Featured Artist


Althea Hukari
Theatre Arts

Althea Hukari’s passion for theatre all began with a Wink—Carl Winklebleck, to be exact, the local drama teacher during the early 70s. Wink, as he was called, was “a man of many talents, passion and drive,” and he shared these with his students at Hood River Valley High. Hukari remembers doing up to six productions a year, including Eugne O’Neill’s Long Day's Journey Into Night. His daring continues to inspire her to take risks in her teaching which, in recent years, has become her artistic focus.

“We need artists,” Hukari states. “We need people who ask questions…who will look beyond “How do I get by in this world?” and think about “How can I serve this world?” Art-- especially dramatic art--is an excellent arena for encouraging young people to engage in this kind of exploration and self-expression and, as such, is one of the most essential things we can teach our children.

Hukari, who received a B.A. in theatre arts from Oberlin College, likes working with children for a number of reasons. According to her, they warm up faster and they still know how to play, essential skills in theatre arts. And they love to act things out, especially in consort with other people. Hukari uses various strategies—talk shows, scriptwriting, group discussions--to engage and challenge her students, who range from elementary age to high school.

Last year, working with adjudicated youth at the Klahre House, there was a moment in rehearsal when a question arose about how to handle violence in the student-generated piece. Hukari and her teaching partner, Gale Arnold, sat down with the young actors and asked some hard questions about the causes of the violence. Silence fell for a few moments, as the students saw that they were not going to get away with any easy answer. But eventual the kids began to articulate very insightful views on the feelings of powerlessness and lack of respect that might drive a character to violence. The dramatic circumstance gave the students freedom to examine troubling behavior more deeply and truthfully then if they had been discussing an incident from their own lives.

At the heart of Hukari’s work is something she learned as a professional artist in Seattle: how to deeply listen to another person. She describes is as “dropping my agenda, opening my eyes, body, mind, and heart, and allowing myself to just be with another person in the present moment.” And she has found that when she really listens to students in this way, they tell her exactly what they need to learn and how they can be taught. “It is powerful,” Hukari says, “and rare.”

The Bridge Project is Hukari’s most recent adventure; was “born out of two accidental meetings.” The first occurred when she invited a colleague from a playwrights’ group, to present her work at a Hood River community education class. When a counselor from one of the local schools began to talk about the effect of the immigration debate on middle school students, the playwright turned to Hukari and said, “You need to do a theatre project!”
Shortly thereafter Hukari met Gale Arnold, a retired teacher who is fluently in Spanish. The two began to talk, and within the hour, a partnership was born.

The goal of The Bridge Project, according to Hukari, is “to build ensembles out of groups of kids who normally don't have much to do with one another.” These ensembles become a community that has to work together for a common goal—the creation and performance of an original piece of theatre about issues in their own lives. The project was piloted last year at the Klahre House, where Hukari and Arnold continue to work; this year they plan to create theatre in both Spanish and English at local middle schools.

Hukari’s full-length play, The Orchard, won an Oregon Literary Fellowship in 2001. In the past two years, however, her own creative work has taken a backseat to her work as a teacher. She does, however, have several plays “languishing in (her) laptop.” One- commissioned by Portland Center Stage as part of a PlayGroup project--is a ten-minute excerpt from Frenching the Bones, a longer play about food and horror. It, along with several other menu-related pieces by other playwrights, had a public reading in Portland last fall.