ESPrit de Corps

DreamYard and PS/MS 95 have been art partners for the last four years.  This year is our second year partnering in an ESP grant.  We currently have 15 arts integrated residencies that include visual arts, theater and dance, plus two after school arts programs in theater and visual arts.  This is their first year together as an Arts Leadership Team (ALT)!

What is an Arts Leadership Team?

The PS/MS 95 Arts Leadership Team is a team of teachers, Teaching Artists and school administrators who meet monthly to discuss, plan and spread the word about the arts to their school community.

I’d like to open this up to our Arts Leadership Team to tell you more about their team and what they do!

• How would you define the Arts Leadership Team at PS/MS 95?
• What’s exciting about the Arts Leadership Team?
• What are some things you are working on as a team?
• What is one thing that you would like to accomplish this year as an Arts Leadership Team?
• What are some challenges you have encountered?
• Do you have any words of advice you would offer a school that is thinking about starting their own Arts Leadership Team at their school?

The myths are done! They are beautiful. My students had a good time doing this project and they learned about astronomy, history and storytelling. There were some bumps in the road as I was sick for a week and there were partnerships that needed some help. There was editing and revision, rewrites and retypes, but the books were published. Next week some students will read their myths to students in other classes.

We are now focusing on two other arts integrated projects in my classroom. City Center’s Encores program and an architectural residency with Howard Stern.

My class has been studying Juno (the play, not the movie!). I have been thinking about the play, which is not necessarily accessible to eleven year olds and about the enormous learning potential the Encores program provides. It has so much “meat” and opportunity that I find I have to be careful not to bite off more than I can chew. One of the most valuable opportunities that this City Center program provides is an inside look at the lives of artists who work in the theater. My students now know what a director does, what a musical director is responsible for and how a choreographer works with a cast of characters. Now I want to assess, evaluate and confirm how well they understand these roles. I also want to see how well my students understand the theme of “family values” and “immigrant struggle”. What do we all have that comes from our traditions? What do we hold onto from our past? What do we embrace that makes us American? How can we distinguish ourselves from our families? These questions are ones that I want my students to consider. (Essential Questions Anyone?!?) It took me a while to formulate the project in my head that would accompany the rich work of the Encored program. I wanted something that would help my students better understand this play and at the same time assess that they have learned the important roles of the director, choreographer and musical director in the theater.

So I turned to the internet and found a wonderful list of children’s books about the immigrants experience. I will ask my students to read a book and to create a theatrical character based on one from the book. This is something that my students have already done with Sophia, the director from City Center. Together with other students they will create a script and block a scene that tells the story of characters struggling with their identity as immigrants coming to a new place and/or leaving their homes. The students will then be challenged to write lyrics to a song to help tell their story. Again, this is something they’ve had experience in with Tammy, from City Center. But now, can they put this skill into action on their own? Have they learened enough from Karen, the choreographer, to choreograph their own dance number? In this project I am hoping to see that my students can understand motivation and “back story”. I also want them to appreciate how difficult it is to create characters, stage a scene, write a song and perform. Since this is the first time I’ve assigned this learning activity I am not sure how the students will tackle this project, but I am looking forward to watching them try.

While they are creating their own theatrical works, we will continue to perfect our scene and song from the play “Juno” and our original scene and song. We will perform these at City Center on March 26th when we share our work with students from Washington Irving High School. When I take my students to City Center to see Juno on March 26th, I think my children will have an experience they won’t forget.

The school improvement project with architect Howard Stern is just now starting. My colleagues and I met in the library today at lunch and had a working meeting to discuss how to raise the level of work. This will be the fourth year Marion, my colleague on the grade for 14 years, and I we have collaborated with Mr. Stern and we are hoping that the children walk away from this residency having a visual language - the ability to identify architectural styles, while at the same time, create something that will be installed at the school for years to come. Of course, there will be research for the children to do and more for them to write about. With these residency programs, I look forward to what I will learn, and what the students will learn and take with them. My hope is that when they travel the world years from now, that they will consider this their first introduction into art history.

It has been a pleasure to share with the ESP community a little about my class and the projects that we are undertaking. I look forward to seeing you at Summer Seminar!
Cheers!

Our school has been involved in ESP for a number of years, but we started a new partnership this year with Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center. Hallwalls is a great fit for our school, they have programs dealing with all of the areas our students major in (theatre, dance, music, new media, and visual art), so there are tons of opportunities for us to work with guest artists. They also work with a lot of local artists, and we have had tons of opportunities already to bring guest artists in. Most importantly, the staff at Hallwalls sees this partnership as a priority, so they have gone out of their way to make artists and other resources accessible to us.

I’ve personally loved being involved with the ESP because I get to learn about contemporary artists, and to see first hand that many of them work in a very interdisciplinary way.The project that has me most excited right now is a guest artist visit this week, Megan Greene, who has a show called RAPPACINI’S DAUGHTER (hallwalls.org for details). She’s coming in on Thursday to talk with art and English students about where she gets the ideas for her work. Students are reading Hawthorne’s story of the same title in English class. She is going to be doing larger group presentations, but also spending time just with my AP Class during lunch. I’m really excited about the chance they have to work in a small setting with her. I love her work, and I can’t wait to hear from her about it. The students are also really excited, especially the ones who have the special “lunch pass” to meet her in a small group.

The question I get asked almost every day happens mostly on a staircase where I am walking up four flights to my classroom. My student want to know what lays ahead of them. It doesn’t seem to matter that we have schedules posted on doors, or that they know the routines of the day. The kids want to know, “What are we doing next?”.

Today I read to my class a classic Greek myth about Cupid and Psyche. My goal was to introduce them to the flow and structure of the myths and then set them off in pairs to work on creating their own original myths. From that, they will design and name a constellation. The myths will take the form of a picture book, and include a description of their new constellation in the back of the book. What will they do? What will they learn? For me, it is about them owning some Greek history and tradition, but its also about them problem solving and figuring out the layout of their book. Communicating and compromising with their literary partner, presenting their finished work to the community, considering their choices; every step in the creative process becomes an opportunity for children to make choices and learn. I am very excited by this project, as are my students. I hope it will be a success.

I have a visual language inside me. It is older than time. My language embodies my past, my future, the dark and the light. There is the window silhouette, the martini in the sunset, the starlit swim. My dream images are pieces of each moment which makes all of my time seem endless and open to interpretation.

“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many times will you remember a certain afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems so limitless.”

-The Narrator (Paul Bowles), from the film, The Sheltering Sky

Now my love, I know there is no leaving that rock. It is the voice in my bones, my blood, my foundation. Those dark waters surrounding me in sleep hold clues each and every night. When it gets too hard I smell the lilacs. When it gets too hard I remember the stars. When it gets too hard, I think of you.

This blog is dedicated to my Mother.

The entire piece is called:

Dear Lucilla Day,

It was performed at St. Marks Church in NYC on January 17, 2003 with The Alchemy Brooklyn Blues Ensemble. It was one of the coldest nights of that Winter and the house was packed. In the front row was my entire family.

In the end my radical new ideas are old and time tested! If you can help to create a community of inspired learners with inspired patience you have a shot at something innovative and lasting.

My unexpected lessons at this point? You just never know who is going to be touched and respond to certain things. The Ace In The Pocket story has brought out such a response from all sorts of people in all sorts of roles in this Art Ed field. Both on this blog and off…I plan to make a visual response for my Summer Seminar Community.

Thank you for this opportunity Phil and Stephanie and David.

Hawley Hussey

Coney Island

Winter 2008

At Roundabout, we are in constant conversation about how our teaching artists must bring their artistry to their work.  That is what makes them teaching artists and that is what will make their work authentic and successful.  I once saw one of our teaching artists, LaTonya Borsay, create “Ms. Jackson” as part of the inciting incident in a workshop.  Ms. Jackson was clearly from LaTonya’s experience of having grown up in Texas.  I loved the character and I loved that she brought her authentic self to the classroom in that theatrical way. 

I too must be authentic to be successful in my role.  I must bring my particular sense of humor, my particular set of passions, and my personal artistry as a director to my job.   As a theatre artist, I consider my colleagues as a design team, as actors, as stage managers.   I have both the privilege and responsibility to be the director of this great production, Education @ Roundabout.   

What are these Radical Rules?  Read the introduction to Radical Rules.

♦♦♦

And so ends this installment of Radical Rules.   I have enjoyed having the chance to reflect on this guiding principal: If I apply the dictums that I have learned as a theater director to my practice as director of education and to the efforts of the education program, great arts in education work is not only possible but is probable.

If you would like to share in more of my artistry as a theater director and in my views on arts education as a playwright, please come see A Lesson in Art & The Oral Tradition, February 16-19.

The essential elements in great storytelling are the content of the story and the manner in which that story is conveyed to its audience.  If a director focuses only on the content story and fails to convey that story to the audience in a clear and compelling way, the production will have failed.  If the audience has not been engaged in the story, they have not participated in the theatrical experience.  The foundation of our work at Roundabout is that every good lesson is like a good play.  In transforming classrooms into theatres and theatres into classrooms, our mission is to engage students in learning through theatre across the curriculum.  It is that transformation that puts the student at the center of the experience of theatre making. 

And I love that transformation is at the heart of what we—the collective We in the arts and arts education—do.  I came across this excerpt about my blogging colleague Hawley Hussey that illustrates this point:

I.S. 291 Bushwick: Artist/educator Barbara Neulinger worked with 7th and 8th graders to paint a mural in the school auditorium depicting personal cultural histories. With artist/educator Hawley Hussey they transformed a classroom into an art temple, painting all the walls and adding decorative trim. The installation featured small collected objects displayed in cases and shelves.

What are these Radical Rules?  Read the introduction to Radical Rules.

In 1975, I just barely graduated high school. But I wore a crown of lilacs and gardenias upon my graduation from Sunset Hill, the one square mile rock, my beloved townies, the sleepless nights. My Mother placed the crown on my head and recounted to her friend proudly…”Did you know she read that alphabetical cocktail book at the age of nine and memorized each and every drink? I think she has a photographic memory. Ask her anything. A pink lady. A rusty nail. She knows them all!” My Mother’s face in the moonlight admired me profusely.

“My Mother, sister and I tell each other the same stories over and over. This repetition is an incantation, an invocation of the beauties of patina, and a way of expressing complicated feelings about each other. With our tales we entertain, comfort, make order, instruct, chastise and preserve. Stories stretch. They exaggerate, make larger than life, freeze moments, name them, move them out side the present. Storytelling is the opposite of Be Here Now , but storytelling is not abstract. Storytelling is Be Here Then. This is why, in fiction, the past tense reads as if it were the present, While the present tense creates a dream like feeling.”

Blanche McCrary Boyd, The Redneck Way of Knowledge

The atmosphere of a play is certainly important.  In order to convey the world of the play to the audience, the atmosphere must be just so.   The atmosphere in the rehearsal room is important in order for the best work possible to occur.   The first rehearsal between actor and director is, in essence, the audition.   If this is the case, I am not sure why some directors seem to strive to create an inhospitable environment for those auditions.

The same is true when we invite new colleagues and potential teaching artists into our department.  It is important to me—important to us—that the atmosphere conveys who we are and what we expect; we are creative, collaborative individuals who work hard and take the work seriously while maintaining a healthy sense of humor.

What are these Radical Rules?  Read the introduction to Radical Rules.

THIS IS JUST A BLOG PAUSE.

I just made that up and I like it!

I’m taking a moment to thank everyone who is writing on and reading this!  I am so inspired by all of you.  I have 10 million ideas!  Thanks to Stephanie and Phil for piloting this!  As they say in Coney Island: It’s Super Duper Duper.

“For God’s sakes, your rocking the boat back there.”  Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.

Kerouac, On The Road