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| Arts
Corps |
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| A
phenomenal success story |
| by
Susan Platt |
The excitement and energy is everywhere at
the Intiman Theater. On the stage you can
hear drumming, bells, vocalized rhythms, spoken
word poetry, solo singers, dancers, and original
instrumental music. In the lobby you can see
collaborative murals, prints made with squid
dipped in colored ink, paintings based on
dreams, masks, original ceramic sculptures
with brilliant glazes, digitized photographs,
video clips, and computer programs. Just off
stage, children mill around with drums almost
as big as they are, as even smaller children
dressed in white shirts wait for their turn
to dance. They seem like a flock of birds
fluttering before they begin to soar. On stage,
they are accomplished and serious dancers
performing choreography of their own creation,
no matter what their age or size.
All of these creative children and youth,
all of this excitement, is part of the quarterly
public celebration of Arts Corps, Seattle's
unique after-school arts program. Arts Corps'
slogan, "Make Art Anyway," is a
wonderful pun on their mission, which is to
empower children to be creative and imaginative
in a society that considers the arts to be
a marginal frill. Arts Corps hires professional
artists to teach children in after-school
programs. They collectively make art anyway
they can and in spite of the lack of support
for arts in our public sector spending priorities.
Only a year ago last fall, Arts Corps held
its first classes with 11 teaching artists
at six facilities. This fall they had 200
students; the program has already reached
a total of 700 children with a budget of only
$275,000. This spring they will have 27 classes
in 17 facilities. The program has exploded
into a success beyond anything its founders
could have imagined.
But it is no accident, and a lot of hard work
by a tiny staff is what is making it all happen.
Executive director Lisa Fitzhugh is the only
full time staff, along with three part-timers.
They operate out of a small house in Madrona
and when I was there, between terms, it was
one phone call after another, a question to
answer, a fire to put out. These people are
dedicated.
One of the secrets to Arts Corps' success
is the teachers whom they have hired. They
are professionals in their fields who give
not only their time, but also their dedication
to teaching and who bring their own equipment
to support the program. For example, Bill
Moyer, a percussionist and sound designer,
teaches drumming. He carries his own conga
drums around in his Honda civic. (Q.: How
many drums fit in a Honda Civic? A.: Eight).
He is teaching children the technique of vocalizing
rhythms, an art form he learned in Northern
India. His young students at Bailey Gatzert
Elementary School are only in the third and
fifth grades, but they went on stage with
the calm presence of real professionals.
Another creative teacher is Matt Marshall,
a filmmaker trained at Montana State University.
He provided a short animated film of a birthday
cake that went through various amusing transformations.
The students developed music for it as well
as captions, calling it "Flags on the
Castle." Marshall used his own editing
software to assemble the final project. The
result was a witty, musical animation that
stunned the children when they saw and heard
their own creativity.
Sonya Boothroyd is artistic director of Turf
, a break dance theater, as well as a multimedia
artist. She taught "urban dance"
this fall at Yesler Community Center and the
Seattle Girls School through Arts Corps. Her
technique is to combine hip hop and modern
as well as some ballet. The children at Yesler
were highly motivated, she said, to create
dances together. Boothroyd provides her many
personal talents, music, and energy, but in
her classes she encourages the students to
connect with dance from the heart, to create
movement that speaks of their own experiences
of the world. She believes that dance is a
way of encouraging positive group dynamics
and self-expression.
The visual artists are equally compelling
and dedicated. Tomas Oliva Jr and Lauren Atkinson
helped their classes design murals on the
theme of "Seeking Safety." Lauren's
class made a Mandala Tree, Oliva's class made
a large jigsaw puzzle, part of a collaborative
program with Cape Town, South Africa. The
mural will travel there next year to join
murals that children there have been making
on the same subject. All of the murals will
also be on display at the Seattle Art Museum
this May.
One of the themes of Arts Corps is that the
art classes are only the beginning or only
part of their mission. Arts Corps is part
of the community, not just an after school
program. They are now talking with officials
at King County Department of Community and
Human Services, the Chemical Abuse and Dependency
Youth Treatment Providers, and the Public
Defender's office, who are eager to get their
kids into Art Corps programs because they
recognize how central artistic expression
is to lifting a child's self-esteem.
This idea of the arts is not new. Think of
the government funding for community art centers
in the 1930s. The arts then were seen as a
means to help people through difficult times.
Artists were sent all over the country to
teach photography, printmaking, painting,
sculpture, music, writing, theater. They became
part of the life of people, on the model of
John Dewey, who wrote a book called Art as
Experience. Holger Cahill, the head of the
Government Arts Programs and a devout disciple
of Dewey's, spoke of moving "art into
life." He wanted to democratize the arts
and not confine them to an experience available
only to the educated elite. Between the 1930s
and now, continual cuts in art education for
children led to too many public officials
who did not understand the arts as a fundamental
and necessary part of human experience.
Happily, Arts Corps is making it possible
for youths in Seattle to once again enjoy
the power of art to transform lives, communities,
and society.
Susan Platt has written the book Art and
Politics in the 1930s (Midmarch Arts Press,
1999) available at Elliott Bay Books. It discusses
the government art programs of the 1930s as
well as other aspects of community-based art
expressions in those years. |
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