onStage Pittsburgh (2025-)
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Voices of Place: A Pittsburgh Neighborhood Sound & Portrait brings together five creative narratives shaped by people’s relationships with Pittsburgh. Moving between reality and fiction, familiarity and estrangement, memory and desire, these works explore the city through personal experiences, sensory impressions, everyday encounters, and imagined possibilities. Each narrative offers a singular perspective on the places we inhabit and the meanings we attach to them, inviting us to reconsider the familiar and discover the unexpected within the city around us.
Combining creative writing, photography, voice, and sound, the project creates a collective portrait of Pittsburgh through the diverse ways people experience, remember, and imagine the city. Listen to the audio tracks on Spotify.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
The project began with a series of creative writing workshops in which participants explored their relationships with Pittsburgh through memory, observation, sensory experience, and imagination. Drawing inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the workshops invited participants to look at familiar surroundings from unfamiliar perspectives, transforming personal experiences and everyday details into narratives that move between the real and the imagined.
The writing process was collaborative and experimental, making room for different voices, forms, and ways of telling stories. Participants developed and reworked their texts through writing exercises, readings, and collective feedback, exploring how a place can become both a concrete landscape and an imaginative world.
Photography extended this exploration into the visual realm. Through walks around the city, participants selected places and images that resonated with their narratives. Rather than simply illustrating the texts, the photographs became another way of thinking about the relationship between people and place, bringing portraits and urban landscapes into conversation.
Finally, the written narratives were brought into voice and sound. Working with audio designer and engineer Pedro Vinci, the recordings became sound pieces in their own right, incorporating vocal interpretation and sonic layers that enrich each narrative. Text, image, and sound thus come together as distinct yet interconnected ways of experiencing and imagining Pittsburgh.
PROJECT CREDITS
Conception & Direction: Guilherme Meletti Yazbek
Text / Narration: Audrey Pernell, Guilherme M. Yazbek, Julie, Laya Shahzamani, and Miya Sylvester
Photography: Guilherme M. Yazbek and Miya Sylvester (portraits of Guilherme)
Audio Design / Audio Engineering: Pedro Vinci
Graphic Design: Andy Santos
SUPPORT & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Voices of Place: A Pittsburgh Neighborhood Sound & Portrait was selected for sponsorship by the Duolingo Community Arts Program 2026, with additional support from AddVerse and the University of Pittsburgh Library System. We are grateful to these organizations for supporting the project and helping make it possible.
With gratitude to Annmarie Duggan, Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (Pitt), Department of Theatre Arts (Pitt), Dexter Hairston, Doreen Hernández, Kingsley Association, Khirsten L. Scott, Kornelia Tancheva, Luana Reis, Media Center (Pitt), Michael Thompson, Michelle Granshaw, Nikhat Jehan Ghouse, Nicole Sauter, Olivia Rangel, Qianru Li, Rickeya Shanelle Giles-Cottrell, Stammitti, Robert, The Soft Spot, Vernard Alexander.