There are people in other parts of the country, reports Sabrina Hamilton, who still think New England is an all-white enclave of Mayflower descendants. “Not my Valley!” she cries, and to prove it, she cites hearing nine languages spoken in a recent visit to Puffer’s Pond, the popular Amherst swimming hole.
Hamilton is artistic director of the Ko Festival of Performance, which begins a busy five-week season this weekend on the campus of Amherst College. This season’s theme, running through all the shows, is “New Homeland: Strangers, Newcomers and Neighbors in the New America,” inspired in part by her polyglot Puffer’s experience.
“I thought, let’s do a season about who really is in America. Let’s look at how newcomers, neighbors and new kinds of neighbors are treated. In the light of the recent events in Charleston, and the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, isn’t it time to think about how we greet and treat people other than ourselves?”
The season’s five centerpiece productions play for one weekend each. There are also three week-long participatory workshops and two one-off special events. The performances portray a range of personal experiences of immigrants and native-born people of color, performed by a prismatic array of visiting artists. 
They include stories of “growing up as a young woman in London in a conservative Muslim Pakistani home; growing up in a Cambodian-American family in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge; coming to the U.S. as a Chinese opera performer, only to find that work is only available in nail salons and restaurants.”
The season begins this Friday with Crossing the Blvd, Judith Sloan’s one-woman “group portrait” of new immigrants and refugees in today’s Queens, where 138 languages are spoken and life is conducted in a kind of “chaotic co-existence” — an Archie Bunker nightmare come true. Like Sloan’s popular Yo, Miss! last year at Ko, this one uses verbatim dialogue and diverse musical textures to get “inside the cultural divide” that is quickly closing and overlapping in American life.
There’s no particular “house style” or aesthetic in approach to curating a season, Hamilton says. Indeed, she reaches for variety. “I always say that if you don’t particularly like the show this week, come next week, because it will be something completely different.” One common denominator has developed over time (next year marks Ko’s 25th anniversary season): “All the shows are created by the artists and their teams of collaborators.”
Traveling to conferences and festivals here and abroad in search of work to bring to Ko, Hamilton says she looks for pieces “by dynamic artists who are touching a cultural pulse. There’s a kind of integrity and honesty that is present in this work.” She finds the same dynamic in the annual KoFest Story Slam, a local, friendly/competitive version of the Moth Radio Hour, in which people get up and relate first-person anecdotes. “It’s true. It’s authentic. I think people crave that.”
The season closes in August with Amherst resident Onawumi Jean Moss in Seriously … What Did You Call Me? “She is a prize-winning storyteller,” Hamilton says, “who has never before told her own story — of migration from the Jim Crow South, through the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty, to the Pioneer Valley.” With this premiere piece, “she brings the season home. Literally.”•
Ko Festival of Performance: Fridays-Sundays through Aug. 9, $8-20, Holden Theater, Amherst College, (413) 542-3750, kofest.com.
Chris Rohmann is at StageStruck@crocker.com and valleyadvocate.com/author/chris-rohmann.
