Sounds Like Teen Spirit

Their VOICES ECHO through the stairwell—excited, high, hopeful. I’ve followed the group across the street into a building on East Fourth, and we’re making our way up a narrow corridor to a rehearsal space that was booked last-minute.

These are the performers of The Waistmaker’s Opera, a two-part, site-specific musical organized by Downtown Art that centers on the young female workers of New York City’s early 20th-century garment industry who, 100 years ago this year, became a cause célèbre when they successfully unionized and launched “The Uprising of the 20,000,” one of the first important strikes by female workers in America. More than 100 of these women, largely from immigrant families and mostly between the ages of 16 and 25, would die the following year in the infamous Triangle Factory fire near Washington Square.

While our capacity for remembrance leans toward the tragic, founder of Downtown Art (and co-creator of Waistmaker’s) Ryan Gilliam hopes to bring light to the strike that preceded the tragic fire, an event Gilliam argues made the Triangle Factory incident especially resonant and led some 350,000 New Yorkers to flood the streets in mourning.

Lily Abedin, one of the young performers, agrees. “So many people focus on the factory fire,” she says, “and we’re kind of jumping back a step and saying, like, how hard these girls fought for the strike before and, like, what amazing people they were.”

The content and context of the project is not lost on these teenagers, who are the same age as many of the garment workers who were fighting to roll back a 68-hour work week and to boost a salary of about $10 per week.

“It was really eye-opening for me to try to imagine like, me, my age 100 years ago, being one of these girls,” says another performer, Lena Feliciano Hansen. “It’s like I go home and complain about something stupid and I’m like, wait a second, and I think about all the things that these girls went through and how they fought for rights that we have. And it’s just mind-blowing.”

Upstairs in the studio, the young women line up in a semi-circle while Michael Hickey, the show’s musical director and composer, stands in the middle with a guitar slung over his shoulders. The music is a mix of dustbowl country and jazz. The young voices sing out in unison through dense words written by Gilliam. At one point, Marianna Quinn- Makwaia (Mari)—a Downtown Art veteran and performing in her last project before she heads off to college—steps out and sings to the group, encouraging them to strike, to stand in solidarity and fight for fair treatment. She is playing the role of Clara Lemlich, a Jewish worker who, not even 20 years old, spoke out—in Yiddish—at Cooper Union and catalyzed the thousands of rank-and-file workers in attendance to vote to strike.

Waistmaker’s, which runs weekends through May, will start at the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Audience members will listen to a prerecorded soundtrack as they walk through the streets (mp3 players provided, or you can download to your own ahead of time) and view live movement from members of the company. When the audience reaches East 3rd Street, the audio tour ends and live singing and music, with a band of three teenagers led by Hickey, will take over an empty lot—not far from where Downtown Art is planning to build their new headquarters.

Downtown Art is unique in that, outside of the direction of Gilliam and a few other adults, it is run entirely by teenagers. Since October, the teens have negotiated their high school and family lives to create this work, and to work within an ensemble where kinship is developed around the act of creating art and performance.

The circumstances and aims of their labor may differ drastically from those of the young women they are representing in Waistmaker’s, but these performers are no less the inheritors of their predecessors’ struggle—and their spirit.

>>THE WAISTMAKER’S OPERA May 8-30, for information visit [www.downtownart.org](http://www.downtownart.org/).