Swinging into Fall after a Successful Summer of Educational Programming
URT has just completed one of the busiest summers ever in the Education Department!
Cambridge teens created and performed their own play with the Cambridge Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program, and younger children did the same in a program done with the Agenda for Children. Our Summer Acting Intensive for Young Actors expanded to include younger ages. We continued our residency at the MFA and led another successful workshop with our friends at Project Zero. We're catching our breaths briefly, because Fall will be just as exciting!
Cambridge teens create Bricks and Bats with Public Art ACTS and the Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program
I loved the way the kids explained and lived the local history. I really enjoyed the performance because it showed young people working positively together.
- Audience member from Bricks and Bats, August 12, 2005
URT spent six weeks working with a diverse group of Cambridge teens to create an original Public Art ACTS show performed for almost 300 people at the Summer in the City event on August 12, 2005! Bricks and Bats is a new play inspired by the stories and history of the North Cambridge brick factories of the 1840s-1950s and by David Judelson's public art sculpture, "Brickworker, Ballplayer" at Rindge Field. As part of our second year of partnering with the Cambridge Mayor's program and the first year of Public Art ACTS with the Cambridge Arts Council these 12 teens spent six weeks observing, researching, improvising, scripting and performing this new show. The great script, written by the young performers, will be a basis for future Public Art ACTS projects. Our ongoing collaboration with these programs is laying the foundation for a future Central Square Theater Youth Ensemble.
A Successful Close to the Agenda for Children Residency
This summer the children in Cambridge's after-school programs spent ten weeks exploring their playwriting skills through improvisation while also learning basic theater and acting skills. At three sites; the Cambridge Economic Opportunity Commission, Cambridge Family YMCA and the Moore Youth Center each group of 9 to 12 year old children created a play and then performed it at a community event. The performance themes ranged from an adventurous family vacation, to a new kid who invents an invisible boy in the hope of fitting in to his new home, to a science project gone awry. This was the fourth extraordinary year of our partnership with the Agenda for Children's Theater and Literacy Initiative. In an extension of this program, URT will be working with Afterworks Afterschool in a Fall 2005 residency. The youth at Afterworks will explore the history and stories of their local community and infuse them into a short youth created play. URT hopes to expand this pilot project into a long-term endeavor called Cambridge PLAYS Youth.
URT's Summer Acting Intensive is growing
This year, the URT Summer Acting Intensive expanded to include 9-12 year old actors as well as their teenage peers. For a week in late June Debra Wise, Maggie Moore Abdow, Ramona Alexander and Andrew Periale worked with the two groups of committed performers at the Graham and Parks School in Cambridge. Our goal for the older students this year was to help them wrap their actors' minds and hearts around plays of contrasting dramatic style that all had to do with the same - and we hoped, compelling - theme: war and peace. The younger group focused on learning basic theater and puppetry skills through scene work from the URT repertoire. At the end of the week, both groups performed for family and friends, showcasing sophisticated scene work from plays that included Lysistrata and Brecht's Caucasion Chalk Circle to the young actors performance of URT's Alice Underground, Are You Ready, My Sister? and How Do You Spell Hope? Both groups, with the guidance of Andrew Periale, showcased newly acquired puppetry skills. The older group performed an abstract hand puppet show inspired by personal accounts of children from the Vietnam War, while the younger actors learned to manipulate rod and shadow puppets. We are proud of their accomplishments, and received useful feedback from them, and we look forward working with continuing and new students in the future.
Summer Fun with Art InterACTions
Through our ongoing residency, URT brought Art InterACTion tours to two Family Night Out events sponsored by the MFA. Maggie Moore Abdow along with URT actors Ramona Alexander and Dorian Christian Baucum took families on a journey through the MFA collection exploring artworks such as Winslow Homer's "The Lookout" to Jackson Pollock's " #10." We were joined by an unprecedented number of patrons and we loved seeing returning families from our previous tours. Keep your eyes open for more Art InterACTion dates at the MFA in the Fall and Winter.
URT Teaches Thinking through the Arts
URT continues to share powerful techniques for teaching thinking skills through theater and visual arts, most recently as part of the Project Zero Summer Institute at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Hundreds of educators in all fields - public and private schools, museums and theaters - attend the institute each year. This is part of URT's continuing art-education programs, Art Works for Schools and Art InterACTions.
URT is actively planning the 2005-2006 season for Art Works for Schools and Art InterACTions, as well our program for the in-school community, Page to Stage. If you are part of a school or arts organization that is interested in a workshop on thinking through the arts, or using playwriting, acting, and puppetry to fire the imagination and build skills in youth then contact Maggie Moore Abdow, URT Education Director, mabdow@undergroundrailwaytheater.org, 781-643-6916.