![]() By: Sarah Stearns Young Playwrights Teaching Artist Apprentice My fellow Teaching Artist Apprentice Jasmine and I have spent much of this past fall and winter learning how to be better teaching artists. In nineteen classrooms at eight middle schools, we’ve honed our skills, leading middle school students through the ins and outs of monologue writing in preparation for the Middle School Monologue Festival. At the festival in March, twelve winning monologues written by middle school playwrights will be performed by professional actors at Interact Theatre Company. We’ve worked with groups as small as four students at Mighty Writers in South Philly and as big as forty at Holy Child Academy in Drexel Hill. We’ve worked with fifth graders through eighth graders. We’ve worked with groups where every single playwright wanted to share every word she had written; and in classrooms where the sentence “Anyone want to read for the class?” was met with downcast eyes and panicked whispering.
0 Comments
![]() Young Playwrights’ Resident Teaching Artist Kate McGrath wears many hats: she is an educator, playwright, and dramaturg, whose work for--what’s that, you say?—what is a dramaturg? Good question. As part of the Young Voices process, winning student playwrights work closely with a director, professional actors, and a dramaturg to develop their work and to prepare it for performance. An elusive position, a dramaturg—like Kate—is a wearer of many hats. Since it is a crucial part of the Young Voices process and a unique opportunity for our student playwrights to experience the development of new work, we asked Kate, who is one of three dramaturgs working with students for Young Voices, to explain her role as a dramaturg to find out what exactly that means for the process of taking Young Voices page to the stage. ![]() The It Gets Better Workshop by Emma O’Neill-Deitel (Julia R. Masterman High School/10th Grade) PYP Youth Council Member and previous 1st place winner of our Annual Playwriting Festival Two weeks ago, I attended the It Gets Better workshop at the Kimmel Center, as a representative of PYP. The It Gets Better project is a multimedia campaign that exists to spread the word to LGBTQ youth that they are not alone, and that their situation will get better. It also promotes changes that can be made in communities to make sure that life does get better for LGBTQ people. The workshop I attended was part of a series of workshops all over the country led by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, in which members of the chorus facilitate a discussion and video-making workshop to promote the It Gets Better message. The other students in the workshop were from the Attic Youth Center, an organization for Philadelphia’s LGBTQ teens and their allies. We began the workshop by introducing ourselves and our organizations. I was very proud to represent PYP and it was interesting to hear about the Gay Men’s Chorus of LA and the Attic Youth Center, neither of which I had been familiar with prior to the workshop. After the introductions, we broke into small groups and talked about what message we would like to convey to other LGBTQ teens. We then shared what we had discussed and made an outline for what we wanted to include in the video. After we had come up with a general idea, we wrote individual statements, which we filmed. We also wrote and filmed segments that we performed as a group. The experience of creating such a spontaneous piece (we did all this in just two hours!) reminded me of a similar process we often follow in PYP workshops, which has taught me that on-the-spot performances are some of the best. Young Playwrights, the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, and Asian Arts Initiative officially launched a new collaboration last night at Young Playwrights’ new and future home at 1219 Vine Street. The 1219 Project brings youth, social practice artists, theater professionals, and university students together to explore how art can transform place, create community, and create a culture of civic engagement through cross-generational, cross-organizational, cross-disciplinary collaboration. Young Playwrights gratefully recognizes our Board of Directors, Producers’ Circle and investing partners on the 1219 Project: The Barra Foundation, Wyncote Foundation, CHG Trust, Howell Lockhart Sieple Trust. The 1219 Project is produced in partnership with Asian Arts Initiative, City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, and the Ira Brind School of Theatre Arts at the University of the Arts. |
Categories
All
|