Some inspiration on a snowy day

Sorry it's been so long! The whole teaching drama and being a graduate student for teaching drama caught up with me!

Lots has happened though. But sticking with the present, I came across this inspiring article today about a youth theatre in Chicago. Wishing I had the guts/resources/inspiration to make something like this happen. This is the type of theater I'd like to do with youth. How do I start?

I also took my high school students to see "black odyssey" the Denver Center for Performing Arts to kick off my semester-long project tying into Greek tragedy and adaptations to relevant themes and events. Here's a little snippet of an interview with the playwright, Marcus Gardley, who wrote a really brilliant and inspiring piece based off of Homer's Odyssey intertwined with an African American soldier returning home from the war in Afghanistan, suffering from PTSD.

Stay tuned to our progress on the "Antigone Project."

Twinning Project

One of the first projects I really wanted to share was the Twinning Project. This link will just take you to an excerpt on Amazon, if you want an entire article, just comment and I would love to send it to you, or you can just order the book by Noel Grieg to learn more.

Two youth theater companies or schools from different parts of the world, or even different parts of the country, or a state or city, complete a series of activities in which they send each other specific information about their culture. Some examples are sending a box of 10 items, sending postcards, sending an account of a full day, or a full day's encounters with food, doing a similar service project in the community, and also later on the two groups practice the same theater exercises and activities for devising. With this information, the two companies develop a devised theater piece dedicated to, or for the other company. Using the specific landmarks, stories, cultural information, the group chooses what is important to highlight in a theater piece that is shared with the other group and vice versa.

The Creative Arts Team in New York City has done this, and has an amazing video example that we were able to watch in my MA program, but the book illustrates another example that was done between groups in Brazil and England.

I am also posting this as a call to any theater people in other parts of the country or the world that would be interested in doing this with me and my kids at the Denver Center for International Studies in Denver, CO. I think this would be an amazing opportunities for students to really learn about another culture through theater, as well as shape a clearer picture of what they think and feel about their own culture and how they want to portray it to other students.

Please comment back if you are interested!

halfway, hump day, hooray!

My colleagues and I are halfway through our first summer intensive for our MA program in Theater Education at the University of Northern Colorado, and this has inspired me to begin this blog. I have blogged in the past, but I am starting fresh with this one with the primary intention of creating a space to share, to reflect and connect about teaching theater to youth. It seems as though we, as teachers of the arts, often are isolated while expected to keep ourselves updated with the latest ideas, strategies and trends in the field. Why not share with each other what we are working on, what is going well and what didn’t go so well, using a blog space as a medium for communicating and sharing?!

Hopefully what I post is helpful, inspiring, and relevant to readers who find it. If not, at least there should be some funny stories and pictures along the way to give some insight into the always exciting life of a drama teacher.