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Ghost Town Support

Contact Information

Office: (801) 707-9930
e-mail: info(at)anotherlanguage(dot)org
www.anotherlanguage.org

ANOTHER LANGUAGE
BOARD OF DIRECTORS

National Advisory Board

Charles Amirkhanian
Executive Director
Other Minds Festival
San Francisco, CA

Jeff Carpenter
Multimedia Specialist, NCSA
Urbana Champaign, IL

Kent Christensen
Artist
New York, NY

Karly Rothenberg
Faculty Member and
Industry Event Coordinator
AMDA College & Conservatory
Sun Valley, CA

Utah Advisory Board

Pauline Blanchard
The Pauline Blanchard Trust

Wayne Bradford
Systems Administrator
University of Utah

Harold Carr
Software Architect
Oracle Corporation

Victoria Rasmussen
Broad Band Computer Professional

Board of Directors

Kathy Valburg
Another Language President
Ice Skating Director

Sylvia Ring
Registered OR Nurse

Jan Abramson
University of Utah
Health Sciences
Grants Contract Officer

Staff

Jimmy Miklavcic
Founding Co-Director

Elizabeth Miklavcic
Founding Co-Director

Awards

Another Language Directors, Elizabeth and Jimmy Miklavcic, received the 1995 Utah Arts Festival/Mayor's Artists Award in Performing Arts.

InterPlay: Loose Minds in a Box was honored as a national semi-finalist for the 2006 Peoria Prize for Creativity.

InterPlay: Nel Tempo di Sogno received a 2007 City Weekly Artys Staff Award for Best Real-time, Distributed, Surrealistic, Cinema.

InterPlay: Carnivale received a 2008 City Weekly Artys Readers Choice Award for Best Opera/ Symphony performance by Travis Eberhard and Artemio Contreras.

InterPlay: AnARTomy was awarded the 2009 City Weekly Artys Staff Award - Best Reason To Set Your Alarm Sunday Morning.

Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters The Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters chose InterPlay: Performing on a High Tech Wire written by Elizabeth and Jimmy Miklavcic to receive the 2010 Best Paper Award in the Arts Category.

Duel*Ality 1.0 was awarded the Salt Lake City Weekly's 2011 Artys Staff Award - Best Mixed-Media Performance Art.

Gallery

Art-of-the-Month Another Language Performing Arts Company's Art-of-the-Month was created to publicly feature a variety of visual art expressions created by the directors of Another Language. Exhibiting abstract acrylic to digital paintings, and running the gambit in-between, this gallery exhibition offers the viewer an online gallery experience with a new addition each month. The Art-of-the-Month web program began September 2010, and features a variety of paintings, showing a body of work spanning decades. Extensive visual art galleries are available to supporting members in the Membership area of the website.

January 17, 2015 (1) By Elizabeth & Jimmy Miklavcic

January 17, 2015 (2) By Elizabeth & Jimmy Miklavcic These digital paintings, created January 17, 2015, are included in the ongoing "Tag-You're-It" collaborative series by Elizabeth and Jimmy Miklavcic. The paintings are created on an iPad 2 using ArtStudio version 5.13 software.

Spotlight

Another Language Performing Arts Company's Ghost Town is underway and there are some really creative and fascinating sites in development. Be a part of the 30th Anniversary celebration by adding your creative voice to the Ghost Town project, which takes place completely online and is crowd sourced! Go to anotherlanguage.org for further information. Make sure to register to reserve your site! If you have questions please email info(at)anotherlanguage(dot)org or call (801) 707-9930. This newsletter edition features the Ghost Town project of Lily Havey. A Brief Story About My Stay At Amache, Colorado by Lily Havey

Before World War II my family lived in Los Angeles, California, and I had never been camping. Camping meant sleeping in tents with Girl Scouts on a mountain with a lively brook bubbling down nearby where we would catch fish for dinner. We would sit around a campfire, our faces ruddy with the warmth of the crackling flames, and toast marshmallows until they oozed and turned golden. We would grow sleepy telling ghost stories until the camp leader yawned and led us to our tents.

I was shocked and dismayed, then, to find that the camping trip promised by my mother was not in tents and mountains, but in a tarpaper barrack on the asphalted grounds of a racetrack at Santa Anita. It turned out to be a six month camping trip after which we were transferred to Amache in southeastern Colorado. The camps were designated as "assembly centers" and "relocation centers" by the government. 120,000 Japanese Americans, citizens and legal resident aliens, were herded there to live out the war years. We were characterized as the yellow-bellied, buck-toothed enemy capable of sabotaging the West Coast of the United States. President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, ordering this mass evacuation.

I have written my experiences in these camps as a 10-to-13 year old in a creative memoir, "Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp: A Nisei Youth Behind a World War II Fence." Amache and the other nine American concentration camps are now transformed into historical sites as well as ghost towns.

I have returned to Amache a number of times as an adult and each trip has revealed a different aspect of the site. Because all the barracks have long been dismantled or reused by citizens of nearby towns, the fields look nothing like the Amache I remember. The Amache Preservation Society (students at the Granada High School) has kept up the grounds around the cemetery. Each year in the spring some former evacuees gather there and conduct a memorial service, officiated by a Buddhist priest. My most recent visit was in the spring of 2014. The government had given a grant to build replicas of a guard tower and the water tower and I wanted to see them. They were as I remembered them although the guard tower was built without the search light on its roof because an original one could not be found. One of the sharpest memories I have of both Santa Anita and Amache is of search lights sweeping across the barracks. It intruded relentlessly into our lives, our souls. The reconstructed water tower was much bigger and taller than I remembered. In my memory it was only a bit taller than the barracks as seen from a distance.

Water Tower Landscape Photo: Lily Havey

Another place that I seek out on each visit is the barbed wire fence with a crude gate at the very eastern edge of camp. I stood there often looking toward Kansas and envisioning the small towns "way out there" where I might be free---without the guard towers and barbed wire fence.

Today only the foundations outlining the barracks, mess hall, and laundry room are visible. Even these are being reclaimed by the cacti, sagebrush, and rabbitbrush. On the first visit in 1998 I stood in our doorway of barrack 9; on subsequent visits it became harder to locate even the foundations and a huge cactus had claimed residence in the doorway. My first impulse was to hack it down, but on second thought, it seemed more appropriate to allow it to grow there.

I was surprised on the visit in 2014 to find that although it was an extremely windy day, there was virtually no dust. One of my more vivid memories of Amache was of the terrible dust storms that raged through the area. But then I realized that to build the camp, the plants that held down the soil had all been sheared to make room for the barracks. Then the wind had its way, relentlessly blowing sand and dirt into every nook and cranny.

My ghost project for Amache consists of photographs of the camp today and some watercolors of the camp. I see ghosts prowling the foundations and the cemetery headstones. I wish them peace.

By Lily Havey

About Lily Havey: Lily Havey Photo: Michael Havey Lily Havey's interest in ghost towns spans decades. When her son Michael was 9 or 10 they began searching for ghost towns to photograph; the earliest ones are captured on Kodachrome slides. In the ensuing years as time permitted she alone, or with Michael, located towns in Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, California, Mexico, Hawaii, and Japan. When she learned that the Amache Relocation Camp in Granada, a World War II concentration camp, was officially a ghost town, she inquired whether she might include this site in the current ghost town project offered by Another Language. Her interest in the place is highly personal: she was incarcerated there as a ten-year old and lived there until the end of the war. She has made a number of trips there beginning in 1998, the latest being a pilgrimage in the spring of 2014 to photograph the reconstructed guard tower and water tower. She has a book recently published by the University of Utah Press, "Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp: A Nisei Youth Behind a World War II Fence," depicting her four year incarceration at the Santa Anita Assembly Center and at Amache. Some photographs and watercolors accompany the text. Further information is available on Facebook. In the ghost town project she hopes to combine old and new photographs with new paintings waiting to find expression.

Participate in the Ghost Town Project: Another Language is encouraging investigations of Utah ghost towns. Original photographs, movies, animations, visual art, music soundscapes, poetry and text compositions submitted by participating artists will be uploaded to anotherlanguage.org. Correlations between historical ghost towns and modern conceptual ghost towns are encouraged. What is your personal ghost town? What do you see, think, and feel when experiencing a place that was once thriving?

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MEMBERSHIP

BENEFITS

Digital Images by Elizabeth and Jimmy Miklavcic

May 17, 2013,	May 24, 2013	May 25, 2013	June 4, 2013	June 17, 2013

SPONSORS

Supported by the Utah Division of Arts and Museums, with funding from the State of Utah and
the National Endowment for the Arts.