Multimedia tales of migration to have U.S. premiere in Phila.

Born in Cambodia, raised in two refugee camps after her family escaped Pol Pot's dictatorship, Leendavy Koung is a master of Asian arts and culture in Philadelphia.

In November, she sat for a videotaped interview as part of Article 13, a fiery French-Mexican multimedia production about migration, scheduled for its U.S. premiere in Philadelphia in April.

Despite the strain of refugee life, Koung, 43, said she learned from her parents to appreciate and promote Khmer classical music and folk dance.

Happy or sad, "we make music. We live through it," she said in the recorded segment. As refugees, "we lose our homes, but continue to have what we came from."

Opening the 2016 Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, the free show takes its title from Article 13 of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrines "the right to freedom of movement."

Amid America's raucous debate about immigrants and refugees, the grand-scale spectacular will run over three nights in April, filling up 120,000 square feet of a Penn's Landing parking lot.

The show, presented by the Kimmel Center and billed as "a large-scale story made out of small stories," incorporates skits, sculptures, videos, and musical elements presented "in the form of a huge memorial unfolding in a town," with spectators free to wander pathways lit by fire.

Collaborating are Compagnie Carabosse, a French performance troupe known for using fire pits and torches in blazing installations, and Teatro Linea de Sombra, a Mexican theater company specializing in current affairs and mixed media.

Equal parts spectacle and documentary, the show is dedicated to the thousands of migrants who have lost their lives seeking safety.

Visitors wander through a memorial made up of sand and fire, and featuring data presented in unusual ways to show the human faces behind the numbers. Created in 2012 and first performed in Europe, this edition is tailored for Philadelphia-area audiences by integrating interviews such as Koung's. Also in the mix are the stories of local immigrants from Liberia, Jamaica, and Mexico.

Alicia Laguna Castillo, director of Teatro Linea de Sombra, said she looks forward to presenting the show at this moment in America, "when immigration is an urgent subject in the social life of the people."

Kimmel Center artistic director Jay Wahl said he saw Article 13 for the first time in a workshop production in France in 2012. Two years later, he saw it in Mexico, where an actress held up a nondescript portrait and started calling out names.

"You got the sense she was calling people who had disappeared, or died. Or maybe it was a roll call of people who survived," he said.

"What happened in Mexico - and it brought me to tears - is that the audience started calling names back to her. They had an interpretation of what she was doing and they responded."

The show, which can be accessed from several vantage points, takes about 90 minutes to view. It includes sculptures made of wooden pallets - the kind desperate refugees lash together as rafts. There will be sound tracks of trains and steamships, along with testimonies in English, Spanish, French, and other languages.

"At a time when the political rhetoric is ratcheted so high," said Wahl, Article 13 "inserts humanity."

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