Angoon’s 65 K-12 students, along with Gustavus-based artist Sarah Campen, will on Thursday present “Raven Stole the Sun,” a play high school and junior high school students in Angoon wrote based on the story of how Raven brought light to the world.
Students wrote and staged the play in two weeks. First, Campen said, all the students read different versions of the story. They studied it, told it, and remembered what they could from times they’d heard the story before. The junior high and high school students then wrote the script, including dialogue and action, and the elementary school students created backdrops and props.
Eighteen high school and junior high school students will perform six main roles, Campen said, with background characters as well, for about 35 students performing in the play. There will also be puppets.
Campen has been traveling around Chatham district schools through Artists in the Schools, a program through the Alaska State Council on the Arts. She’s been to Klukwan, where students wrote their own stories, coming up with actions and gestures for those stories; in Gustavus, where they built giant puppets around the theme of “Wild Things” (inspired by the book “Where the Wild Things Are”) and in Tenakee Springs, where students developed a character, gestures and a monologue for that character. Angoon is her fourth and final school.
Campen grew up in Sitka, has lived in Juneau, and now lives in Gustavus. She works in dance, movement, theater art and writing, and recently has been learning about puppet-building.
The event begins at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 12 in Angoon’s elementary school gym, and can be live-streamed at thecube.com/cube/angoon-school-angoon-alaska.
Angoon kindergarten and first grade students work on the backdrop and props for their upcoming play, “Raven Stole the Sun.”
