura is Chinese-American. In their performance for Live Art, Laura says Alisina and herself are “…recounting the feelings and experiences of being the children of immigrants. Through poetry, rhyme, and soul [they] want to convey the pain and beauty of belonging and not belonging to two countries and how it affects the way [they] love, resist, and exist.”
You can read Alisina’s poetry at butterflycrossing.us. To hear Laura sing, check out thevocalsuspects.com
That does it for this season of the Live Art Magazine Podcast from NEPR. Thanks for listening! Be sure to come see Alisina and Laura perform “Broken Color” live at the Academy of Music this Friday.
Audio Engineer: J Kyle Sullivan
Editor: J Kyle Sullivan
Mixing & Mastering: J Kyle Sullivan
Photography: Joyce Skowyra
Music: Alisina Saee-Nazari & Laura Sui Broken Color, 2016. Bugseed. Shifty LP. VinDig, 2015.
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